re political atheists my turn to jump in in article pi h innq gap caltech edu keith cco caltech edu keith allan schneider writes reference line trimmed livesey solntze wpd sgi com jon livesey writes there is a good deal more confusion here you started off with the assertion that there was some objective morality and as you admit here you finished up with a recursive definition murder is objectively immoral but eactly what is murder and what is not itself requires an appeal to morality i think you mean circular not recursive but that is semantics recursiveness has no problems it is just horribly inefficient just ask any assembly programmer yes now you have switch targets a little but only a little now you are asking what is the goal what do you mean by goal are you suggesting that there is some objective goal out there somewhere and we form our morals to achieve it well for example the goal of natural morality is the survival and propogation of the species another example of a moral system is presented within the declaration of independence which states that we should be guaranteed life liberty and the pursuit of happiness you see to have a moral system we must define the purpose of the system that is we shall be moral unto what end the oft quoted line that says people should be guaranteed life liberty and the pursuit of happiness as inalienable rights is a complete lie and deception as the very authors of that line were in the process of proving liberty is never free it is always purchased at some cost almost always at the cost to another whos liberty is more inalienable similarly for right of life when one person must die if he is to save another or even a group of others whos life is more inalienable that leads into the classic question of the value of the death penalty especially for serial killers whos life and liberty is more valuable the serial killer or the victim according to that beautiful line those two rights should be completely inviolate that is noone should be able to remove them this includes government admittedly the serial killer has restricted some people s life and or liberty but is not his own life liberty inviolate also according to the declaration of independence it is murder is certainly a violation of the golden rule and i thought i had defined murder as an intentional killing of a non murderer against his will oooh i like that it means that killing an infant is not murder because it cannot be against its will reason an infant has no will as such similarly for people who are brain dead easier to see in a coma etc also under current law accidental killing is still murder how will you include that and you responded to this by asking whether or not the execution of an innocent person under our system of capital punishment was a murder or not i fail to see what this has to do with anything i never claimed that our system of morality was an objective one i thought that was your very first claim that there was some kind of objective morality and that an example of that was that murder is wrong if you don t want to claim that any more that s fine the only real golden rule in life is he who has the gold makes the rules i e might makes right that is survival now what is wrong with that well murder violates the golen rule which is certainly a pillar of most every moral system however i am not assuming that our current system and the manner of its implementation are objectively moral i think that it is a very good approximation but we can t be perfect if you mean the golden rule as i stated yes almost every system as implemented has used that in reality sorry i don t deal as much in fiction as i do in reality and by the way you don t seem to understand the difference between arbitrary and objective if keith schneider defines murder to be this that and the other that s arbitrary jon livesey may still say well according to my personal system of morality all killing of humans against their will is murder and wrong and what the legal definition of murder may be in the usa kuweit saudi arabia or the prc may be matters not a whit to me welcome to ozland what is not arbitrary if you can find some part of society some societal rules morals etc that are not arbitrary please tell me i don t think there are any well objective would assume a system based on clear and fundamental concepts while arbitary implies no clear line of reasoning keith sounds like euphemisms to me the difference seems to be that objective is some reasoning that i like while arbitrary is some reasoning that i don t like or don t understand m
