From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Sun Oct 13 2002 - 14:53:09 BST
Hi Darrell:
> In regard to recent comments that some people are morally superior over
> others I would like to add what I suggest is an absolute morality if we are
> to have a society free of the stranglehold of violence. The underlying
> belief that some people have more value than others as human beings is the
> first necessary step in any intentional act of violence against another
> human being. You can argue til you're blue in the face, but before a person
> can intentionally violate another human being they must first diminish that
> person's value as a human being in our mind. The most significant attribute
> of empathic rationality is that all human beings have equal value as human
> beings in our thinking. The first argument someone will throw in my face is
> how can you say someone as evil as Adolph Hitler has as much value as a
> human being as others. My response is that we don't maintain this belief
> out of respect for Hitler, we do it out of respect to self and to a society
> free of the debilitating influence of violence.
Human nature being what it is, I doubt if your "empathic rationality" will
ever become universally adopted voluntarily. I refer you to Pirsig's view of
the matter:
"What the Metaphysics of Quality indicates is that the twentieth-century
intellectual faith in man's basic goodness as spontaneous and natural is
disastrously naive. The ideal of a harmonious society in which everyone
without coercion cooperates happily with everyone else for the mutual
good of all is a devastating fiction."(24)
Humans are innately selfish and aggressive. The genius of the
capitalistic free market system is to channel these genetically
determined private vices into public virtues. On balance good things
happen when people are allowed to freely respond to DQ without the
interference of intellectually inspired social engineers and emotionally
blinded do-gooders.
Platt
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