Subject to correction, I think Kant's argument might run thus: if your intentions are good, then your virtue is intact, consequences notwithstanding. On the other hand, if consequences are your measure and you do not achieve them, then you got nothing.

I might add a minor correction, though I more or less agree, that I've heard the Kantian 'method' being to choose based on the best intention, which is a tad misleading. I think it would be more clear to think about it in the reverse sense as choosing with the attempt to surpass immediate interest and consequence rather than positing intention versus consequence. What turns out to be the moral act, or in our colloquial language the intention, will not depend solely on the view of the immediate consequences, but on how well it will fulfill the universal freedom of the individual.

The whole idea of using the Metaphysic of Morals to conduct one's behaviour and judgement in a mechanistic fashion is sort of like trying to cook using the chemical reactions in a chemistry textbook; better than nothing though I guess. It would be nice if this distinction were more clear, as for instance some take Kant's view as a sort of contradiction to Mill or other writers. Comparing them is certainly possible, but when extended too far it's like apples to oranges.

Didn't Kant say that the consequences of an action are not morally relevant to virtue?

I'm not saying your interpretation of Kant is wrong and I admit that I'm not sure where you got this line, is it a direct quote? Analyzing it, it is also a little ambiguous with regards to context, what came before and after and what section was it in? Virtue and morality aren't the same thing, in my view virtue is the integrity to do the most moral action when it is the most difficult and fruitless to do so. So in a sense, the consequences aren't morally relevant because in Kant's view moral universals are not drawn as a direct result of our base interest and subjectivity.

I think I see your point that we're not thinking in terms of checks and balances, Kant made a distinction between thinking morally in terms of interest, much more generally stated here as consequence, and from a place of reason. The example Kant gave still stands: if we do things like borrow money or pirate videos online, we set a moral precedent that sacrifices our ability to determine the universal otherwise through the only practical means we have: action. We have willed an influence that there be lesser moral objection from our place in borrowing money or pirating videos as we chose to do, because in so doing we have authorized it in the only sphere in which we have control: our own conduct.

I think the criticism is a common one, but at the end of the day Kant did not choose judgement and practice for subject matter, the aim seemed to be intended to be definitive and illuminating. Let's not forget that the work characterizes morals as a product of the societies of which they are a part, and perpetuated by the will of each member as they act in the universality of the whole. By universality, do we mean a pure logical syllogism that is always true for all, or a kind of synthetic system that is transitory and engulfed in partial subjectivity? I guess that's where the division here seems to be that differentiates this phrase from the Golden Rule. The G.R. would have everyone act according to what they had always known and believed were the right thing, but this phrase of Kant's – that in writing meant was only as a guide to a more complex analysis – seems to ask, given the opportunity to influence what we perceive as the right thing, what would we select?

You make a valid point. It was improper to present my idea as if it was valid outright that a continual limbo in adolescence was resistant to reproduction. What I really meant was a perspective in which is posited a state of continued 'unreadiness' for the rites and challenges of cultural life. Take the action-film world as an example, where there is a screen that metaphorically separates the action from the viewer. The viewer observes characters enlarged on the screen both formally and literally as they did when they were but a helpless child. In scenes of intense action, the movements of the plot and dialogue act as if to inform them of changes as if they were both a part of the action and yet a completely passive observer; included and yet not quite at the stage where they truly feel themselves to be part of the story. This form is ideal for experiencing empathy, understanding, and sympathy but is not about doing, controlling, and mastering.

I can only say that the film-head is most susceptible to envy and a certain confusion of ego that stands in the way of them reaching a state of mind that would be deemed 'mature' by traditional society. That's just one example, but we could generate others about the medium of the video game, and the internet and reach similar conclusions. Doing it is so easy because these are not only technological extensions of the arm or leg in the McLuhan sense, but of the mind and even – if you would go so far – the desires and the soul. Reliance on this form of experiencing reality naturally conflicts with the development of rational and mature choice and self-discipline in whatever that used to mean to adults of past generations. The world of choice is continually presented as a being outside the capability of the viewer, who is allowed to indulge in ephemerally watching chaos happen, in contrast to our accepted idea of adulthood as a clear-headed, in-control, and stable lifestyle.

