What?

Living without civilization might be like being burned for you. That suggests that you wouldn't survive.

No one has talked about preserving inequalities, or establishing equality (whatever that means). But it is simply false that everyone is equal in abilities, talents, or virtue. Let's get that settled whatever else we want to say.

---------- Post added 12-25-2009 at 09:23 AM ----------



Right you are! A intelligent person is an intelligent person. And an idiot is an idiot.

I presume you have a point... My point being that equal political rights come from a definition...You might see this in the abortion debate where the right want a human definition for a zygote...They should hold their water because others are on much better legal ground...In a sense; people have to express the need to have the right...It is not that animals do not have feelings, but that they cannot express need...

Having equal political rights has nothing to do with whether people are equal. Having equal political rights means only that they are, "equal in the eyes of the law".

The law has no eyes; and whether you know it or not, natural law comes from the Roman law of nations which put forth the idea that all nations were equal, and the middle ages transfered that equality to the individual apart from his nation...I might agree that rights, like equality are by agreement, but our soical forms like law are out of necessity...Ask: are the differences between healthy people, which are superficial, enough to disallow a conclusion of equality???People are people and the best are not far from the least...What you find true for youself that you appear great in your own estimation is equally true of the poorest and meanest of people... Who knows the mountains they have climbed to reach a point of equality with beasts...Perhaps it is not what they appear to be to others that makes them equal, but that they dream and dare and suffer with the rest of us...

You must know that this thought of inequality, and personal superiority is used by the powerful and the rich to seed the need for social reform with dissent...I have been a union man, and the unions enforce a rough equality; but every effort against the union, which is against equality and democracy is an appeal to individualism, and the sense of individual superiority...

The argument is that you are an individual; and equal pay for you is an injustice to you because it does not recognize your superiority, but takes your freedom to negotiate your own deal and forces you to conform to the herd...

Everyone ought to look at the notion of the individual because the concept is of equality, of being the same...No one could build a wall if every individual brick were different; nor could the individual represent the group...Why do you think any law would accept as fact what all people deny, which is the equality of all???It is because we are never so much individual as social, and as our enemies will see us all as equal we have no choice to accept equality as a social form...It is based on the rough facts of the matter, but necessity is what makes it law...

When people go around the social goal of the law and put themselves before others, and change the law to enforce inequality of rights, they make the inequality of people in fact even more certain... The poor baby born into poverty has enough impediments, but if his social condition makes it likely he will suffer more from disease, or that he will chew on a chip of leaded paint, he may be doomed to a second class status for ever...How many of the supposed inequalities between people are the result of environment, because those are easily cured with the will to do so...

What the obvious inequality of people ends with is hereditary wealth, hereditary poverty, hereditary power, and hereditary impotence...It is inequality that destroys societies... It is worse than a false idea...It is a bad idea...Our differences do not mean inequality...Our differences mean diversity...If you start putting a tape measure on people in ends up in failed societies...For this reason, societies in survival mode enforced equality... They were all in it together

...Read the Lincoln Douglas debates that we have...As Lincoln pointed out: If a man may justify slavery for a black man based upon the color of his skin then what is to stop any man whiter than another from making a darker one his slave...It is a superficial difference....

I almost never write posts more than a paragraph long, and never read them either. Whatever can be said can be said briefly. Try wrapping it up into a small package.

LOL! Kennethamy giving advice on proper conversation etiquette! Gotta laugh. Try not to let him get to you Fido. Try to just continue the conversation and not respond to such comments. He's just trying to get your goat. That's how he gets his jollies. I think we all know that's really what he comes here to do.

The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions . . .

Hobbes and Rousseau have been mentioned. Locke is another philosopher who wrote at length about man in the state of nature. Here's a quote from Locke:

But I wonder what sort of law that is. Rousseau and Hobbes were talking about descriptive law (what actually does happen). Locke seems to be talking about prescriptive law (about what ought to happen). It is like saying that the law of gravity tells you not to jump out of four story windows.

LOL! Kennethamy giving advice on proper conversation etiquette! Gotta laugh. Try not to let him get to you Fido. Try to just continue the conversation and not respond to such comments. He's just trying to get your goat. That's how he gets his jollies. I think we all know that's really what he comes here to do.

The only prescriptive is to consult reason and the natural law will inevitably be revealed to those who consult reason. Are not natural laws, especially when revealed by reason, considered to be descriptive laws?


Whether there is such a thing as natural law or not is another matter.

I have been reading Rousseau's Social Contract recently and his belief that we are equal and more or less better of in the state of nature experienced before civilised society was created. It is important to remember that the human population in Rousseau's state of nature would be very small, there would be little human contact, nothing like we experience today.

Is there anyone here who would actually prefer to return to a state of nature? Not necessarily Rousseau's state of nature... No government, each person would be able to do what they wanted, we would no longer be 'wage-slaves', no mobile phones or internet! We'd have to catch and make our own food. Belongings wouldn't be much of an issue.

Totally out the question or would this be a good challenge? I'm in belief that if we were born in such a state, it would be pretty simple. But to come out of the society we're in now and to enter such an atmosphere would be difficult for most human beings. More to the point, would people have total equality???

Nevertheless I think the idea still has some practical value as an 'imagined alternative' to our hyper-industrialised society and a means of forcing us to consider our estrangement from nature. Social movements that advocate a 'back-to-nature' approach serve a similar purpose. (I recall an article a few years back about the expense Japanese municipal councils have to go to, to remove autumn leaves during fall, as the presence of such untidy and disorderly reminders of nature disturbs the highly urbanised inhabitants of the Japanese mega-cities.......)

Not at all. I come to discuss, teach, and learn. I did not say anything about conversational etiquette. I simply said that I never write or read any post more than a paragraph long. I never recommended that to others. That is just my practice.

I do think it is good practice to try not to be verbose. You can learn a lot about what you are trying to say from trying to say things succinctly. Try it.

It is true that in France Socrates would not have drunk the hemlock, but he would have drunk of a potion infinitely more bitter, of insult, mockery and contempt a hundred times worse than death.

Whence arise all those abuses, unless it be from that fatal inequality introduced among men by the difference of talents and the cheapening of virtue? This is the most evident effect of all our studies, and the most dangerous of all their consequences. The question is no longer whether a man is honest, but whether he is clever. We do not ask whether a book is useful, but whether it is well-written. Rewards are lavished on with and ingenuity, while virtue is left unhonoured. There are a thousand prizes for fine discourses, and none for good actions.