You Say Potato, I say…. (Part Six)
Do you ever wonder….. “is it worth it”?
Statistics say that every three seconds in the world someone attempts suicide.
The Quran forbids suicide (as does the Catholic Church, and most other religious ideologies in the sense of saying they will send you to .. you know, that other BAD place), but out of all the religions (despite the propaganda against them), Muslims kill themselves the least..
Those that identify as atheists are most likely to take that final step in their own demise.
Switzerland (with the third longest life expectancy in the world) does a brisk trade in “suicide tourism”, being that there, any doctor, friend, or complete stranger can help you kill yourself … it’s legal.
Think that is barbaric? We don’t think twice about putting down a pet that is suffering because of some painful affliction that they will never recover from, yet we can’t bring ourselves to let our loved ones have the same dignity and rights.
As with all things in life, nothing is black and white. Grays/Greys are everywhere
A Dose of Sanity:
Part Fourteen:
We are not living, and do not live INDEPENDENTLY in a jungle, on our own deserted island nor are we individually the supreme beings of all.
I often hear people, when speaking of their “right” to independence speak of it in terms or ideas that seem to elude to the fact that they can, will and should have the inalienable right to do what they want and not have interference from outside sources pertaining to their own actions. This thinking seems flawed in the idea that all actions have cause and effect.
Our survival is facilitated and continues to flourish and evolve by myriad interactions between individuals in a society; and as such, one’s long-run self-interest is best served only by considering the interests of all individuals in the system, not just their own “inalienable right”.
In general, that means then that the right question to ask would not be “What is good for me?” but “What is good for the society as a whole?” We often seem to forget this when we speak from the self-ego of the I.
If one asks oneself both of these questions, and the answers to the two questions differ vastly in most (or a high majority of) individuals, then that society would most likely be on a brink of collapse.
A Dose of Sanity: Part Eleven
Humans selfish ideas of their “rights”
There are no natural rights, because in Nature’s state rights don’t exist, only power does. Rights is a human concept afforded by (a) civilized way of living. And the first thing to be given up to become civilised is “freedom to act as one pleases”. Therefore, individual freedom can not be a right. It’s a delusion which has to be enjoyed within certain boundaries.
A Dose of Sanity…Part Ten
Contraception and the Absurdity of Ideology:
Ideology is not constituted by abstract propositions in themselves; rather, ideology is (itself) the very texture of the” life world” which “schematizes” the propositions, rendering them livable. Take the issue of contraception availability for women in the United States as an example. Such an issue only becomes “live able” against an obscene amount of unwritten rules and rituals.
This is why, if there is an ideological experience at its purest, it occurs the moment we adapt an attitude of ironic distance. If we do not then the ideology exerts is strongest hold on us (all) and creates subjects to pure ideology. In this creation we become lost to the real world, the real experience (of those effected) and the true understanding of what it means to be free.
Something to remember the next time those in opposition to such a rudimentary right of all women speak about an infringement of their rights and freedoms and try to dictate the rights of something that (for the most part) the ones in opposition do not even posses and could not possibly understand the complexity of (to its fullest)
All about “ISM’s”
Part One:
…. a brief glossery, and guide, into the wonderful (and often confusing and thought provoking) world of the “ethical-ism”.
As the adjective would imply, these are rights that cannot be over-ridden, and are thus “unconditional,” regardless of competing moral claims or social conditions.
Unfortunately, it is not clear that such rights exist.
Consider the right to life (and the duty to avoid killing). Common moral judgements about the justifiability of killing in self-defense, capital punishment, and killing in war condition the application of the right to life (and the duty to avoid killing) in almost all societies.
As a political theory, absolutism is typically a synonym for despotism. As an ethical theory, it can be contrasted with relativism.
An absolutist would assert that there is one correct approach to the “moral life”, across persons and cultures. (The term is rarely used other than pejoratively, either in political theory or ethical theory.)
Absolute ethical dictates might be attributed by adherents to the (unequivocally revealed) will of God, the dictates of Nature (to the extent that’s not redundant), or apprehension through human reason.
This is a position that states moral beliefs and principles are relative to individual cultures or, in the extreme, individual persons.
Rightness and wrongness thus vary from place to place (even person to person); there are thus no (or at least few) absolute or universal moral standards that could apply to all at all times. Consequently, concepts of rightness and wrongness are meaningless apart from the specific contexts in which they arise.
This position states that there is no single ethical theory or single method for resolving all disagreements, since moral principles can collide and reasonable persons can disagree about how to resolve the collision (e.g., differences about the value of liberty Vs. equality). Pluralistic theories are contrasted with monastic theories (that envision one supreme moral principle).
The pluralist position is that in a heterogeneous culture there may be many sources of moral value and consequently a multitude of moral points of view on many issues (consider abortion). This applies all the more strongly across cultures, which may have much different “weightings” of principles, or indeed different principles entirely.
In the context of an ism, it refers not to monks but to ethical theories that envision one supreme, over-riding moral principle.
Equality:
Some of the most difficult questions of ethics arise over how to specify and prioritize among the relevant characteristics by which people are to be considered equal or unequal.
Since every individual is an amalgam of many “characteristics,” even inter-personal decisions about equality and inequality require setting priorities about which is/are to be considered most important. (The problem is all the greater when attempting to compare groups, for obvious reasons.)
Will it be need, effort, ability or some other variable that sets the terms of the distribution? The answer will often depend on the context of the question.
