What is "moral" is a matter of opinion. Ethics is also relative and depends upon the situation. What is moral to a Zionist, may be immoral to a Muslim, but they both agree on the avoidance of anything relating to pigs. (That is common ground to build upon.)

The fact is Dr. Hagel, that in the case of torture there is no relativity argument. Either you support that the US government can kick in your door and torture you, your wife and your children for no reason whatsoever other than a hunch, or you don't. If you wish to claim that this is not what the government is empowering the military to do along with the CIA and whoever else falls within these presidential “secrets act” then you are quite an idiot—a gullible imbecile of a fool.

Try this fictive scenario on for size, just for the sake of relativity........ . . . . . ..

Interrogator: “We have an inkling that she, your wife, is hiding secrets vital to the national security of our nation and she is protecting your true identity—DO YOU UNDERSTAND Ibn HAGEL”

Dr. Ibn Hagel: in a state of dazed confusion “WHAT in the HELL....????”

Then when she is a bloody mess, convulsing on the floor in spasms, they can now begin on your terrorist children. They show you a picture with your kids sitting on the curb next to your neighbors who are also not terrorists, you know them well, AL who is Ali according to the spookss, Abby, who is Abed to the spooks, and Mo, who said to be Mohamed (these 3 have just been shot to death outside your house less than 10 minutes ago while they were filling their car with a can of gasoline—ie. “Doing suspicious activity with explosives,preparing for a suicide mission” is what it reads in the Lieutenant's report, where even their cigarettes and matches are described as “detonating devices”, in such a terror ridden world there is no need for such names as matches or cigarettes. Stretching things perhaps but well within the legal limits of Bush America or at least in our newest creations, the "democracies" of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Interrogator: “You see these pictures prove they have been collaborating with known terrorists which were killed in the act of committing a terrorist crime”

Then when your kids are almost dead or you have caved in to the will of the interrogators and admitted that you are guilty of whatever crime they say you have committed (as well as your entire family) to a crime I might add that you in fact have not done, which means you and your family will spend the rest of your lives locked in a cage and every single person that is on a list of paper you have just “willingly confessed are your fellow conspirators” will now be viewed as “proven terrorists” by a “self confessed terrorist” and of course I forgot to mention that this was all done without any form of coercion or torture whatsoever because that is also written into your confession for all the world to see if need be. Thank you for your cooperation Dr. Ibn Hagel!

So my question Dr. Hagel is do you really want to give that form of power to the government? I am merely asking because you seem to give the impression that there is some sort of “relativity” involved, when the truth of the matter is use your God Damn imagination because you can rest assured the government will, I mean they already have because we have invaded and blown an entire nation in hell for their failure to show us what they couldn't show us because they had none (those infamous WMD that would be used against us)—there exists real limits as to what can be allowed, universal “moral” limits that in fact have been accepted by all UN member states—the United States of America included, limits to which the concept of cultural relativity no longer applies and torture is a case in point—it is even defined. We must not forget that the entire fundamental construction of our legal system was composed at a time in the world where torture was in international terms legal. Where the genius for torture was an ancient wisdom and indeed most creative—a true art form, where the “god loving church” butchered people for whatever joy seemed to fit the needed occasion—witch burning is indeed great fun—but have you ever proved someone was a witch Dr. Hagel—sometimes it requires means of persuasion that border on the excessive but not beyond the imagination found in the heritage of our Jesus loving Church and well the idiots that lead this country today are actively witch hunting and I might say they are doing it with the consent of people like yourself. I mean WAKE UP MAN. This is not some sort of rhetorical question, something to joke about, this is the worst kind of nightmare imaginable and the entire American population is picking the dingle-berries from their butt holes. If you say yes to torture, yes to holding and detaining individuals without the need to give grounds for detainment, yes to holding people indefinitely then you have just condemned yourself and your family to the dungeon of hell—this element of fear and the right to torture whoever at the whim of power is what Bush and his kind call AWE! I recommend you read the Pit and the Pendulum to get a feel for 200 year old fun and games when it comes to old time politics and decide: Do you want the to return to the age of the pit and the pendulum, to the rein of terror and call it “relative” morality? Today that is the way things are! We stand at the edge of the great void, the exact same kind of nihilistic void that swept Germany into madness—the kind where a master of literature such as Thomas Mann needed to be kowtowed by his children into condemning the government in the Berlin in a written public manner, to turn his back on his beloved “fatherland” and denounce its leadership for what it had become—a land inundated by fascist pigs, a time where the radical thinker Jean Paul Sarte said everyone, himself included sat paralyzed and unable to lift a finger and waited for impending doom—as we all know that doom came and in its wake 100 million lay dead in the burned out hell and ruble that marked the aftermath of WWII and today you speak of torture in terms of “relativity”. I must say I do gag in disgust. This present course we are on will only end when the American people say enough is enough, because that unilateral action would bring Bush to his knees, that the people fill the streets in every single city of the nation and say “Don't ask what Bush&CO can do to you but what you can do to Bush&CO! Whew! . . .