We can already observe a type of indirect attempt in humans in overdeveloped areas to mediate their own drive to reproduce. There is a growing fixation on the immature - self-focus, consumerism, indulgence in infantile narrative fantasies – in distinction to the traditional rites of passage which increase the individuals civil worth: strength, honour, valiance, citizenship. Game-like fantasies with auto-erotic pay-offs, visual narrative voyeurism and its childlike helplessness, and internet obsessions that concentrate on ingraining the former restrict the mind to its single desires and contain our minds within social spheres that in the near past have been associated with childhood and adolescence. Reproduction is the ultimate contradiction to this state, in it the individual must act almost solely in the immediate interests of another.

Furthermore, observe the increase in morally gestured ways of life and dogmatic viewpoints. They come with a tendency to view the gain of others as of high importance and self-interest as comparatively meager. This too meets with a distinction with what we would call the 'perfect mate' in the natural world. Disease, however brutal and horrible, is a means by which population control in the world can be exerted. That we now deal with increasingly self-engineered strains of this new coronavirus that has grown strong through activities we call our own vices – mass carbon-guzzling travel, fertility-driven activities such as clubs, bars, and events – shows us to such an extent that this performs a function in reducing populations when they are overly extended.

It wouldn't be surprising if in the near future there were a return to the melancholy ways of art and thought, seeing as these too create a sense of nobility and suffering that would reduce our will to expand and indulge in a vice-focused life. I think we are at a turning point where the larger sphere of humanity is uncertain of its chosen path: do we embrace artificiality or aim to strike a more moderate lifestyle? This will be a gesture of a greater natural process where humanity is prompted if it really wishes to survive. Ironically, that too is the focus of much of our recent discourse in philosophy.

In my view, value isn't solely in the subjective content of the person-object relation, but it is – partly – this subjective process itself in form. Because it is not only the positive content of gold, silver, or people stacking bricks alone that creates wealth, but their negation. If you eliminate the negation of the understood content you wind up in an entangled ideological web of relationship of exploiter to exploited, and value doesn't hold to remain exploitative in structure.

If, for example, we take brick stacking to create value as in each brick is worth x quantity, and we create value in this way alone, we are in a position of hierarchicalism where the structure is to find the fastest way to destroy the value system by determining an optimization process of stacking the most bricks; it was in fact the relation of the brick stacking to factors outside itself that played a role in the original survival of that value system.

In the mammalian world, we think of the sex organs as compensation for the destruction of the total organism. Machines are much less liable to become dis-integrated the way biological material is. In the same sense that they extend our permanence we extend their temporal finitude. Machines look to us for their 'real selves,' where we look to them for our superficial selves; I don't think they can ever extricate themselves from us, because there is this unity and causality between them and us.

I’m trying not to label or define anyone, though when we hold this discussion we gravitate into certain roles and this conversation is a long standing one. Actually I interpreted your position as closer to the opposite camp, with all this talk about spreading love of wisdom you seem describe the system more like a self-regulating machine. You responded to baker’s traditionalism-rich musing about prancing about and showing off as humorous.

There is visible business-oriented knowledge to be exploited in the average academic learned person, a growing price tag, harder competition, and a greater role in social and political life. This narrative is validated by those who appeal to the intellectual progress of an elite for whom they are expendable. For examples look to the many techno-fear narratives in the arts and in the media. Like the backlash against Facebook and Twitter and the techno-apocalypse and dystopia narratives being told in the arts. They reflect the fears of individuals who see this progress as assertion of power that threatens to compromise fundamental rights and liberties. A fear of a type of material deterministic world where their freedom will be reduced and their happiness in the present transformed into a debt to the future.

Does the working class really want learned AI techs to replace the drudgery of their work lives? Probably not if they have any sense…. Will it still happen? Almost certainly. The system of exchange of goods for access is symbolic of an inevitable progress, a peg in a larger movement in time and is a cultural gesture towards its completion.

It is more interesting about how this discussion inevitable turns into a conflict for power between one who sees this long standing institution of the university from a higher moral ground and another with an equally extreme materialist mindset. My criticism of the system is that it is currently tending to produce an unbalanced number of materialist thinkers, in my view, paralleling the dualism between its organization in pre/post enlightenment culture to its current form where it is actively stripping itself of these morals and values; what will we have left other than some type of extreme materialism?

