GRGR (15): Good & Evil (was Enzian...)

[Peter Petto]

Tim Thomas wrote:

>But the Nazi program of genocide was carried out by real people who had real
>support for their actions - this is the moral relativism, their actions seem
>evil to us, but obviously not to them.

I would not assume that because someone does something, they believe it is 
right. (And there may have been many Nazis who believed their actions were 
moral.)

But I have on occasion done something that I knew was wrong. And I've known 
many Germans who knew that their wartime actions were wrong at the time.


Tim went on to say:

>There are plenty of examples in Pynchons fiction of groups of people sharing
>alternative moralities eg: the folks aboard the Anubis, the guests at
>Foppls's "villa" in V. These people exist in their own moral universe. And
>the morality of relationships between characters - Enzian-Weissmann,
>Slothrop-Bianca, Katje - whoever... they are all subjective.

I believe that these "alternative moralities" are both social analogies to 
the cruelty and evils of WW2, and the well from which it erupted.

I don't believe GR's little details of coprophagy (I had to look that one 
up), sadomasochism, and pedophilia, are the part of any moral question. I 
see them as the demonstration of an unambiguous moral judgement.

    p3++