Not only that but the problem will likely occur again.
Bingo Pearly, good post, exactly.
Given the contradiction he faced, Plato came up with the idea that our lives are split between the eternal world and the temporal world. I could easily argue that this notion remains deeply buried in our foundation, in the idea that we can separate Church and State. Thus life can either be a dream or a nightmare. Socrates rejected relative morality because he felt that it denied time in the sense that if everything was just relative one would not be able to tell progress from regress.
Anyway I digress, what I think is relevant to FADG, is that recognizing a common humanity, while certainly attractive because it enables issues to be framed in Universal Good or Universal Principle creates a Lot of Problems from a Policy point of view. One easy example of this is, say we all agree that the bombing of Serbia, is justified on the grounds that no government should be allowed to systematically and massively violate the rights of its citizens in the course of a campaign to eradicate a secessionist insurgency, then why not bomb Russia over Chechnya ?
The demise of the cold war highlights another problem because suddenly the contextual familiarity of acting in the name of National Sovereignty in the fight against Communism, our moral justification if you will, seemed to disappear overnight and so some thought the fight was finished. I believe the attack of 911 is one glaring outcome of this.
In a Biblical narrative you could set Socrates and the Sophists off as follows: Am I my Brothers Keeper or Am I my Keepers Brother.
I have to wonder what those 20 000 Taliban chaps think of this right about now, after all they are supposed to be the faithful. Anyway, how about all those different NA chaps, I mean are they with us or not. |
