On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:00:56 -0500, Publius wrote:
> The Trucker
verizon.net> wrote in
> news:pan.2008.07.15.14.27.59.87064@verizon.net:
> >> All opinions concerning righteousness are religious opinions.
>
> Well, Trucker, I'm afraid you're re-defining "religion." In order to
> communicate successfully with others, you are pretty much obliged to use
> public terms with their public meanings. All legal systems, for example,
> distinguish "right" from "wrong," according to one criterion or another. If
> they are all thereby "religions," then most of US law violates the First
> Amendment, and is void.
>
> Religions typically propound a moral code (just as they propound theories
> of cosmology, biology, physics, etc.), but they invoke supernatural
> entities or forces to justify them. Philosophical ethics also proposes
> moral principles, but they rely on rational and empirical arguments to
> justify them (just as scientific cosmology, biology, etc., rely on rational
> and empirical arguments).
It is somewhat irrelevant. I have conveyed what I wish to convey and you
can play with it until you become bored.
>> The "moral argument" is a religious argument although it is "manner
>> and custom". That is what it is. There is no way to prove that there
>> is even such a thing as "good". All such opinions are religious.
>
> No such thing as a "good"? I suspect you misunderstand the meaning of that
> term. A "good" is anything one desires to obtain or retain, which may
> motivate someone to act to secure it or keep it. All goods are thus
> relative to persons, since different things motivate different persons to
> so act. (An "evil" is anything which people act to avoid, or be rid of). I
> doubt there would be any difficulty in "proving" that many such things
> exist.
You are focused on the individualist meaning of the word "good" and
perhaps a micro-economic view. You do not account for the concept of
"what is good" as this relates to shared belief or experience. You
probably cannot address the issue because you are a staunch believer (a
religious fanatic) as regards the absence of any shared or common "good".
>>> Do you consider yourself the owner of your right hand? Did you
>>> produce it?
>>
>> Yes and no. My body and my mind are my property because I was created
>> (or born or whatever) as this single unit.
>
> Well, that is a different justification for your owning your hand than that
> you produced it. Being born with it is not the same as having produced it.
> So now you have two bases for claiming property --- producing it, or being
> born with it. You may note, however, that both are cases of first
> possession.
No. You are, quite predictably, distorting my position. It is not that I
was "born with it", it is that the "it" in inalienable. The "it" can
serve no functioning economic purpose if severed from the rest of me.
This is, again, a religious position in that the hand can be eaten and
that I may well still survive as a person absent the hand. Yet I do not
chose to admit a economic viability or a "common god" derived from
separating one hand from each person or from a person for the purpose of
sustenance. The person doing the severing, however, may have some uniquely
personal religious conceptualization concerning hand meat that he is
willing to defend with his own life. In that case his definition of the
word "good" holds true for him, and he "right" to take my hand from me and
eat it will exist as long as he lives. This inalienable righteousness
seems to be the fundamental/religious underpinning of egoism and
objectivism.
>> That is my position on the
>> matter. But that is not really a dispute that can be argued. My
>> _right_ to my hand is an internal inalienable right. It has nothing
>> to do with societal rights at all and it truly springs from the
>> natural inclination of self preservation while denying no one of
>> anything that would be useful to them. What good would me dead hand
>> be to someone else other than as food?
>
> How about a kidney? May someone confiscate one of your kidneys for
> transplant if he would die without it? BTW, you have now also introduced a
> second basis for rights --- first "religion," and now self-preservation.
The only one that matters regarding inalienable rights is self
preservation and that trait is simply shared by all animals of all kinds
or they would not exist. Religion and belief spring from that same "will
to survive" and have nothing to do with societal rights unless the society
agrees among itself with the particular religious position(s). It is the
agreement that creates the societal right. Not the particular religion.
--
"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers
of society but the people themselves; and
if we think them not enlightened enough to
exercise their control with a wholesome
discretion, the remedy is not to take it from
them, but to inform their discretion by
education." - Thomas Jefferson
http://GreaterVoice.org/extend
