I agree - since we have reached such techical advances - innate turths are much tougher to get to. Perhaps it should be an individual decsion rather than a group effort - like if one choses death - rather than being told - no matter how bad off you are - you must live becasue the rest of us are afraid of death. Rights need to a freedom of the individual.

                                    Trisha


> On Tuesday 25 Nov 2003 1:26 am, you wrote:
> > Methinks the herring in your argument is red, Deri.  What you're saying is
> > analogous to, "Hitler is not responsible for the death of millions during
> > the '30s and '40s."  In the strictest sense, that's true: he did not
> > personally pull the triggers or open the gas valves.  Therefore, there is
> > no "fact" that he's responsible for killing anyone except himself, Eva
> > Braun and maybe a few allies in the "Great War".
> 
> No, what I'm arguing is that very few "facts/truths" are true for all time and
> looked at from all angles. Your statement on Hitler is an interesting point,
> the assumption being that the responsibility for the Holocaust can be laid on
> just one person. The binary view is "No Hitler = No Holocaust". I'm just
> saying that even the most patently obvious "fact" may not be true for all
> cases.
> 
> > If we can't agree that there are certain ethical "truths" (e.g., it's wrong
> > to steal another's food, rape his wife, kill his young child), then on what
> > basis do we form a society?
> 
> Wrong to steal another's food.
> 
> Imagine an airline crash, you are the only survivor but are starving, you
> discover a dead passenger has a bar of chocolate in his pocket. This "food"
> patently does not belong to you, is it wrong to steal it?
> 
> Rape his wife.
> 
> What if the Virgin Mary said "no thankyou" when God said he was going to
> impregnate her with His son, would He be "wrong" to consider it more
> important to give His son to the world?
> 
> Kill his young child.
> 
> Obvious dichotomy of mercy killing.
> 
> 
> > More importantly, how is it that the knowledge
> > of these truths is innate?
> 
> Its only "innate" if you don't think about them too hard - there are very few
> innate truths.
> 
> > Or, do you feel that these are not universal
> > truths due to their time dimension and that someday we will "progress" to a
> > point where there is no universal "right" or "wrong"?
> 
> I hope we do progress to the point where we try to see things through others
> eyes as well as our own, that we are not content to rely on apparent "inate
> truths" to make judgements, that decisions about people are not made by
> stereotype thinking.
> 
> > If that's the case,
> > is that the kind of world in which you would care to live?
> 
> Again it comes down to whether you believe society should have a written
> constitution, a set of commandments which shouldn't be broken in any
> circumstances, or whether you teach people to just consider the result of
> their actions from view points other than their own.
> 
> > Kyle
> >
> 
> I don't think red is the colour of my 'Clupea harengus', rather, rosy is the
> tint of my bi-focals!!!
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Deri