On Mar 23, 2009, at 2:02 PM, Miles Jackson wrote:
> Look at this from a practical point of view: what is important is
> the social transformation that social movements can generate, not
> the mental state of the people involved. --Thought experiment:
> imagine that all the civil rights leaders in the 1950s were robots,
> and they were programmed to do all the things they did. The social
> results of the movement would have been the same, even though none
> of the leaders were motivated and guided by moral/ethical principles.
But they weren't robots. A lot of them were Communists and Christians, whose principles had a strong influence on what they did.
Look, I know that movements can change the way people think, that social conditions shape our moral judgments, etc. etc. But eliminating the ethical dimension is forced and weird.