 Bertrand Russell Quotes 366 |
When men dispute or go to war about a political issue, is there any sense in which one side is more in the right than the other, or is there merely a trial of strength? What is meant, if anything, by saying that a world in which human beings are happy is better than one in which they are unhappy? I, for one, find it intolerable to suppose that when I say "cruelty is bad" I am merely saying "I dislike cruelty", or something equally subjective. What I want to discuss is whether there is anything in ethics that is not, in the last analysis, subjective.
Source: Bertrand Russell: Russell: Human Society in Ethics and Politics, (1954), chapter98：Is there ethical knowledge ?
More info.:https://russell-j.com/cool/47T-0901.htm
Many people are likely to say that the statement 'cruelty is wrong' is not just a statement of personal feelings, but an objective (non-personal) truth. But if that were the case, it would seem that a common understanding or agreement could be reached simply by pointing out various facts and appealing to conscience, but in reality this is not the case.
Especially in discussions related to war, it seems that there is agreement on the principle (war is evil) and parallelism in individual discussions, but in fact, I suspect that there is no agreement from a deeper and more principled point of view.
For example, the Israeli military's attacks on Hamas have killed a large number of Gaza civilians, and while a large part of international public opinion condemns Israel's actions, many Israelis consider them to be unavoidable, and the US Government basically supports Israel. It is as if Israel and the rest of the world differ in their approach to ethics from principle to principle.
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