Dehede011@aol.com wrote:
>
> In a message dated 1/24/01 1:59:30 AM Pacific Standard Time,
> charlie@antipope.org writes:<< If your theory of rights is derived from
> human nature, then you are ill-equipped to do business with sapients that are
> non-human -- unless you can coerce them into pretending to be human.
> Moreover, the natural rights theory of the 18th century is infused with
> religiosity: the US constitution reeks of deism, and the country that it
> belongs to has a higher per-capita proportion of fundamentalists than just
> about anywhere on the planet except Afghanistan and Iran. >>
>
> Charlie,
> You might like to look at Robert L. Humphrey's VALUES FOR A NEW MILLENIUM
> where in he claims to have found a couple of basic natural rights that are
> shared by all human societies and seem to be shared by some of our animal
> friends. He also asserts that Thomas Jefferson's philosophy as having
> derived from a member of the Scotish enlightenment instead the normal sources
> for the other founding fathers.
> Further Mihal Csikszentmihalye in FLOW and THE EVOLVING SELF asserts a
> measure of happiness that can gauge all societies. He shares some
> measurements from a number of different societies and they were at least
> surprising and worth pondering.
These are very good sources. Look, its rather simple, there are things
that if you ask people they want to be able to do in their lives, they
will generally agree on if not put in political terms. They generally
involve being left alone to run their lives as they wish. There are also
taboos, like incest, murder, rape, theft, etc that are universal to all
cultures. These taboos wouldn't be universal if there were not some
objective basis for them.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:25 MDT