The Law of Beagles

"Moral relativism may be any of several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different people and cultures. Descriptive moral relativism holds only that some people do in fact disagree about what is moral; meta-ethical moral relativism holds that in such disagreements, nobody is objectively right or wrong; and normative moral relativism holds that because nobody is right or wrong, we ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when we disagree about the morality of it.

Moral absolutism is an ethical view that particular actions are intrinsically right or wrong. Stealing, for instance, might be considered to be always immoral, even if done for the well-being of others (e.g., stealing food to feed a starving family), and even if it does in the end promote such a good. Moral absolutism stands in contrast to other categories of normative ethical theories such as consequentialism, which holds that the morality (in the wide sense) of an act depends on the consequences or the context of the act.
Moral absolutism is not the same as moral universalism (also called moral objectivism). Universalism holds merely that what is right or wrong is independent of custom or opinion (as opposed to moral relativism), but not necessarily that what is right or wrong is independent of context or consequences (as in absolutism). Moral universalism is compatible with moral absolutism, but also positions such as consequentialism." - (copied right from Wikipedia)

I may not have known what I was talking about there, but that's never stopped me before. After first shooting from the hip, I went back and looked it up. Well, better late than never. As it turned out, "moral relativism" means exactly what I thought it meant, but "moral absolutism" was a poor choice of words on my part. What I should have called it was "moral universalism" or "moral objectivism".

Under the Law of Beagles, it might be permissible to steal in order to feed a starving family, but then I would feel obligated to either pay it back or pay it forward, if and when the opportunity presented itself to do so. My first choice would be to reimburse the person from whom I stole. If that was not possible, my second choice would be to help somebody else who found himself in desperate circumstances so that he would not be reduced to stealing as I had been. Something like that shouldn't have to be looked up in a book, it should just come natural to a good person, which I believe myself to be.

I think what started me out as to be a good person was the way my parents and other adults kept telling me that I was a good boy when I was little. To be fair, I was sickly as a toddler and probably didn't have the energy to be bad. As I grew older and my health improved, I began to have doubts about my inherent goodness, so I asked God to make me better. Maybe He did, or maybe the fact that I asked Him to indicates that He had made me good in the first place and I just needed to be reminded of that. For whatever reason, I have always believed myself to be a good person, except for when I briefly fell off the wagon when I was 11 years old. I'm not sure what happened there, it might have been puberty or temporary insanity which, when you think about it, are one in the same thing. Some years later, it became fashionable in some circles to be bad, or at least pretend to be bad. I never bought into that. I knew who I was by then, and I had no desire to change sides.

I'm not so sure that people in Third World countries are any worse off now than they've ever been. Most of them have secured independence from their colonial overlords in our lifetimes. That's got to be a good thing, right? Before they were colonized, they lived in a state of tribal feudalism, and some of them have reverted to that. Although, as Uncle Ken has previously pointed out, most people would rather be oppressed by their own kind than by foreigners, so they must be happier now than they were before. Some of them were the center of mighty empires in their day, but empires are transitory, they rise and they fall. I think that most Italians are happier now than their imperial Roman ancestors were. In those days, most of them would have been slaves or soldiers. I have never been a slave, but I have been a soldier. It wasn't so bad, but I never re-enlisted, which tells you something.