From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Jul 27 2003 - 13:42:24 MDT
--- "Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury@aeiveos.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 25 Jul 2003, Barbara Lamar wrote:
>
> > Not at all. If you wish to express it in these terms, then the
> > question I was getting at is: "What is the price of the ABSENCE
> > of a moral code?"
>
> Point taken. I might offer that perhaps there are 3 codes --
> a legal code, a moral code and an instinctual code.
>
> The instinctual code seems dependent on our genetic makeup
> (currently fixed -- but likely not for long). The moral
> code seems highly society dependent (witness "eye for an eye"
> behaviors in Iraq or Turkey which have been the discussion
> of recent news articles). The legal code seems quite
> bendable [at least over time] (witness the recent PBS
> specials documenting how the wives of Henry VIII were
> manipulated using varieties of court/church/political
> "law" all the way up to the the Japanese internment
> during WWII -- "The Fred Korematsu Story" and how
> the Supreme Court was manipulated by the Justice Dept.
> to produce a verdict that still seems to hang over our
> heads).
Which one is that? The one that legalized the mass murder of tens of
millions of pre-natal people by the majority demographic in the US? Or
is it the one from 1939 that no court can seem to interpret
consistently (US v Miller) in which the Justice Dept is documented to
have lied three times in their arguments before the court? Or is it US
v Emerson, where the Justice Department under Clinton lied and argued
contrary to the overwhelming weight of legal scholarship?
If you are instead talking about the Bush v Gore decision, I'd first
like to hear such a claim from someone who has a) actually read the
Florida election laws as they existed at the time of the election, b)
seen the documentation of the DNC approval of the ballots, and c)
actually read the SCOTUS decision on Bush v Gore. I'd also ask such a
person who they prefer to believe, perhaps the word of a member of the
Daley clan, a family of serial election criminals going back a century?
SCOTUS decisions with regard to the Japanese Interment or the SCOTUS
decision about the military prosecution of Nazi saboteurs? I'd like to
hear such arguments from anybody who can actually claim any sort of
training in the application of the Geneva Conventions. I have yet to
hear of any such individuals on this list, and all the liberals I hear
in the media also seem to have never studied them either.
>
> Against those 3 codes -- I would still offer up the questions of:
> -- (a) Are the rules of the code(s) worth the sacrifice of those
> who would uphold it (or believe in it) [or benefit from it]?
> -- (b) If the answer to (a) is yes, then the question would seem
> to become "How many current lives -- and how many future lives --
> are you willing to sacrifice for such principle(s)?"
Depends on who those people are who lose their lives. It's the old "If
you could have killed Hitler" debate. All lives are not equal in value.
It depends on a) how enlightened they are, and b) whether or not they
intend on acting against those more enlightened.
If you are talking about complete extinction, perhaps, for example,
given the choice of dropping a dino killer asteroid to prevent the
takeover of the planet by Hyper-Nazis, I'd say you have more options
than that at your disposal.
Poor application of morals gets you into such quandaries. For example,
misinterpretation of the 'thou shall not kill' aphorism gets you into
all sorts of moral binds. A proper interpretation of 'thou shall not
murder' (a completely different standard) alleviates one from the sort
of binds that the first gets you into. For example, assasinating evil
leaders would be wrong under the first but okay under the second.
>
> Note that I'm attempting to force one into a position of doing
> triage (what lives do I allow to be lost now?) as well as performing
> a discount value analysis of the net worth of current vs. future
> human lives.
Again, it is which specific lives you are talking about.
=====
Mike Lorrey
"Live Free or Die, Death is not the Worst of Evils."
- Gen. John Stark
Blog: Sado-Mikeyism: http://mikeysoft.zblogger.com
Flight sims: http://www.x-plane.org/users/greendragon/
Pro-tech freedom discussion:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/exi-freedom
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