>G'day LBOers,
>
>A particularly well-worded post from DMC, I thought. This bit punches
>beautifully:
>
>>Is it killing the potential life of an
>>unborn child. Yes. Nonetheless, I think that
>>legislating this issue is simply wrongheaded. This is
>>a way to take away our freedom, hard won through
>>political struggle, to make ethically responsible
>>decisions.
>
>The inescapable fact of the matter here is that we'll never get beyond the
>'where does the executive power best lie'? As with all things, it best
>lies with those people most directly involved and most likely capable of
>ethical judgement. And that, it seems to me, is decisively and generally,
>the pregnant individual herself.
>
>To legislate otherwise is effectively to deny rational beings the freedom
>to be ethical - for which one simply *must* have conscious agency.
So why legislate about anything at all?
>Many on the left are always crapping on about rights (even 'absolute' ones)
>but often frame responsibilities as hegemonic impositions (I think Carrol's
>polemic against we 'anti-communist moralists' is of this variety).
>
>The right always lectures us on our responsibilities but blithely
>legislates and sermonises our rights away.
>
>Perhaps the very old-fashioned thought that rights and responsibilities are
>inextricably mutually constitutive, and therefore must ever reside together
>(a dialectical unity, if you like), must ever be invested in the same
>person, is the way to go.
But that doesn't address the issue of conflicts. Yes, your rights are someone else's responsibilities and vice-versa, but you and the others are separate and often have different interests. For example, if you are wealthier than others, you may mind more than them about property rights (which is why Marx talks about ideology of the dominant class). In fact, it's worse than that: even under conditions of perfect equality, you may still obtain additional benefits by cheating others.
I think that we face a much more general problem here: as relatively cultured people, we always tend to overrate the role of intelligence, and try to lay everything on rational foundations. However, as my beloved Hume noted long time ago, "the rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason". Rather, morality has evolved over a very long period of time in order to restrain individual behaviours that proved harmful to the society: animals without a social life look refreshingly amoral, whereas I bet that those living in complex societies struggle every day with dilemmas similar to ours. In the best interests of an individual, theft is a good thing, but it endangers social cooperation. Similarly for sexual morals: adultery, intended for a male as fathering offspring without bearing the cost of supporting them, and for a female getting good genes from an attractive but busy male, while relying for support on a less brilliant but devoted and loving one, is genetically good in the adulterer's best interests, but risks causing disruption of the social life. Similar patterns underpin other moral issues: amending the biblical metaphor, the tree of Good and Evil was encountered AFTER Adam and Eve got out of their private Eden, and had to deal with the complexities of human society.
So the sad reality is: like many products of evolution, moral rules are often inconsistent and, so to speak, under-engineered and unelegant. However, by and large, they seem to work, and I think we shouldn't be overly dismayed by their lack of internal logical coherence.
Enzo