Alternative Ten Commandments: Relative Morality
Crime and Punishment, Ethics November 9th, 2007After the arrest of Salvatore Lo Piccolo, allegedly of the Sicilian Mafia, the following list of commandments were discovered:
1. No-one can present himself directly to another of our friends. There must be a third person to do it.
2. Never look at the wives of friends.
3. Never be seen with cops.
4. Don’t go to pubs and clubs.
5. Always being available for Cosa Nostra is a duty - even if your wife’s about to give birth.
6. Appointments must absolutely be respected.
7. Wives must be treated with respect.
8. When asked for any information, the answer must be the truth.
9. Money cannot be appropriated if it belongs to others or to other families.
10. People who can’t be part of Cosa Nostra: anyone who has a close relative in the police, anyone with a two-timing relative in the family, anyone who behaves badly and doesn’t hold to moral values.
The best one is the last line: you can’t be part of the Mafia if you are immoral. The point is that they are putting forward a system of morals that they are capable of following and holding it up as an example of “morality”. Almost everyone else would not be able to follow their moral code. Conclusion: just because people going around calling things “good” does not mean anything more than “I approve of you”.
Anti Citizen One
November 10th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
I have a book on this I must lend you. One of the old names that Cosa Nostra employed for itself was La Societe ‘Onorata
- the honourable society-
so called because of its strict ‘moral code’
which ultimately culminates in moral number 10, which is also expressed as the code of Omerta ’silence’.
I see you are taking a positivist view of morality, that good merely means ‘I approve’.
Question: Is there such a thing as a greater good that transcends the herd morality of approval/dissapproval, taste/distaste?
theory: any such ‘morality’ would need extra-social roots, i.e. have their origin beyond humanity, this could mean God (divine command), or Evolutionary imperative (that which is simply our nature).