Is there any room for free will and a type of transcendence of the learning self in the materialist schema? Whenever anyone explains it to me it usually just comes off as some kind of individual-driven fixation of curiosity and/or semi-religious symbolism of the knowledge as a type of higher spiritual power.

My personal inclination is to say that might vs right may be rational but it’s not reasonable. That’s based on thinking that for the subject it is perfectly rational; one can live their life by this and succeed perfectly well in society and life. But once we start to blend it with something more objective it reveals the poor foundation upon which it is built.

Taken as moral law, this would lead to some pretty dark types of behaviour: executions, prejudice, anything would be fair game because the weak deserve their punishment according to (3). In an objective way, things would be lost though they may not seem that way to the subjects themselves. But it is unfair to have one group who doesn’t care being at an advantage because they care and another being at a disadvantage because they do care. This is where it goes into the existential question of, “When is a moral life worth living?”

If someone knows themselves and chooses freely to be immoral, then they simply get the circumstance they choose. Morality wasn’t made to enslave people, but rather to be a way of life that was considered by antique thinkers to be the most reasonable way to live. But reasonable could mean other things too. I think we just tend to have certain presets because of our historical development that way, and it’s perfectly rational to want to defend them.

So here is the run-down of the ongoing whittling of the term 'weakness' that we have put this together so far. This is not so much a definition of weakness as it is an ongoing delineation of it that is probably never going to be finished.

1) We have posited an individual and their separate external circumstances and judged them to be less effective or ineffective at reaching an end using a certain means; this can be because of lack of ability, good sense, or by simple circumstances outside of their control (ie: lion hunts gazelle, squirrel is run over by truck, etc.).

2) We have reached a certain end using a means, and in so doing have compared this end and means to others who have attained or are in the the process of attaining some end using a means, one or both of which we see as lesser. This can be because of the ineffectiveness of the end in achieving other ends or by a perceived discrepancy between the will of the individual and the end itself; the in itself and for itself of the end (ie: he's always eating, but because of this he is fat and unhappy).

3) A relationship of exploitation is revealed whereby in the judgement of the ends and means the observer takes as implicit a certain desired deficit for some purpose that can be for themselves, not, for someone else, or all (ie: this group is lower than us because they are weak). In this case the weak person has the weakness enforced on them in an external or internal way, so that it wouldn't exist without being made into an image or idea.

4) The determination of the weak is turned in on itself, and viewed as such it displaces the weakness that was previously thought primarily of content into one primarily of form (ie: it is weak to believe that only to be strong should be desired, etc). The weakness is found to be in the belief that the weakness is somewhere 'out there' where it is observed and we can see it as if we were neutral observers.

These are the aspects of the weakness idea as we have outlined them, but not it's true definition. All four taken in isolation seem to fail to tell the whole story. For instance, (1) and (2) both suffer from the limitation that they use the language of images as if they were concrete realities. (3) tells us something, but it seems somehow absorbed into itself. (4) is the closest approximation to what this thread has been revolving around.

The question I have for you at this point is, "does (4) deserve to be part of our notion of weakness, or should it be cast out as unnecessary?" What is good about (4) in relation to the other three we have here? Just another reminder that these four don't constitute and exhaustive list, only what we've managed to cobble together here.

"Weakness" is a relative social term, which may or may not play a role in an instinct that would kick in a given situation.

This is hard to agree with, because we're talking about more than just human social weakness. You're right that weakness is a relative term. In fact, to say something is 'weak' is almost considered the equivalent of saying 'everything but this thing is strong.' I do agree that in humans there is much more abstraction and division of opinion about what constitutes weakness and what strength. But it's the general idea of strength and weakness that we maintain and not the exact sameness of it to any specific materialistic analogy that I'm interested in. Within that idea it is bound to it that not all can have a strength, because if they did it would not be a differentiable quality.

The worst thing that could happen would be for this to come off as another unbearable 1:1 correspondence between the limitless explanations of evolution theory and the thinking and behaviour of human beings, which in terms of meaning doesn't seem to us to have such deterministic causes. The point of the predator-prey analogy was to appeal to intuition and not only reasoning, where we take there to be animals that are weak for reasons outside themselves and for reasons within themselves. When a rabbit decides, "I'll just come out into the open this one time to have a nibble since its so quiet," where the fox lays waiting, that to me is a weakness of judgement not unlike the human who buys into a pyramid scheme thinking "maybe this time I'll get away with this." They are both similar to the human failing of idealism; many of us consider that failing to be a weakness.

