trc@houti.UUCP (07/01/83)
Response to Tim Sevener on limited laws for all time: Perhaps you should re-read my notes - I explicitly stated that a mechanism should be built in to allow laws to be changed if they were found be be inadequate or extraneous. My point is not that someone should be able to define a set of laws that is Absolutely Guaranteed to cover all cases, but that a set of laws can be written to cover all known cases, without having different laws for every possible concrete circumstance. The day the aliens from Venus land on earth is soon enough to worry about whether current laws are sufficient to cover them. And speaking of reading my notes - have you come up with any arguments yet for a system of morality based upon survival of the species that does not require that individual survival be the real basis of values? Godel's theorem does not imply that it is impossible to build consistent logical systems, only *self-contained*, consistent logical systems. Since a suggested set of limited laws could be based upon explicit moral premises, it is not impossible to make it consistent. If you wish to attack the morality, it, in turn can be based in a philosophy. If the basic philosophy tries to be self-contained, then the whole of the system cannot be consistent, and so the politics may be inconsistent. Objectivism doesnt try to be self-contained - it takes as a given the reality of the universe. It makes no attempt to prove this by means of logic, but simply says "It is self evident". Of course, not being self-contained does not imply that a system is consistent, and I am not stating that. You state "Morality (which is what the best politics should be)...." This is OK, but some clarification is needed - politics should not *define* what is moral, but rather should *be* moral. You then continue "...is not something which can be frozen at one point in time." You claim this on the basis that the environment (the concretes humans deal with) changes over time. I claim that morality is based on the nature of humans, not on their environment, and so I claim further that so long as the basic nature of humans (alive, rational) does not change, basic morality does not change. It is merely applied to the varying circumstances humans find themselves in, with the result that an action that might have been moral in a different context is not moral in one's current context. You state that it used to be moral to reproduce a lot, but that now it is not, and that now it is moral to try to stabilize or reduce the population. Reproduction, of itself, is neither moral nor immoral. If it were immoral, it would be moral for the government to punish those that reproduce too much, by *government* standards. In fact, you are introducing what might be called an "anti-moral". An anti moral is one which negates a real moral by misdirecting attention to non-essential issues. Also, it partially negates the concept of "morality". In this case, the negated moral question is - "Who has the right to determine how much you do or do not reproduce?" The non-essential you have introduced is whether people in general will be better off materially if they choose not to reproduce. It is an important question, but it is not, in essence, a *moral* question as you imply, but rather a value question for parents. The question - "Can we support another child, and will its life be good for it?" - is more immediately relevant to the decision to reproduce. If the answer is no, and the parents rationally refrain, it will have the influence you desire for the species - namely that it tends toward a population stabilized at a level that is self-sustaining. If the parents dont ask the question, or ignore the answer, or answer incorrectly, it will be those parents and their child that suffer the consequences - not the species as a whole. (Unless, that is, the rest of the species is forced to support those parents and their children. In that case, the Altruists create the problem, then accuse people of being immoral, and finally claim the right to punish them.) Tom Craver houti!trc