Actually, I believe they can. And it does not violate "principia probant, non probantur", because that is not the meaning of the latter.Originally Posted by MallsRGood
The Cardinal Postulate (CPos): All men are equally endowed with life. One either accepts it, prima facie, as true or rejects it. If accepted, the basis for all principles of proper human relations is established, just like magic.
If you reject, I can keep you busy literally for the rest of your life with questions, the answers to which are arbitrary and thereby non-definitive, dropping you into an infinite regression of equivalent questions at each "level" of inquiry with no possibility of an answer striking upon an irreducible invariant. It would get ugly within five to ten minutes, as well as clearly hopeless, and you would get bored and aggravated soon thereafter, at which point you would likely have to concede the point or just stomp off in a huff.
But once accepted as true, the CPos opens the door widely to sight and understanding of the proprieties between men. They are few, simple, elegant, rigorously correct, complete, and sufficient for the resolution of virtually all questions of human interaction.
But to stick to the point and demonstrate, given the CPos, the First Prime Corollary then follows, stating: "All men hold equal claims to life". I note here that my Canon of Proper Human Relations is something of incomplete in that it neglects to go into the details of the claim to life that men make. Suffice to say that life claims itself. I have yet to see a single example contrary. Perhaps the CPos is a two-part affair... I will have to revisit this one day.
All men are equally endowed with life, life claims itself as its own property, and all men hold precisely equal claims to life.
Now, I recently stumbled upon an countering question one might make regarding the claim to life, with goes roughly like this: "By what authority does the individual claim his own life?" The answer to this is to turn the question upon the inquirer: "By what authority does anyone deny the claim of a man to his own life?" See how the sword cuts both ways. And once again we also can see that any attempt to justify one man's denial of the claim of another to his own life results in an endless loop of questions, the answers to which are perforce arbitrary and unsatisfactory.
These elements are self-proving because they are self-evident or, barring the latter, eminently demonstrable. They are immune to differences in points of view because regardless of said points, I can engage the Socratic method and through nothing much more than asking questions, may render demolished any other philosophical perspective. Why? Because questions tend to expose the weaknesses in faulty world views. Understanding the prominent position and power of the irreducible invariant can hardly be overstated. It allows one to expose the arbitrariness of views, and thereby their falsity when beaten against the standard of Life itself. Life and all that it implies for us is the proper frame of reference which men may take as effectively absolute. Life is the absolute measure of all we do and think because it is the one thing that is common to all men. We are, each and every one of us, alive.
Only the faulty ones are. The correct ones are objectively demonstrable because there exists the universally applicable standard of Life.Ethical principles are expressions of subjective preference.
If this is so, onus would rest with you to prove it. I assert that this is wholly false in the case of the right and truthful principles precisely because the benefits enjoyed are those to which one are by right entitled. Those for whom a benefit is denied, are denied because those people never had a right to it in the first place.Any ethics invariably benefits some people at the expense of others.
Case in point. The would-be victims' valid and demonstrable claims to life are justly recognized and protected. The would-be murderers' demonstrably void claims to the lives of the would-be victims are justly relegated to non-recognized status because they never existed in the first place.e.g. A prohibition on murder benefits would-be victims at the expense of would-be murderers.
You are gravely mistaken, mon ami. There is a universal morality, and I have demonstrated the root of it in this very post. Through my methods, which are not my methods, I claim that I can identify and demolish any false moral principle set before me. This is a very bold claim, yet I am confident in my ability. I remain open to amending my view if I am presented with damning evidence to the contrary, but until that time, I remain staid.There is no such thing as a universal morality so long as people disagree about things, have mutually exclusive desires.
If one has the right ethic in hand, this is not a bad thing, just as imposing murder laws upon all is demonstrably just.Hence, ethics is always about imposing one's will on others by force.
Empire humanity has been dancing around the crucial points of proper morality for a short aeon. Why they have failed to identify that which I have apparently succeeded in uncovering, is a mystery to me. I do, however, feel that the root of the failure rests in the clouding of men's thoughts with the various noises that are attendant in proportion to the complexity of their lives. I long ago discovered the relationship between signal and noise and realized that the attenuation of the latter is paramount to clear thinking. Reducing an issue to its primitive components and forsaking all else, the basis of what I call "noiseless analysis", permits one to zero in on that which counts, to the exclusion of that which serves only to distract. I came upon this during my computer science studies, graph theory in particular, where the brilliant men who invented the discipline clearly understood the roles of signal and noise and contrived a system of graphic representation that gave men the ability to eliminate the disruptive elements of a problem such that they could focus on the relevant essentials. To those men the world owes a debt of endless gratitude.
Through my application of noiseless analysis, I have identified a core set of principles that I defy any man to credibly repudiate. I suppose it may be possible, but until I see it, I will remain unconvinced.
Reply With Quote
Site Information
About Us
- RonPaulForums.com is an independent grassroots outfit not officially connected to Ron Paul but dedicated to his mission. For more information see our Mission Statement.
Connect With Us