It is surprising that you would cut everything off at the level of social weakness and call that something else when there are animals that exhibit strong and weak social traits. Chimpanzees being the closest to humans. Where do you draw the un-crossable line between human weaknesses and animal ones still remains a mystery. Surely it would be unbelievable to say humans and animals are the same thing, but it would be equally unbelievable to say we share nothing in common with the animals when there are some obvious similarities, depending on your religious beliefs.

Instead of the arrow, you're just not perfectly charming to the opposite sex. Some other people don't get along with you, and you meet with failure in your life that is the product of a will or an exchange of wills. Not to say you should go around intentionally screwing things up or accepting your failures in themselves; that would be a pretty dismal approach to life.

I'm sure there are times in your life where you've asked yourself "why didn't I just do x and everything would have gone fine." and so forth. Well if you were perfect everything would go fine, and one only need think shortly over the consequences of that over a broad group to see how that could end in an overall failure. This all reminds me of the Radiohead lyric Just:

Can't get the stink off
He's been hanging 'round for days
Comes like a comet
Suckered you, but not your friends
One day he'll get to you
And teach you how to be a holy cow
You do it to yourself, you do
And that's what really hurts
Is you do it to yourself, just you
You and no one else
Don't get my sympathy
Hanging out the fifteenth floor
You've changed the locks three times
He still comes reeling through the door
One day I'll get to you
And teach you how to get to purest hell
You do it to yourself, you do
And that's what really hurts

We miss the mark. Shoot the arrow to the wrong place. We give the prey a chance to escape, because that's how we survive. And why should it not be the case in our civil lives as well?

The same. When someone professes to have some all-encompassing ability to understand another's life experience it starts looking a lot like they are fixing their gaze on them with the intent of using them as a means.

Suppose that the better question than 'why should we be weak,' is 'why are we weak?' Our weakness is something we have somehow already conceded to. Look at our eyes, our ears, and other organs: aren't they are so well-adapted to their purpose. If we had perfected predation like we had these traits, we'd have destroyed ourselves long ago. Thus we don't have them. Or at least that's the way I see it simply based on intuition. So then, does it still seem fit for us then to accept that strength is a more desirable trait from John Rawls' 'original position,' simply because as subjects we ourselves feel it fit to strive for it?

There's no doubt it should make sense to want to be stronger. But what about the strongest? Or even stronger than that? As an idea it can easily transform into a fetish, or a masochistic pride that doesn't speak for the full breadth of our real interests.

Fair enough. percentage-wise, the technology affected roughly the same demographic, but it would reach more individuals and see more frequent usage. The U.S. population now is recorded at approximately 333 Million. In 1940 the census recorded approximately 132 Million. So while the approximate 90 percent figure is similar, that percentage represents significantly more people. Plus those people are able to carry this device with them all the time and perform more actions with it in addition to all the functionality of television and radio combined.

I got the feeling after “laymen have a perspective on things that the more educated classes do not know,” that it was almost laughable. This is common sense. If I were to start somewhere it might be wondering about that.

Yes, I agree. Where do you see the academic class blocking the life path of what you call 'common people'? I agree that our current ' diploma democracy' as we say in Dutch is flawed. Our policy makers should represent the people and currently the balance between academically educated and non-academically educated is off. I do not think though the academic education is the problem per se, but the academically educated seem to be privileged in other ways as well.

In Europe perhaps less so because tuition fees are not as high as they are in North America. Here the technology gap has greatly increased the requirement for extended education to reach high-paying jobs. In addition, there's the sheer attendance factor in these institutions. You can't have fifty percent of the population going into debt investing their entire life savings and youth on something and then "Sorry we've got nothing for you."

The influence these disciplines have is also now more far-reaching. Data scientists, programmers, engineers, journalists, are in a greater sense more a part of our lives and the roles they play have increased in complexity and influence on the behaviour of the ordinary person. In 1951 they didn't need to ask themselves, "Will x news headline cause anxiety and depression?" because maybe only thirty percent of people in the neighbourhood even read the newspaper on a daily basis.

