RE: Relativism of values, ideas, rights, memes (was Open Letter t o Gina Miller)

From: Smigrodzki, Rafal (SmigrodzkiR@msx.upmc.edu)
Date: Wed May 29 2002 - 13:17:50 MDT


Lee Corbin [mailto:lcorbin@tsoft.com]

Just how do you regard people who reject the Extropian
Principles?

(a) they are as wrong as if they were to claim 2 + 2 = 5,
    or to claim that the Earth is hollow, or to claim that
    telepathy has been shown to work.
(b) they are *unreasonable*, in the sense that they
    have failed to reason correctly. They should be
    regarded as wayward students, who may one day
    surmount the various logical and scientific errors
    that plague them.
(c) they have differing values from us, but values that
    can be objectively shown to resemble the values of
    backward-looking, religious, atavistic, authoritarian,
    nihilistic, or harmful systems of the past.
(d) they have differing values with which we strongly
    disagree and which many of us properly and often
    harshly condemn.
(e) they have differing values from us, to which they
    are just as entitled as we are to ours, and there
    are no objective criteria against which their values
    and ours can be compared.

So what choice most closely fits your take? Thanks to
everyone who answers, not just Dr. Smigrodzki.

### mostly b or c, frequently e, sometimes d.

Rafal



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:14:28 MST