only that it's such an unlikely choice that it probably didn't happen much if at all. I don't see how it could ever be advantageous for the would-be slave and you have not offered any plausible scenario< so I'm stuck at why anyone would have done it.
I didn't think it was necessary. I realize its not something you or me can imagine ourselves doing, but think of people starving in the third world, of refugees driven into the desert like those from Darfur and southern Sudan - but with no aid organizations. That and worse things have happened numerous times in world history. Famine, starvation - those have been common occurences mankind has faced and still faces.
Why bother with the clean sheet approach? Is this a matter of Randian idealism?
It's not ideology driven.
I'm not so sure. You are pretty much a libertarian, aren't you? And that is a political idealogy. Everyone thinks they're rational and clear-thinking, unlike the other guys. Koan does - he's one of the enlightened who got "it" back in the sixties. I don't think I'm putting him down in saying that, its what HE's said
You might try Sowell's A Conflict of Visions.
I will check that out.
Sowell's a conservative from an economics background, a protege of Milton Friedman. Lakoff's a "progressive", that is a very liberal Berkeley guy. Sounds like Lakoff's trying to do some Freudian thing basing things on what kind of families people were raised in.
In its first chapter it makes the point that most people don't have a clue why they have the worldviews that they have. That is certainly consistent with my experience.
Ditto on that. BTW do you know why you have your worldview?
I do agree with what I recall Sowell calling the constrained or tragic view of humanity. I does fit in with my religion - humans being flawed, fallen creatures - but also fits with what I see in humanity. I think human nature as described by Christianity is actually true objectively. Human nature is what it is, humans aren't "good" by nature and only messed up by society and cranky old religions, and human nature isn't going to change.
One thing when you consider moral issues, remember there's two ways of looking at those ... one is to say they're proclaimed by religions as given by God .... but another is to recognize they can be seen as rules* worked out by societies filled with humans who have the same natures as people have today over many millenia. IOW they can be seen as evolved social wisdom. To dismiss them as silly and to go to a clean sheet view of life is to throw away what it took many generations of experience to produce.
*Moral rules "work" - keep people out of trouble, protect them from folly, usually produce generally decent families for raising children, produce societies that work better, etc.
If you pictured, instead, a couple, say half brother and sister, who had been separated in childhood as a result of a divorce and who met again in their thirties, hit it off, and wanted to marry, would your reaction be different?
I'd still tell them they shouldn't marry and frankly, not make any exception as to granting them a marriage license. Good grief, just from a biological standpoint, inbreeding like that is a terrible idea. It would be easier to have understanding for the people involved of course. The story of relatives who end up marrying or bedding family members is as old as Oedipus or Amnon and Tamar.
Morally upright as they see things, yes, but they see things so very differently that you wouldn't recognize it as morally upright. Morally upright is defined as nurturant. They want to produce kids who are nurturant. And happy and fulfilled but mostly nurturant. Happy and fulfilled because happy and fulfilled people have greater capacity for nurturance. That's entirely different from the Strict Father's sense of morally upright. There's no mention whatsoever of character in the Nurturant Parent.
It's obvious that liberals and conservatives have different worldviews, different ideas of morality. Lakoff sounds like he's painting stereotypes.
Sowell gets into the same type thing in A Conflict of Visions, but he does so from the standpoint of people's worldview. I don't recall him trying to track it back to how people were raised as children.
A guy named Jonathan Haidt has explored this too .... calling it the "science of morality". He thinks there are five components to morality and liberals for some reason have only two, but conservatives have all five, which is actually normal compared to other societies and cultures. I think he's wrong about liberals ..... though he is one himself. I only know Haidt from reading some online articles .... He hasn't written a book on his ideas about morality.
For example, Haidt says liberals have no purity component to their moral thinking - but if you look at liberals, they are frequently the most uptight about purity of all, they just don't apply purity to sexuality. Think of the many versions of vegetarians and vegans there are, the organic food eaters, the fear of "frankenfoods", the emphasis on natural foods and substances, the obsessive environmental fears. Those religions with purity rules - people who eat kosher or hallal - are a lot less uptight about purity than many liberals. |
