It's not an argument, just an obvious fact. Someone's views on an issue are not made either right or wrong by it.
The idea that some people and societies are "generally good" and others wholly "contemptible" is an individually comforting but socially damaging myth.
I cannot tell if you are being purposefully obtuse or if you are just, as is typical of anthropologists, incapable of seeing the performative contradiction that you keep committing.
On one hand, you say one shouldn't make some value judgement, because "other people and cultures come to different conclusions". In fact, you call it a
myth that people or societies can even be contemptible or good. I'm not sure how making a value judgement can be a myth, that just seems like a category error to me, but OK. I expect you are more of an expert on myths than I am.
But the you immediately proceed to make a value judgement, that this myth is
socially damaging.
In what way is it socially damaging? Indeed societies and people come to various different conclusions than you that the idea that individuals can be contemptible or good is socially damaging.
It must be very comforting for you to believe that people cannot be good or contemptible.
But my point is that I don't see what is so unreasonable about Lion's position in this case. I don't agree with it, but I can easily see where he is coming from. I mean, everyone is afraid of death, and in various ways and certain contexts tries to suspend its arrival. You and he have simply chosen different battlegrounds within which to express this universal urge.
Lion is not expressing any universal urge. Lion is repeating a dogma handed down by a bunch of sexually repressed old virgins about what some ancient Canaanite god presumably thinks about the matter (even though they say they are Roman, I know, it is confusing).
Now, not everyone is afraid of death or fears dying.
I do.
But I try to not let my base fears influence my actions to the point that I act immorally. If a dog gets run over in the street, its entrails hanging out and its legs flattened, you aren't going to sit there and let it suffer if you have the means to end its life quickly. If I refused to do it because of my fear of death, I would be a coward and I would be acting immorally.
This is pretty much basic human decency. If we cannot agree that it is merciful and kind to put this dog out of its misery, then we really cannot agree on anything, and it is best to stop the conversation here.
Similarly, if I were run over and horribly mangled, and I am begging for a
coup de grace because I know I'm surely going to die, just slowly, then you would be acting immorally if you had the means to do it but wouldn't do the act. If that were the case, I suspect you would either be like Lion, repeating a dogma without using your brain or heart, or, you could just be a coward, much like the sorts of people that are perfectly willing to put a sticky mouse trap out, but aren't willing to kill the animal once it is in the trap.
If I were dying from some painful terminal disease, and you refused me
even access to the means to end my life without pain, then, you would be again either a coward or unthinking/unfeeling or merely enraptured by some dogma handed down by robed men. And yes, you would be acting contemptibly.
Now, I don't think Lion is a "wholly contemptible" person because of this. I kind of like Lion. Just for the record.
