From: Jerry Mitchell (cosmicv@tampabay.rr.com)
Date: Thu Jan 24 2002 - 20:31:09 MST
> Jerry Mitchell wrote:
> >
> > Where have I shown that I didn't respect your right to be
> altruistic?
>
> Comparing all altruists to Hitler(?!) is a good start.
>
Granted, breaking the Hitler rule is generally counterproductive, but I
really was trying to show that he honestly believed the individual should be
subordinate to the greater number of people (in his case, the nation/state).
I might go so far as to say the single greatest cause of non-natural death
in the last century can be attributed directly to governments that hold the
tenant that the individual must subjugate his/her rights to the "need of the
many".
> > Where did I demand anything, including that you believe as I do?
> > I simply asked why.
>
> Well... you asked why, then mentioned Hitler, which I took to
> mean that
> the first question was rhetorical. But it remains a valid
> question, of
> course.
>
> My personal reason for altruism is twofold. First, if there is an
> objective meaning to life, then it presumably applies
> symmetrically to all
> humans, or rather applies symmetrically to all sentient life
> with a given
> architecture.
I wouldn't try and tell everyone that I have discovered their reason for
existing. I'll leave it up to them to decide that.
>
> If there's not an objective meaning to life, then things get more
> complicated. In this case, my adaptations for reasoning
> about morality
> wish me to interpret my desires using the semantics of
> objectivity, such
> that if fun is meaningful when I choose to have it, it is equally
> meaningful when another human chooses to have the same amount
> of fun in
> the same way. Or to put it another way, my adaptations for reasoning
> about morality drive me to interpret my desires as meaningful
> because of a
> universal predicate that designates desire fulfillment as meaningful,
> including other people's desires.
>
> In *either* case, my life has neither greater nor lesser
> intrinsic value
> than the lives of the other six billion inhabitants of Earth.
There's no such thing as intrinsic value, there's only value "to whom" and
"for what".
Jerry Mitchell
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