No Wonder So Many People are Depressed

[think positive]

[K]

^ that the idea of "rights" is both infinitely elastic and expandable and endlessly divisive, being exploited for, and by, sectional groups.

Liberty under the law, guaranteed by parliament and the constitution and defended by a patriotic people, is a far more powerful and noble set of ideas, being accorded to all citizens, not some.

And that law is built on rights and bills of rights because the language of serious negotiation and lasting peace can only ever be one of robust principles.

Sure, but whose principles, based on what type of moral understanding, and how universal in its application ? Is a law against blasphemy in a modern Muslim nation contrary to human rights ? Is the right to life inviolable ? Between abortion, warfare and capital punishment, many people in our society apparently think not. So how universal are these principles across cultures ?

There are deep abiding human principles about justice and laws that seem deeply encoded in the human soul - that it be proportionate, non-arbitrary, equitably judged, that crime be avoidable etc. That seems to function across cultures, in a way that is less obvious for "human rights".

Not for the first time, I am reminded of arguments for the Moral Law made by C.S. Lewis. It seems that the (alleged) existence of the Moral Law is very closely related to the (alleged) existence of Evil...

[K]

C.S. Lewis:

"This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. ... [T]aking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.

I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.

But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. ..."

[HAL]

I cannot predict the future.

[David]

[K]

[K]

[K]

[David]

[K]

...
I don't see the link between rights and moral law. Sounds like some kind of ontological argument! Rights (codified in law or in practice) are, in my view, purely functional things that enable a society to operate.

A logical link or a discussional (thread) link? In terms of the discussion, it arose from Mw's comment. (Lewis was interested in ontological arguments, of course.)

...
There are deep abiding human principles about justice and laws that seem deeply encoded in the human soul - that it be proportionate, non-arbitrary, equitably judged, that crime be avoidable etc. That seems to function across cultures, in a way that is less obvious for "human rights".

Those "deep abiding principles about justice and laws" sound like the Moral Law, and furthermore it sounds like it is being compared favourably to "rights".

If rights are purely functional, as you view them, then surely they are arbitrary and we can simply ignore them if we judge the results to be functional. Were slave societies really dysfunctional? What about animal societies?

I also tend to be reminded of the (allegedly existing) Moral Law whenever you mention (allegedly non-existent) Evil (which is quite frequently). It seems to me that, in thinking about evil, your focus is too anthropocentric. I don't think the primary question is whether one can or should label a moral agent as evil; I think the primary question is whether one can claim that there are objective notions of Right and Wrong.

[David]

[Flanker_33]

Of course most news are bad news, but I have a feeling I can't shake that good news wouldn't sell. Of course, there's the usual report about some kind of wholesome village festival or a crippled kid receiving a cool prothesis 3D printed by university students, but most news are bad because... it somehow looks more credible.

I mean, for example, the news in the USSR and other communist countries reported only about good news in their own countries, lots of steel being produced, a new satellite being launched etc, while reporting only about what's bad in capitalist countries, and people didn't believe it anymore and turned to alternative news sources, like listening to West German radios for citizens of the GDR.

[K]

...
By maximum functionality or efficiency, I tend to mean here something like "works best for people as a whole". This is also referred to as utility in other philosophies. These concepts deal with ideas like objective benefit, but I'd argue that they're not moral concepts because they don't seek to appeal to any internal or external absolute law. ...

But it's also important to keep in mind here that, up until this point, I haven't really been talking about how things should be so much as simply why things are. ...

I'd need convincing that, sans something like a Moral Law, there is a well-defined concept of "functionality" or "objective benefit". I think that deniers of a Moral Law are (understandably) reluctant to take this denial to its logical conclusion; they still talk in the language of the Moral Law in a way that implicitly uses it as the underlying paradigm. Without a Moral Law, for example, it's hard to see how there can be any concept of what "should be". Physical Law simply tells us what "is". Who is to say what is "better" or "worse", either for the individual or society more generally, or the universe most generally? The word "Moral" may be a loaded one for some people. One could replace it here with something else, denoting an objective measure of what is better or worse.

Of course, one could take the stance that there is no Moral Law, no "functionality", no notions of better or worse, nothing like that at all... But no one seems to be willing to do that.

[David]

[K]

Your opening questions aren't well defined without a Moral Law. Saying the answers are "wholly self-evident" is just assuming a Moral Law. To argue against the existence of a Moral Law is to claim that these questions make no sense, that they have no intrinsic meaning.

"All that really matters are consequences," you write, but whether those consequences are "good" or "bad" --- or "better" or "worse" --- constitutes a Moral Law, even if you don't call it that, even if you prefer to call it "objective benefit". The consequence of having no food for sufficiently long is starvation. What is it that makes you claim that starvation is "bad"?

"These are matters of fact, not morality," you write, but morality is not defined to be unfactual. That's precisely the question: is there an objective (i.e. factual) Moral Law? You've assumed a conclusion in your argument for that conclusion. (The Moral Law has been called other things. Perhaps we should use those other terms, because the words "moral" and "immoral" so frequently are used with specific connotations.)


The question is whether this objective Moral Law exists, not whether humanity agrees on it perfectly, knows it perfectly, or follows it perfectly. (Surely, we don't.) It is true that some sort of anthropological universality has been claimed as support for the existence of the Moral Law; whether that's a good claim and good supporting evidence is a separate question.