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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (74876)	2/21/2000 5:27:00 PM
From: one_less	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

<<what I think is reasonable is to hurt the fewest people, the lest amount of the time, and to help the greatest number of people the greatest amount of the time- but even that has to be tempered->> Too complicated for me. I believe in the existence of my soul. So, the simple directive I have to live by is to protect my own soul. I know it sounds selfish but it does drive me to kindness and decency by most peoples standards. Well... when I am paying attention, and not calling pezz names.

To: epicure who wrote (74876)	2/22/2000 4:54:00 AM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

As I remember it, Aristotle started the whole gig with his books Nicky Ethics and Politics. Plato (his teacher), and perhaps Socrates (his teacher) criticized Athens and the rest of Greece for defective political systems. Plato admired the patriotism and self sacrifice of the Spartans who had crushed dissident Athens (Go stranger, into Sparta tell, that here in obedience to her customs we fell). 300 men dying voluntarily for the State. Aristotle described what a gentleman (foot soldier or knight) in a democratic state should aspire to become. He should be honest, brave, proud, disdainful, magnamimous, rich (a poor man could not be a citizen!) and a citizen soldier, should aspire to subsidize the drama or festivals, build a trireme for the fleet (and man it with his friends). The question of a woman's ethics never arose. The stoics took up the message, and created some of the most inspiring models of how a man should live -- a man whether emperor (Marcus Aurelius) or slave (Epictetus) whether rich or poor. When Tully translated Aristotle's word ETHIKE (Greek was all caps in those days) he coined Moralia from mors mores (customs) just as ETHNIKE meant "customs of the tribe" in Greek. In the wordlists of Greek versions of the bible and in the early Latin translations, neither ETHIKE nor Morality appear. These are clearly pre-Christian and pagan ideas, although Paul somewhere talks of the law in the hearts of the gentiles. In my opinion, morality and ethics apply to the customs of peoples -- necessarily relative to themselves. The emergence of universal (international) morality arises from Hugh de Groot through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (ex the Constitution and Declaration of Independence of the United States) and not from Aquinas, who was a Christian absolutist, but that is another story altogether.