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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul Merriwether who wrote (288)	3/26/1999 4:39:00 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 17770

I think some organization should exist to enforce "human decency" and prevent atrocities(think UN's failed in this regard). That's a very important question to discuss. In theory, I think many (most?) people would agree. The devil, though, is in the details. As far as a world organization, do you think there is a uniform world agreement about what human decency constitutes? What about our belief in capital punishment--would that have to go? (And ith it our incredible penchant for locking people up -- we have one of the highest per capita prison populations in the world.) In order to have legitimacy, it would have to be accepted by the world. Presumably it would be run by a representative governing body. How would this body be constituted? The democratic way would be by population, but then Asia controls the organization and their definition of human decency prevails. As in the U.N., one nation one vote? Should Lichenstein have the same power as the U.S.? (And why not, if there is truly a standard of decency which all the world agrees with?) By economic power or military power? Would such a structure have legitimacy in the eyes of most of the world? Then, as noted, there is the issue of what is human decency and what are atrocities. I think you are assuming that the world would basically agree with your understanding of human decency and what constitutes an atrocity. But I question that. And how serious would some event or circumstance have to be to trigger a response from this body? Was Ruby Ridge an atrocity in the eyes of the third world? Waco? As noted above, the whole U.S. penal system? Perhaps more seriously, is our legalized abortion, in which the government permits (and in some cases pays for) what much of the world views as the killing of hundreds or thousands of totally innocent lives, a human atrocity? If abortion kills more people than died in the killing fields of Cambodia, should the U.S. be bombed until it declares abortion illegal again? Lots of people in lots of countries might well say so. We would view depriving women of what we consider basic equal human rights a violation of human decency. But a large number of counties think we're out of our minds. I read an interview with Bin Laden in Time or Newsweek six months or so ago, and it was VERY enlightening. I had not realized how incredibly different views of basic human rights could be. He would basically view any U.S. military presence outside of its own borders as aggression and a violation of human rights. Perhaps there can, indeed, be agreement on basic code of conduct which is so horrible that it justifies a global military response. But I think it will look very different from what you or I would envision.