Who appointed you to be my judge? You can not speak with moral certainty and authority. You think that your opinion is right, but that is all it is ,one opinion amongst many, no more right nor wrong. You think that you can know what is morally right, then you are experiencing a fantasy. Ultimately values are an individual kind of thing and that morals are the kinds of things that are subjective and relative to every person's view of right and wrong. Don't push your morality on me, who are you to say? In the opinion of the Roman Catholic Church and all the Princes of the Church they state that being a practicing gay person is mentally disordered. That is their opinion. They are entitled to their opinion, just like anybody else. These people who do not buy moral relativism are these religious right people who claim that they know moral certitude.

I'll side with Kirilov, thanks... his "fantasy" is much more ethical, no matter the morals, than your relativistic individual values... the slippery slope by which any horrible act may be justified.

You posters sound just like the Bible Thumpers and religious right people that I argue with all the time. You have turned into them. I bet that you don't believe in Darwinism too, the survival of the strongest, might makes right. That is Science. Get used to it.

As one with a Ph.D. in Biopsychology, I am fully in tune with science, evolution, the biological basis of mind, etc. I don't attend church and I see the Bible primarily as history. What I am not - is being full of ad hominum thruth, of which I would know little of its validity. What I have been exposed to, however, is the many different mechanisms by which survival of the fittest (not strongest) is effected, one of which is the use of "group behavior" to maximize survival of the species. "Fit" means adaptable, and given the myriad other means by which biological species adapt and survive, it is altogether likely that individual and social norms and contracts derive from evolutionary processes designed to provide maximum adaptation to the changing environment... psysically, physiologically, psychologically, and socially. To limit one's view to the proposition that human adaptability requires cultural or moral relativity denies a wide range of "ethical" constraints in the evolutionary processes by which humans, as a species, thrive. Such a broad definition of ethics includes adherence to the natural order in all domains, not just kill-or-be-killed. One could more easily postulate / argue that the human-to-human behavioral techniques decried above are a detriment not only to those who give and receive them, but ultimately to survival of the human species... as opposed to the argument that social relativity means little to the evolutionary future of mankind. Watch that soapbox you're standing on... it's made of balsa.

"by which humans, as a species", so says Mr. Science. Natural law dictates that homosexuality does not contribute to the thriving of the species because they can not reproduce in the natural order of things. This is not a moral teaching. Standing in the garage and saying that I am a car does not make a person a car.

Yeah, I never figured out homosexuality either, but neither you nor I can say with certainty that it "does not contribute to the thriving of the species because they cannot reproduce." Perhaps we're thriving as a species so much - overpopulation - that it's a natural response designed as a countermeasure. Kinda like frogs that change gender when the natural balance is out of whack. At least the frogs don't seem to have a relativistic social conscience that parades as shades of morality. Go ahead... be a Hummer.

Charles Darwin was himself a racist, referring to native Africans and Australians, for example, as savages. This shows that evolution is inherently racist. His disciples were Spencer, Haeckel, Hooton, Pearson, and Huxley. He was also a sexist.

Darwinism is not the survival of strongest! It is the survival of the best strategy, or at least the most adaptable “equipment”. A given species may well not have a strategy at all but because of its structure, its chemical make up it can survive in a wider range of conditions thus as the world changes this species survives while many others will perish—in this sense it's good chemistry, not strength. Man as a species is more or less homogeneous (everywhere alike), still those societies we call “primitive” often have a superior strategy for survival over us so called “advanced “ societies because their method of obtaining food rewards them with an energy profit—ours is a non-sustainable system of energy deficit and yet our economic system rewards this inefficiency by a metaphysical system of value called money—that system also empowers the inefficient—Simply look at our President. To see that money and economic determination of value are false, merely use the system of economic analysis to determine the value of producing “dollar bills”. A pallet with a billion dollars on it did not cost anywhere in the neighborhood of the artificial value on the pallet, that is the value on the pallet is not equal to the marginal cost of producing it. I mean it is merely special paper with a special design and numbers stamped on it—the value seems to be more related to a form of psychological transference—or if you like our inclination for mythology. Before in time we had beads and other trinkets now we have coins and dollar bills. Yet the means to creating the value lies in the eyes of the beholder. The ecosystem, the world, the universe if you will doesn't give a hoot about the value of those dollar bills, but it does give a hoot about how those illusions affect your behavior in terms of your interactions with the network of the biosphere. What matters in the biosphere is that the means you use to get your food yields an energy surplus not a deficit—thus a can of corn costs 3000 calories to produce but the energy you get for your body is 300 calories. It is obvious that we have a poor strategy for getting food and that our economic system is so full of sh-it that it will claim that the can of corn was optimally produced. The best strategy does not mean strongest as in “brawn” nor “power”. Thus if we take Darwin serious it means that either we alter our system to correspond to the reality of the world we live in or we will parish—even if we have a zillion atomic weapons, and a google bullets—or as Almandine put it above, we had better "watch the soapbox we're standing on because it's made of balsa."

Well put, Kirilovslogic. Mother Nature could care less. In spite of all our theories, if we despoil the earth long enough, we will die. The earth will recover in a few million years, when the human species is nothing but fossils.