Jkrebs
Posts: 590
Joined: Sep. 2004
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Viola Lee responded to KF's direct challenge.
| Quote | 1138
Viola LeeMarch 17, 2021 at 8:29 am
KF writes, “VL I AM LOOKING STRAIGHT AT YOU AND NAMING YOU IN THE FULL PARLIAMENTARY SENSE. YOU CHOSE TO TRY TO PULL THE THREAD OFF TRACK ABOVE.”
The title of this thread is “Should We Recognise That “Laws Of Nature” Extend To Laws Of Our Human Nature? (Which, Would Then Frame Civil Law.)”
The first paragraph says, “The focal topic asks us whether our civil law is effectively an accident of power balances, or else, could it be accountable to a built in law that pivots on first duties coeval with our humanity.”
My answer to the OP question and the “else” part of the second question is No. However, I also think your second question presents a false dichotomy: civil law is also not an “accident” of power balances.
Human beings are rational, moral, and free-willed creatures (but not for the reasons and in the ways you claim). We have to assess the sometimes very messy real world concerning all sorts of issues, and well-meaning and equally well-qualified people often come to different opinions about things. There are no “correct” answers: people have to hammer it out among themselves how they want their society to be structured.
Yes, power and wealth enter into this, but not exclusively, and so does learning and general socialization (both issues mentioned by others during this thread). The civil law we build is not an “accident”: rather it the cultural consequence of the actions of people advocating, in whatever ways they can, for what they believe is best for themselves and society in general.
A key way in which your philosophy fails is that you insist that in cases of disagreement about moral issues, one party is correctly utilizing “natural law”, “right reason”, etc., and that the others are defective, as aptly illustrated by your “crooked yardstick” metaphor.
So when a real-world situation is brought up, you don’t know how to respond other than to fall back, again and again, on abstract philosophy. That is why it is important, and relevant to the OP, to bring up issues which highlight this deficiency.
You consider same-sex issues as “sewer” issues. That does nothing other than to highlight how what you think are “natural laws” issues are really just your personal emotional reactions to something you can’t fathom: for all your talk about neighborliness, and conscience, and justice, and fairness, you can’t in fact empathize with the humanity of people who have different sexual orientations than what you think is correct, nor with all of us who support their desires to be seen and treated as full-fledged fellow citizens and human beings.
So I am not “pulling the thread off track.” I’m trying to make the thread continue down the track that you refuse to take: one the questions the premises and conclusions you state in your OP. If you ask questions, you need to be prepared for people to answer.
The majority of the people in this country support, to various degrees, same-sex relationships, including sexual, and marriage. You don’t: you think it’s a sign of the decay of civilization. Fine: have your opinion, advocate for your position, gives reasons why you hold it. But don’t think that claiming that some proper use of “right reason” gives your opinion some special credence that those of us who disagree with you don’t have. |
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