Welcome friends!
Lots of stuff to talk about, right? Seems conservatives are going a little crazy all over the world just now. We’ve got the Islamic State burning people alive in the Middle East. We’ve got the Stupid Party, sorry, I mean the GOP here in the US encouraging people not to get their kids vaccinated in direct opposition to prevailing medical and scientific opinion. We’ve got GOP presidential hopefuls Mike Huckabee and Rick Perry variously explaining homosexuality is like alcoholism or swearing a lot. (You know, a mental illness, a moral failure, or maybe just a bad habit.) And of course I see I still haven’t written anything about the newly minted GOP congress trying to shoot down the Democrats’ rather feeble attempt at regulating Wall Street as their absolute first order of business. (Whenever I think about the Republican Party it brings to mind the space time continuum for some reason. One hears talk of the regions of the US where Republicans tend to reside but one doesn’t hear much about which era they tend to inhabit. I know Islamic State dwells mostly in the tenth century or thereabout but what about the Republican Party? Sometimes I think they must be somewhere in the 1950s but at other times I think possibly a little later, maybe the 1960s. Every now and then I catch of glimpse of 1980. It’s all very curious. Someone should do a science fiction movie about that. They could call it the Black Hole. No, wait; I think someone already used that for something else. Well, I’ll think of something.) But no. All the headlines I just mentioned are really just more of the same and you know my blog is not about the latest iteration of some ongoing bit of nonsense but about underlying themes. Well, most of the time. Sometimes I do news of the day. Anyway, this time out I wanted to do more of an underlying theme post. Speaking of which, you may recall that last time (January 22, 2015) I was prattling on about the importance for democratic society of following the accepted meta-ethics for resolving social disputes regardless of whether the solution to any given conflict corresponds to how one would have resolved the situation oneself based upon one’s own personal ethics. However, you may have noticed I refrained from saying one should never set oneself up against the prevailing meta-ethics of one’s society, only that it should be a pretty unusual situation. So of course that got the old wheels turning again about whether there was anything else relatively obvious I might say on the subject given the limitations of addressing such a serious issue in a short and typically flippant blog post.
It occurred to me the decision to reject the meta-ethics of one’s society in favor of one’s own personal ethics on some matter must involve two general and interrelated considerations... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website. All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee. Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right? If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then. Thank you my friends!