You have a large section of the population who have invested heavily in something: something that grants them certain powers and privileges. I'm not saying they're blocking anyone from happiness, or there's anything wrong with universities teaching kids to succeed in their field. But there is a system in place that poses a potential for a class divide and an ideological crisis. That's all, no blame or anything on anyone, just plain old crass cynicism.

The usual structure goes:

individual -> particular
particular -> universal
individual -> universal

You have replaced the universal in the second step with a second particular.

Still inappropriate as a means to compare the natural instinct of prey and predators with personalities of people. Categorically incorrect.

Interesting you would say this. In what ways are they different to you? Are you saying there is something clearly different between a human driving force causing violence to another human for gain, and a predatory animal causing violence to another similar mammal in the animal kingdom? Does the human not in some part have their own benefit and survival in view when they do this similar to they way an animal does?

What is the alternative? No knowledge.

It would be sort of hypocritical to start to make prescriptions. But it makes me personally feel dead inside when the educated elite talk about human beings like they are children who need to be guided around by the adults who know better. That is because I see it as an abuse of authority. However, those who take the opposite extreme reach the same conclusion. We’re now talking in the language of wrathful extremes, which gets everyone nowhere.

I’m not suggesting by this we run around and grab the pitchforks for a good ol’ fashioned witch-hunt, but surely we should give the common person some respect for choosing his/her destiny even if it doesn’t fit in with the value system of professors and (private) educational institutions. My reading of Kant’s ‘kingdom of ends,’ inspires me to say a valuable structure in power and politics can’t be found without the consent to some degree of all the people within it as moral equals.

I feel your pain. The university system to me seems to be instilling a sense of class separation and control through just the same phenomena; the proposed oligarchy of the intelligentsia. As if we haven't seen that mentality utterly fail over and over again throughout history.

However when doing so, I think your judgment is enriched by more knowledge of theory of law. Maybe that is the assumption you have, that somehow there is a struggle between the two, but I fail to see why that should be so.

I would agree about the enriching, and this I think is my (known) assumption: That knowledge does 'enrich' us with a certain authority; a certain power. And the more of this power one gets it seems reasonable to think that it would become more difficult to use it effectively. Not that the intention to do good weren't there, but that the more your actions affect a greater number, the more the possibility comes that this could manifest in unpredictability and do damage to some. Especially because a great deal of this knowledge concerns the validity of the very apparatus of judgement itself.

To cite one controversial example of how knowledge itself is not always the path toward good, take the Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels had the intention of spreading what they knew about economics, social science, and political science. These days there aren't many who don't point the finger of blame towards that action for the cruelty carried out in its name, though in my view their work rests on perfectly sound knowledge of the world. What they saw, as far as I'm concerned was the truth, but when they attempted to particularize and individualize it those universals collapsed, free will clashed with the ideal axioms of the academic world and all sorts of unpredictability resulted.

This isn't intended to be some sort of allegory of why we should never use the knowledge taught in universities and colleges, but it does go to show one example where the good it can do can easily turn foul. And this can be worse in some cases because it associates the interest within the particularities as if it were part of the universal, allowing the worst types of violence and harm done in the name of progress.

No offense, but I am a social scientist as well as a lawyer and I publish on a regular basis in academic journals (although less than I wish because of other pressing academic duties such as teaching classes).

Wow, then you're the perfect person to ask this question. Thanks for replying. I seem to have rubbed you the wrong way but that wasn't my intention. I suppose the first question I would ask you is to what extent does your academic involvement — and I'm regretting using the word 'academic' already — mix with your work in law. Imagine, that you were a judge instead of a lawyer, do you think that your exposure to certain ideas about social relationships as a scientist would affect your work to any extent? The judge being an impartial third party, do you see any conflict of interest? What if instead this person had some money invested in an non-profit, would it then become a conflict? Surely the judge who knows must self-regulate their actions in accordance with the knowledge of their own limitations, but this is exactly what I mean: then according to you they are more inclined to restraint than someone who has one-dimensional ideas that draw them to immediate action.

Keep in mind, I'm not approaching this under any assumption that either response is a true or false.

If you are unaware of the limitations to your field of study then that problem might arise. However as I have explained above, the whole point of academic studies is to get a grip on your field of knowledge and also what its limitations are.

I'm so glad you said this, because now we are getting into the real content of the question. So what is this process of knowing ones self and their limitation? Where is the limitation? Is it common sense, is it negation of the knowledge (or 'denial'), is it drawing the line in a strict manner according to some unwritten rule?

