vorpal_potato t1_jadqte0 wrote
Reply to comment by fortin1984 in Universal ethics/basic law for all people & global moral education: A new way to sustainability and peace? by fortin1984
I read it and the author doesn't seem to have actually understood any of the issues. What even is "personal dignity", and how can anyone claim with a straight face that it's universal and self-evident? Hell, you can't even translate the Latin word "dignitas" to the closely-related English word "dignity" without giving a few sentences of explanation about the cultural differences in meaning. You'd run into even more trouble if you look at cultures that aren't related so closely.
And he sure does like to call things "universal and self-evident", even when this is trivially false. For example, one thing he describes this way is the principle that "State, religious, economic and other office holders are in [each human being's] service." This is not at all an obvious idea, nor one that all cultures would agree with. People in various times and places would tell you that government office-holders have power due to the Divine Right of Kings, or the Mandate of Heaven, or would simply describe governments as bandits who have settled down in place. You could come up with similar counterexamples for the statement about religious and economic office-holders.
I could go on, but if the paper fails such basic sanity-checking I don't see much point.
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