Re: Standards of behaviour

John Morrow posts, in part:

  That behavior can and does apply to strangers
  so long as they are humanized....  I think the
  solution there lies in extending the attachment
  we had for 20 people to 200 million ...

That would be nice, I agree.  I question whether it is realistic.  Do
you really think people can be reliably counted on to humanize, say,
the hundreds of thousands of stockholders in that faceless cor****ation
they are sueing?  You yourself seem to be arguing elsewhere for
dehumanizing 2% of the population.

  .. rather than bani****ng the emotions that served
  us well with 20 people in favor of the unexplored
  country of cold rational ethical systems that
  allow us to remain emotionally detached from others.
  The body counts racked up by social experiments
  that tried to banish traditional morality and remake
  humans to follow some utopian ideal suggests that
  such ideas are far more dangerous to humanity than
  the emotions that we relied on thousands of years
  ago when societies were smaller.

I don't think the evidence is on your side here.

I would agree that Marxist governments attempting to implement
fundamentally utilitarian philosophical theories have failed rather
badly in that respect.  On the other hand, I think classical Chinese
governments based on neocon****ian philosophies did rather better than
contem****aneous western governments based on traditional morality.  In
today's world, one of the highest concentration of governments based
on traditional morality - of various traditions - is the mideast,
which isn't exactly an area I'd hold up as exemplary.

I think that our own government - a 'government of laws, not of men',
and based on contractarian philosophy and ethics rather than on
traditional morality - has done all right as well.  We've been in our
share of bloodbaths, but perhaps not more, pro****tionally, than
traditional western governments of the 'ancien regime'.  We've also
lasted as long as a typical dynasty or monarchic house, and we haven't
collapsed yet.

Warren J. Dew