A view of right and wrong, good and evil, in a universe without gods.
I am away from my blog for a couple of weeks. This is an experiment in posting some conversation topics while I am gone.
The two questions to answer relevant to the statement below is are:
• Is it true?
• Is it important?
(13) The Constitutional right to freedom of religion does not entail a Constitutional right to burn someone that one's religion designates to be a witch.
Posted by
Alonzo Fyfe
at
5:00 AM
By request, I have written some of the basic principles of the desire utilitarian moral theory that sits as the foundation for these blog postings into a book called, A Better Place: Selected Essays in Desire Utilitarianism.
In a previous post, I wrote a detailed account of the contents of the book.
4 comments:
"The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Such a lot of great ethics examples come from the legal system. It makes me hope for good things.
Hoping for good things and then having them happen is very important to me.
The right to life is stronger than the right to freedom of religious practice.
And yet, every theocracy that I have ever heard of has reserved the right to kill and heretic, infidel, witch, or apostate within the theocracy. Where religion has political power of enforcement it does destroy those minds which disagree with the current beliefs as to good and evil.
I'm not aware that the law or the US Constitution for that matter protects those that unnecessarily kill another human based on religious, faith-based beliefs. This is a very good thing indeed in my opinion. Sadly though, the law does not protect the vast majority of individuals in the US from such unnecessary violence as is evidenced by the tens of billions of animals that are killed every year for pleasure, convenience, or whim in the unnecessary consumption or purchase of animal products. Double standard? Obviously yes from the standpoint of intellectual consistency in reason and logic.
I don't know why we can't give animals all the rights of humans, but I think it has to do with reciprocity. They won't agree not to kill us if we don't kill them. We can't make a pact with rabbits to leave each others food sources alone. The tuna don't send members to Congress to work out deals where everyone is treated equally.
And they don't care. An individual animal might notice itself running out of foraging area, but no animal is at all tempted to go up to humans and say, "hey, stop it. I want my ninth cousin once removed to have a better life than you make possible." Even a mother would not defend a baby that way - she waits for us to be close.
Until I understand better, I'm staying vegetarian. Less rain forest gets cut down that way anyway.
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