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