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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (26788)	5/31/1999 8:50:00 AM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Seems likely there would be something, since Phoenicians are credited with inventing the alphabet.

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (26788)	5/31/1999 11:30:00 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 71178

>>>>>you have provided no way to judge these societies from the outside.<<<<< Not so. "What works" is, admittedly, only a blunt instrument, which may cause distaste. Let me give you a for-instance of a society which doesn't work. I have no idea what this society is like now, I am speaking about that construct, "the ethnographic present," that is, the time when it was studied by an ethnographer, a guy who taught one of my anthropology classes. The Tarahumara Indians, in Northern Mexico, for reasons which were not told to us, had deteriorated as a culture so severely to the extent that children were expected to fend for themselves at as early an age as 5, and if they found food, had to fight their own parents to keep them from stealing it. Even using as coarse a measure as "what works", we can judge from the outside that this was not a society which worked. >>>>Your own definition makes no room for "meta-ethics", a standard for judging all ethical systems.<<<<< I couldn't agree to that, because I have not tried to develop a "meta-ethics" of what works. I would say that in some cultures, e.g., the Eskimo, killing your parents "worked", and in some, e.g, Ottoman Turk, killing your siblings, or at least blinding them, "worked," if you were the new Sultan on the throne, and in modern society, killing your fetuses "works." Like it or not. I would prefer that these things did not occur, but I am in the minority about the fetuses, and I couldn't tell you that if Eskimos did not put their elderly on ice floes, or if new Ottoman Sultans did not kill their competing siblings, their worlds would have been better places. Can you? >>>>>Pragmatism is like that.<<<<< Not sure what this sentence means.