That a belief that human beings should not suffer is the result of "5000 years of struggle" (assuming it is -- have there really been 5000 years of such struggle?) does not make it rational. All it means is that the belief is the result of a historical process, just like every other contemporary belief. You might just as well argue that the belief that some races are superior to others must be rational, because it is the result of 5000 years of struggle.
--- On Sat, 7/25/09, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Blue Dogs cashing in
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Saturday, July 25, 2009, 10:14 AM
> Now, on the understanding that we are
> not dealing with any originla "Cox
> Thought" but with quite common and widely shared
> perspective, we can
> procede a bit further on the thread.
>
> **Matthias Wasser writes: To many people, if you see
> someone getting
> beaten on the street, get angry, and do something to help,
> that's
> "morality," . . .**
>
> Cbc: Notice, that to make sense of this you have to assume
> that the
> incident is over, that you are sitting calmly at your
> computer, and
> making an abstract judgment of the incident. And you try to
> base this
> abstract judgment (essentially an act of classification, of
> establishing
> the genus of which the particular act was a species) on a
> Moral Law. Try
> to state that moral law and to establish its FOUNDATION.
> What is it
> about the universe that justifies that Law or Principle on
> the basis of
> which we can say: X is an instance of The Moral; Y is an
> instance of the
> Immoral."
>