Miles writes:
> As much as I agree with your values, we have to admit that
our standards of reasoning are neither sufficient nor necessary
preconditions for the survival and stability of human societies
(humans thrived for hundreds of thousands of years without
the Enlightenment!).
And yet the ideas made famous by the Enlightenment were propounded by the Buddha during the 4th century BCE. In the pieces from Marcus Aurelius Chris posted you can see how Buddhist thought was used in the Roman world view. The Enlightenment was nothing new. Buddhist and other Indian concepts are at the root of many civilizations in both the West and the East.
> This is the moral dilemma I'm trying to point out here: if you believe
morals and truth are universally valid, you will make claims like
you did in the first passage: I'm right, they're clearly wrong. I
don't see how this can be reconciled with your claim in the second
passage: ordinary people should have practical and moral authority.
Agreed there is a dilemma. But you seem to believe that it can be left unresolved; that making a choice can be avoided.
If there is no moral common ground people can agree on, on what moral basis do you propose to ground any attempt at social change?
> This is somewhat amusing to me: this is where I came in
on this thread, but I was defending democracy against
Brian, who claimed that the will of the majority could
be ignored, if it clashed with his deeply held moral
beliefs.
What I claimed was that democracy is not always a good tool. You say you support queer rights. At the same time you support the tool of democracy. What I questioned was when democracy leads to persecution as it does with queer rights. If the majority wants to persecute queers and deny them equal rights, if the tool used to accomplish this persecution is democracy, do you think that it is okay?
I cannot understand how you can support queer rights and yet also support a tool (democracy) that is used to persecute queers and deny them the rights that you claim to support. Unless you are maintaining that supporting the abstract notion of democracy is more important than ending the actual persecutiuon of queers.
> Once again, moral philosophy drives me bonkers.
But every person has morals they live by. And these differing moral systems do come into conflict. If we do not have a method for dealing with these conflicts, how can there be peace in society?
Brian Dauth Queer Buddhist Resister