The only reason I'd believe it's moral for the gladiators is because (as I think) it's because they all know they've only have X amount of time before they're all dead. Sure, the great gladiators got celebrated on, women threw their literal woven panties at them (hence all the 'tang), feasts and such occurred, etc...but they were put there to fight, they knew they were to fight, and those that accepted that it's "balls to the wall", they survived. That aspect says it's a far cry from genocide.
Yeah, you kinda hit the nail on the head. I was trying to distinguish that example as being a decidely
different case than genocide. I put two different examples out there, one pretty easily arguable as moral, the other almost impossible to argue as moral. The point I was trying to make was that just because something benefits the greater population or just because the "weak" are removed from the gene pool does not necessarily make it
moral.
I think the morality of something should be determined by something else. Not natural selection, and not even
necessarily what benefits the majority.
I don't think I'd say that a conquered village against an army or a conquered country destroyed from the outside in would say that they're weaker than whoever took them out; there's just too many things in the way that have to be answered before that can be stated. Look at Hitler's army, lining up countless jews that were persecuted without any kind of fair trial, then just having them all shot and put into some unnamed mass grave. Men (old and young), women (pregnant or not), children (all ages), all of them shot to pieces. I've gotten to see some of the routes where people stood helpless as they opened fire on them and it's f*ckin' scary. If I knew that I was gonna be shot, I'd be all "F THIS" and try at least SOMETHING.
Lol I think it's great that you saw where I was going with this. When I was thinking genocide of course I was thinking about the holocaust in particular. There is no way anyone can argue that the holocaust was moral, which discounts natural selection alone (only the strong survive) as determining what is moral.
On another note entirely, I read somewhere in this thread that creationists are threatened by the big bang, which I don't understand. The "good book" starts off with the earth being formless...but it was there. It doesn't specify how the universe came into being, therefore I'm not sure how the big bang theory directly contradicts anything in the "good book".
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