This is not an attack on you personally, please try to see it otherwise. If my ignorance is offending you, please feel free to correct me because I certainly don't consider myself an expert on social science or the law. But we I hope you understand that we can't only ask questions here that pertain to only one field of study completely.

No offense, but being a lawyer is not exactly what I meant by ‘academic.’ Yes, when you have a civil problem you go to a specialist in that field. But when you are being sexually harassed do you go to a women’s studies professor? The academic in my experience usually deals primarily in the universality of the subject, where the specialist in the particulars. We are talking about a similar difference between the mathematician and the physicist. Physics being concerned more with the particulars of the real world at hand, where events aren’t as much idealized in the way they are in the universal form of mathematics.

If you attempted to apply the idealized structure of mathematics to physics problems you’d encounter unexpected results because the real world doesn’t always deal in easily determined discrete quantities. Similarly, those who deal in the analysis of universal categories of law might still fail in persuading a jury of an argument because that is so heavily influenced by particulars.

But what I’m getting at is that if you really well understood those idealities, and attempted to work in them as they were in practical terms, then wouldn’t you to a certain extent be applying a force to those events themselves to be more like your idealizations? That is particularizing the universal and ultimately vise versa: you may run the risk of those particular actions coming to represent universal concepts, and individualizing them to suit whatever aims happen to be popular that day.

Their vision is not somehow clouded by 'academic' reasoning and thinking as you seem to suggest, it is expanded by it. So they know everything the layman knows and more.

The academic may know a lot, but they don't know how to truly behave like a layman. They can never know how to not know what they know, and that is a weakness. The academic is likely to encounter the traditional way of life with a critical eye perhaps because of what they believe they know; sure they know things, but do they know better so as to decide for someone else? What gives them that right over others when the basis of their study precedes them just as much as their subject?

Wow, this brings me back, I was a different person then ;)

The human mind is so much more interesting when viewed from this perspective of a 'collective will.' I think this question is one more for the Existentialists. Like the Sisyphus myth, both the strong and the weak push their boulders up the hill; both commanding equal respect for taking on the many contradictions of life. From a social point of view I think it makes sense not to go to far with this point of view that perfection of our survival is the absolute good in itself.

Well we appear to have reached some analysis that the original post about the equality of someone who fails that is unintelligent, not physically strong or agile, etc. is one component of an ideological narrative of Western-European individualism, one which is dominated by a force that is to a large extent a result of the move from deterministic relations of the individual (x is entitled to y) to a more far-reaching concept of self-hood and individual life.

For the extreme libertarian, for instance, the concept of liberty is extended so far as to become the complete opposite; the repression and subjugation of individual life. A billionaire heir who has been educated by the top minds and trained in physical strength by the finest teachers and who is expected in their civil life to remain in power, if given the same opportunity as someone from a family without money who is expected to fail, is it true liberty to simply leave these two the same freedoms of choice and wipe one's hands? What about the biological effects of individual genetics with the qualities of attaining these circumstances?

But this is problematic because it presents the need for a determination of worth that moves past fixed universals to one that is to a certain extent spiritual and objective. This becomes increasingly challenging with the draining of spiritual life from modern life that comes with secularized education and social life and the challenges that face our objective way of thinking from globalization. I guess you could say that Western history, and especially religion, in a certain sense represents beliefs that are undesirable to modern thought, but at the same time contains certain ideas that allow individuals to be complacent in certain differences. Subjugation of those ideas for its own sake may have effects that could be called negative from within that limitation of being.

This could be one reason why many first-world countries grant the right to freedom religion and security against persecution.

I'm not exactly sure, but from a value perspective it's like this frustrating feeling of like on the whole we are being given the option of this beautifully crafted piece of solid oak furniture that will last for generations versus a crappy piece of particleboard furniture and taking the particleboard... a despair at feeling a lost innocence. Maybe this is why most states condone those who beat down religion and it's values.

Do you think that a system like the caste system they have in India, or the classist system in Europe are good, or bad?
Do you find that the upper class should despise the lower classes, and the lower classes should internalize that contempt, considering it righteous?

