Divine right obviously sounds silly. But I guess both of these rights are maybe getting at the same thing. Philosophically, by taking the axiom I mentioned, we are granting a "natural right" to people, I guess. The legal right is just the implementation of it.
Right, I think that is the crux, defining some metric for our "success" as a species, which is a hard thing to think about. My current view is that our success is simply our "survivability": how well we are doing to ensure that we will be around forever. To me it implies a lot of things that people might not normally attribute to "surviving". For example, scientific progress is very important, because this allows us to understand the threats to our existence and best address them. Happiness is very important because people are more likely to act in society's best interest if they are happy with it. And so forth.
This still doesn't really address why any individual should care about humanity. Overall, usually the best strategy for being happy is getting along with each other, and can do so most efficiently by developing large societies. But there are outliers who will not find it in their best interests to get along.
It's an interesting problem that I suppose no one has really yet been able to think through. I certainly am still coming to terms with much of it.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-11-21 12:29 pm (UTC)Right, I think that is the crux, defining some metric for our "success" as a species, which is a hard thing to think about. My current view is that our success is simply our "survivability": how well we are doing to ensure that we will be around forever. To me it implies a lot of things that people might not normally attribute to "surviving". For example, scientific progress is very important, because this allows us to understand the threats to our existence and best address them. Happiness is very important because people are more likely to act in society's best interest if they are happy with it. And so forth.
This still doesn't really address why any individual should care about humanity. Overall, usually the best strategy for being happy is getting along with each other, and can do so most efficiently by developing large societies. But there are outliers who will not find it in their best interests to get along.
It's an interesting problem that I suppose no one has really yet been able to think through. I certainly am still coming to terms with much of it.