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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank
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To: one_less who wrote (82405)2/17/2010 11:19:34 AM
From: Solon1 Recommendation  Read Replies (1) of 82486
 
"I think we can agree that the ideals do not present themselves in the examples in our experience."

You have not given me any reason to believe that the "ideals" are anything other than standards of "excellence" envisioned by people.

"So we don’t learn of them by being taught, or by observation."

Au contraire. Standards of excellence are part of the the relative/subjective/cultural upbringing of all people everywhere.

"For example when have we ever seen an ideal form of ‘Justice’ presented?

We have not. We therefore have no reason to believe that justice is other than relative and subjective.

"The idea of fairness is universal among human beings"

Fairness is part of our language. Humans reason can never be separated from self interest so there will always be a bias in "fairness". Also, human reason is incomplete so there will always be an imperfect "fairness" applied--even were self interest to be overcome entirely.


It exists as an innate sense within the human condition."

People use reason to survive. Right action can be addressed by reason, surely. But people are also biased so that reason is never pure but always contaminated by self interest. That is why all "virtues" are relative and subjective.

"We measure it differently but we do measure it and we all measure it against an ethereal ideal. In practical terms any action we label as Justice is mislabeled."

No. We measure it against OUR ideal which is entirely dependent upon OUR depth of reasoning power and education and modified by our bias and prejudice stemming from our self interest. It is not an "ethereal" ideal. Justice simply means doing the right thing in a particular circumstance. We could hypothesize an independent observer empowered to determine what is the right thing. But even if this observer was truly independent (no such observer exists in the universe)--this observer would still fail to do the perfectly "right thing" because this observer would lack omniscience and would fail to deliver justice to the correlate of his/her/its degree of ignorance.

When we speak about achieving perfect justice we are not trying to approach some wafer that some scientist discovered floating somewhere outside of space and time. We are merely using language to describe an IDEA (not an IDEAL) that we can hold as a standard of excellence. The quality of this idea will depend on our reasoning powers and our ability to separate reason from self interested bias.

Is it fair to line up for milk and a graham cracker? Probably not. The priest family should go first or the blacks or the whites. It all depends on what your culture or your family believes. It all depends on your VALUES. How YOU lined up is not the way everybody lined up. Capiche?

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