I'm of the opinion that even though there's no clear dividing line between philosophy, sociology, and politics, it is usually a bad idea to have self-proclaimed philosophers abusing their ideas and intellectual authority by telling people what to do to too great an extent. There are some difficulties, but also some necessities, that arise when extending our seemingly objective system of judgement onto others. The same goes for other fields too such as mathematics, science, physics, and biology; if you had specialists in these fields determining how we lived our lives we'd all be living a pretty crummy existence.

Bringing this back to the original topic, if when we consider all men and women to be equal in terms of civil liberty and simultaneously assent to an implicit notion of an extended spiritual equality on which this is based, I just can't help but find this situation so utterly absurd and dysfunctional. Eighty percent of non-religious individuals of Western-European culture you would ask about this - in my urban living area at least - would decry the Judeo-Christian moral set and fully maintain the order of the other at the same time. Surely there must be some type of explanation for this change, which I'm not fully gasping. Is it expressly social, political, technological, anthropological, etc.?

From my own observation the West seems to be in this sort of transition process moving from cultural institutions and structures of individual life derived from these 'unclean' histories to a sort of ideologically automated version. Another way of putting it would be tying up the histories into a type of self-sustaining loop that negates the full extent of their intended meaning but still allows them to survive in a symbolic form through practice. This is done in such a way that over time they would almost certainly become deteriorated and lost or at least alienated from their original meaning.

Am I alone in observing it this way? I don't want to sound overly cynical here, but there doesn't seem to be any light way of putting it. Perhaps Putin was right when he said 'Liberalism is obsolete' we in the West are doomed to having these customs and practices eventually become arbitrary until someone has an equally arbitrary idea or they are abruptly ended by war.

I see it as irrelevant if Jefferson himself believed personally and individually in a G-d. The basis of the matter is there is nothing evidently binding the liberal idea to religion, but we can then not easily conclude that these two are fully separate and distinct.

You seem to consider it an accident that there are themes and references in the writing that refer explicitly to a Creator. There is still undeniably something implicit in the writing that implies religious ideas and contingencies. For instance, the concept of liberty itself. Why should we have had this idea without carrying along with it a notion that we were each a valued individual with a personal internal relationship with G-d, each deserving as such a right to our own freedom of will? Before this notion much of the West lived in a state that was a great deal less centred around freedom of private individual desires and choice and a little more deterministic, wouldn’t you agree? I think if you didn’t you’d be a little out of step with the commonly held vision of what the lifestyles of antiquity were like.

Please note that this is not an idea original to me that I’m now discussing with you.

Yes thank you, and there is a good reason why one might think this way; in the 'equality' of others at the value level. It is not solely original to you, but in part the environment around us also leads us to think this way. I have seen that in some cultures they don't as much have this view that the poor or dim-witted are happy or equal-valued, and they tend to be less so where that is the case. I don't think this to be something that always existed chronologically either, but something we sometimes take for granted in modern times.

Just because Jefferson used a term associated with religion is no reason to quibble.

...just because they used certain words is no reason to believe that they really meant them you mean?

Jefferson could have referenced 'nature' as the source of our equality; or some philosopher, or something else--executive fiat, maybe. Rhetorically, 'creator' is still the best choice, given past and current contexts.

how are you proving that another completely different word could be substituted into the sentence? How do the words nature, philosophers, and Fiat mean the same thing?

I'm not sure whether you said what you meant to say. Clarify, please.

I meant to say what I said. In retrospect it would have flowed better to use the reverse but it still makes sense. You could just as well say something like,"When we believe so strongly in the worse circumstance of the 'less fortunate' we turn it into expectation and eventual reality." It seems reasonable that one effective way to ensure continued domination is to convince the dominated that they should expect dominance.

This language is clear - All people are created equal. All people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. We're not equal in height, wealth, strength, or any other physical or social measure. We are all equal in moral value.

This is a good point. I really want to stay off the topic of the 'Creator' ideology but I don't see any other option since you have now gone there. Though some may disagree, as far as I'm concerned there is clear Judeo-Christian ideological baggage in this idea of being endowed by a Creator with unalienable rights and liberties. I am here drawing a little from an online document from Maureen Heath, which can be found here:

https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/1053063/Heath_georgetown_0076D_14011.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Running closely with the theme of this thesis, in the modern West I see us as dividing spirituality and civil liberty into distinct categories while at the same time expressing both of these in culture and in our psyche in a language of a uniquely Euro-centric individualism, one that developed hand-in-hand with the proliferation of Christianity in Europe over the past two thousand years. This severance of the notion of civil freedoms at the level of the individual to me is like reading an academic article without the citations; freed from its context while remaining knee deep in it.

