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Please pass it on to your own ping lists, if you think it would interest them...
Cheers!
INTERESTING.
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Thanks for the ping; post. VERY interesting.
Life Is a Gift from God
We hold from God the gift which includes all others. This gift is life — physical, intellectual, and moral life.
But life cannot maintain itself alone. The Creator of life has entrusted us with the responsibility of preserving, developing, and perfecting it. In order that we may accomplish this, He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties. And He has put us in the midst of a variety of natural resources. By the application of our faculties to these natural resources we convert them into products, and use them. This process is necessary in order that life may run its appointed course.
Life, faculties, production—in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it.
Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
What Is Law ?
What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.
Much more...here...
http://www.constitution.org/law/bastiat.htm
Ping and thanks to FReeper, raygun, for the link to Bastiat on this forum many years ago.
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The system for reading that too long ramble is not worht the effort or the frustration, with ads and inserts and pop ups ... thanks anyway.
This author brings up a LOT of points that first came to my attention when I read G.E.M. (Elizabeth) Anscombe's 1958 essay, "Modern Moral Philosophy." (So she anticipated Leff's points by 52 years.)
Anscombes MMP is an extraordinary piece of work. She boldly challenged the sheer relativism of almost all 20th century moral philosophers, as rubbish. (She didnt use the word rubbish, but if you read her careful academic prose, I think youd get the point.) Standing practically alone against the entire academic philosophical establishment, she defined, described, and pulled apart consequentialism, the view that there are no acts, no matter how evil, which cannot be justified if one is aiming for good consequences.
Think of the most patently wicked act you can imagine. Say, pronouncing and carrying out the death penalty on a person you know to be innocent. If consequentialism were right, then it would be legitimate to argue that executing innocent persons could be not only right, but a duty under certain circumstances. The Scriptures tell us that this is abominable and forbidden by Almighty God; but even without reference to religious law, this is completely outside of the bounds of Natural Law, of common decency, and of human civilization.
Yet so-called ethicists who think there really IS no right or wrong, still use terms like Moral Law as if one could be obliged to commit sodomy, or torture, or rape, or murder, if there were a good enough reason. Its as if God Almighty had said, Thou shalt not commit moral abominations --- unless thou are really, really, REALLY tempted.
According to Anscombe (and here he was writing in the language of, and referencing the assumptions of, secular academic ethics), if one does not acknowledge a divine Moral Lawgiver, one should be honest and stop using big authority-words like Moral Law. She says its dishonest.
Anscombe also said secular ethicists "should not" use terms like "ought," "right and wrong," "good and evil" or even "should and should not"! Otherwise, they are like a person who uses a big authority-word like verdict even though he has abolished judges and juries; or a person who claims to be an expert on ribs and joints, when he denies the existence of cells, tissues and bones.
This essay hit academic ethics----- like--- a ----bomb. It basically blew the stuffing out of the makeshift, ethically minimalist house of cards known as modern moral philosophy.
It remains a dilemma even today. Classic "Natural Law" philosophers maintain that moral law can be discovered by human reason, on the basis of a deep enough and wide enough examination of what it means "to be human" and what behaviors form the basis of true human flourishing (as persons, and as societies.)
But the problem seems to be that many people do not take a "deep enough and wide enough" view of what it means "to be human." Aristotle, Gautama Siddhartha, Marcus Aurelius, and Confucius tried, and we wouldn't do badly to look into what they wrote. Much of it embodies the "natural virtues," (courage, truthfulness, and so forth) and is naturally honorable.
But I fear that modern cultures have fallen far below the best of classical pagan antiquity. It would be hard for us --- on the basis of our secular culture, absent the Divine Judeo-Christian heritage --- to aspire to, or even recognize, Aristotelian virtue.
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P.S. anybody else here interested in Anscombe? I have something real interesting I could send you.
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