I'm still not following you. Aside from the fact that you have no idea where I live, What do you mean that I'm comparing living inside an empire? So when America was formed, and the country basically consisted of a bunch of farmers, what was your excuse then? They were the same ideas then. Or how about ancient Greece? Never was the huge world empire that, say Britain was in the 1800s.
And I never said I was morally superior to anybody. Come now, think about this. I said that certain attributes work better than certain other ones. Cultures who have more or less of these attributes or more or less effective at very important things. It has nothing to do with me or any country or culture that I am a part of. In fact, that's the whole point! That those attributes exist outside of the cultures themselves. Isn't it great that we can analyze, compare, contrast, and discuss those attributes and what they do to help or hinder the happiness of the people who are in those cultures? Don't we have a duty to honestly and politely engage in conversations with people of other cultures so that they can help us as much as we help them? Moral superiority has nothing to do with it. A culture full of bad attributes is not such a hot place to live. There are, I'm sure, many more attributes that the ones we have today, and as long as we keep our heads on our shoulders we can continue to find them. In fact, it doesn't take much imagination to see that western culture is probably just as barbaric and brutish to some alien civilization as some cultures are to us. And that's exactly why we can't get lost in some kind of moral relativism: we've got a lot more work to do.
And I never said I was morally superior to anybody. Come now, think about this. I said that certain attributes work better than certain other ones. Cultures who have more or less of these attributes or more or less effective at very important things. It has nothing to do with me or any country or culture that I am a part of. In fact, that's the whole point! That those attributes exist outside of the cultures themselves. Isn't it great that we can analyze, compare, contrast, and discuss those attributes and what they do to help or hinder the happiness of the people who are in those cultures? Don't we have a duty to honestly and politely engage in conversations with people of other cultures so that they can help us as much as we help them? Moral superiority has nothing to do with it. A culture full of bad attributes is not such a hot place to live. There are, I'm sure, many more attributes that the ones we have today, and as long as we keep our heads on our shoulders we can continue to find them. In fact, it doesn't take much imagination to see that western culture is probably just as barbaric and brutish to some alien civilization as some cultures are to us. And that's exactly why we can't get lost in some kind of moral relativism: we've got a lot more work to do.