This is not to say that the declaration of independence is in some way inferior. I think it's an excellent expression of freedom and a well tuned piece of writing that speaks succinctly for a wide range of interests and beliefs. There is a line right before your quote that reads "We hold these truths to be self-evident," which I personally interpret to mean that what they were striving for they hoped to be more than just technical equality in law alone, but that each individual would make it their mission in their private life because it is something that they all already believe in. The notion of the Creator overarching their secular life being included in this implicit and shared standard of right and wrong.

In the time of the founding fathers, this self-evidence drew from a society where a belief that the love of their Creator was enough to live a respectable and worthwhile life; after all, in the Bible Christ himself dies for the sins of others. This seems to me to contain a further extension of the idea of civil liberty that is truncated in modern life: that even the plight of torture and death can be endured if we have a certain faith in ourselves and each other. I am not especially religious, but I find this idea inspiring and worthwhile.

I guess the part that this notion of liberty misses is the mission for caring about your fellow man or woman as well, and that this is also good for yourself. An equality of caring I guess it would resemble, though it may sound corny, is a missing link with the modern equality of wealth and employment and so forth.

The FACTS OF LIFE:

Oh ok, I hope this is PG-rated.

Some people will have much better experiences in life than others.

I am glad you said this, because it points to exactly what we're discussing. Yes we can observe this to be the case, but should we really believe this? Yes, we can clearly see that in our observation of these phenomena we can serve to alter existence. But I'm not sure if we should really believe it. When we believe so strongly in the better circumstance of the 'less fortunate' we turn it into expectation and eventual reality.

We set out to make the poor person rich, rather than really improve the poor person's existence so that our determination of them as 'poor' no longer has negative value. We might follow this logic to train more doctors and less garbage collectors as opposed to making a garbage collectors life equally the product of a rational will.

It's not just western. All around the world certain jobs have higher prestige - doctors and lawyers usually being up there.

Of course this makes perfect sense that there be social structures that favour certain occupations over others. I don't want to confine ourselves to just the topic of employment, this is a broader point that I think reaches through other 'rituals,' as I suppose you could call them to borrow a term from cultural studies. I refer to it as a ritual because it functions to transfer values that are accomplished in purified practise. The success of the intelligent and the benefits are in part due to the role-playing of intelligence and feelings of superiority that come with it. The ritual of a certain cross-section of Western society brings with it certain high-ideas about individual worth that counter-acts this relationship of domination. This discussion could then I suppose be seen as a vying for power between camps even though it reflects attitudes based on what is valuable and worthwhile.

The intelligent, powerful, talented, social, etc. are qualities that can and are endowed to a large extent in-absolutely; one who is intelligent is not intelligent purely against someone unintelligent, but at the most overreaching level they are intelligent for itself. The unintelligent individual through modifications of their circumstances could be made equally or more intelligent without any necessary benefit except the significance of the ritual of intelligence and it's purposes.

Regardless of whether we choose to be involved or not the individual pursuit of happiness will be limited by universal thought, just not the universally imposed rules of a state. So I take your response to mean that this sort of determination of the limit of equality is not personally important to you. Considering a more controversial case, imagine that the state were forcing employees who were less intellectually inclined to be accepted into certain jobs in such a high number that this were interfering with your own ability to find work. Wouldn't the circumstance of those not having to invest in themselves the mental effort while achieving the same results bother you? Or take the reverse, where the workplace were so consumed by a need for mental effort that your job were essentially determined at birth with no guiding will to choose it at all.

Please see that the examples are not intended as an expression of my personal belief of what should occur in this situation. Suppose that the reason individuals in their non-intellectually demanding jobs had the idea that to compete with you for your job would be to have an overall 'happier' life, I think this type of broad notion would end up affecting your individual life in a negative way. Or that you were being bred for intellect like a cow so that you could attain this happiness with no real effort at all.

This sounds nice in ideality, but how can one remove all mediation from a universal rule in the way you suggest? Aren't we forgetting that our own concepts of aptitude commands our actions that take place free from universally imposed rules as well, which is where comes the need for consideration of it?