What about all that Biblical talk about people being "God's tools" and "instruments of God's will?" I don't even have any problem thinking of people as objects, provided that we're all God's objects.
Granted. However, it is God using the person for his own benefit, in which case all bets are off. You were suggesting that he makes a great number of people into a collective tool for the benefit of the more fortunate.
[quote]The way you say it, it seems like you're classifying miserable people almost as a different species -- homo sapiens miserables. Of course we both know that no one is miserable perpetually; we all have times when we could use some help, and we also have times when we're ideally situated to help others. That's what I was trying to get at: these are the circumstances, the "rains and the dry spells," that God brings to us to test us and develop our character. It's not that we're to use the suffering of others to reduce them to mere moral objects, but rather that God would use them to help make us more fully human.
That collectivization was intended to be what you were saying, or at least I thought it was. You seemed to be suggesting that God had created a class of people whose sole purpose was to be miserable so that someone else could help them and be edified; if that's not what you meant, then we have little argument.
I still object somewhat to the idea of God testing someone - it feels a bit too Old Testament for me. I would think that if you took that position, you'd always be asking, "Is this a test from God? Should I respond well and fulfill his will?" instead of finding a moral code and trying to stick to it as best you can.
I have no idea where you're getting this. It's absolute nonsense to talk about virtue when dealing with mere objects. One is not kind or merciful or generous with a car or a baseball or a piece of furniture. So if we "use" people for the practice of virtue, then we are using them as people and not as objects.
Pardon my humanism, but people should not be "used" for anything; they are far too complex to be treated as tools. That is what I object to in your statement - the idea that miserable people exist for the sole purpose of permitting you to help them. No person exists for a single purpose, especially not for another person. If they did, they would merely be objects; thus the reason for my comparison.
Quote from PandasRPeople2 »
Indeed not. Misery exists because people have abrogated their responsibility to be charitable. When we see people in want, we are called upon by God and the dictates of a healthy conscience to respond to their needs in proper (virtuous) fashion. When we fail to do so, want sharpens and becomes misery. And misery untended becomes desperation. At any point along this spectrum it is possible that our souls will be stirred to compassion, and we will do right (at least for a little while) by the sick, the poor, the lonely. But if we were collectively living anywhere near the sort of lives God would have us to live, we would see nothing of hunger, homelessness, alcoholism and drug abuse, suicide, and all the other accoutrements of neglected and abandoned lives.
Well, yes, simple compassion and the Beatitudes require us to help those who are in need. This wasn't my problem with your statement. Perhaps you didn't intend it this way, but you would have a class of people existing solely to serve those more fortunate, i.e.,you and I, by allowing us to serve them and learn compassion. I take a different view. In my opinion, poverty and misery are symptoms of a complex world working in ways beyond our comprehension. God asks us to be kind to others in reaction to this unexplained unhappiness, so that they become less miserable. He didn't create misery as a test to continuously require service from us for our own edification.
Quote from Vulcain666 »
Wait, I thought Jesus was the symbol of capitalism.
Yes, yes, we know you're terribly witty. People who are always witty and never meaningful are generally either called smart-alecks or nihilists. Take your pick, listen to PandasRPeople, and please stop.
Quote from KurCE »
Doesn't the existence of suffering in one's life despite the fact that that one has been a devoted follower of God go against the definition of God? Isn't God supposed to be loving and caring of his followers? Why worship a God whose plan is for you, his devoted follower, to endure suffering and misery?
As extremestan (and many other philosophers before him) have said, everything will probably work out in the end, but God is mysterious. Generally, Christians (or anyone else who believes in a benevolent God. Not all Christians actually do, mind you) either deal with this or become atheists.
Quote from IsUsernam »
I have a question, why has a religion based on the idea that a magical Jewish zombie ca make you live forever while you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is presant in humanity because a rib-woman who was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree, have a multi-million person following?
Because the philosophy was, on the whole, more powerful than the dogma? Most of what you refer to is Old Testament-based and therefore allegorical or poeticized at best, and the rest are rituals, which tend to be odd wherever they crop up. Have you been to a football game lately?
Indeed. Ecclesiastes has some good stuff to say on this issue.
I do like what I've read of that book, mainly because it's more philosophy than dogma. Dogma irritates me, mainly since most of it thinks that I should be executed.
Although, just for the poetry, I must say that Lamentations and Psalms are my favorites.
On the contrary, it is only where there is a disparity of pain and poverty and death that meaningful free will can exist!
I operate from this assumption: that God desires for us to be virtuous creatures, and that He created us to that end. I hope that is not too outlandish an assupmtion? Now then... if we do not see others who are sicker, poorer and more hurting than ourselves, how shall we ever be able to practice the virtues of charity, compassion and mercy? Likewise, if we do not see others who are healthier and happier and more prosperous than ourselves, how shall we ever be able practice the virtues of patience and humility and graciousness and hard work?
Having just read and been most fascinated by Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, I can't even describe how much this statement distresses me. By your own logic, you just condemned many, many people to lives of, as you say, sickness, poverty, and pain so that you could react to them as if they were objects, not living people. I don't care what brilliant piece of theology you've thought up; misery in no way exists to satisfy our need to be bloody charitable.
(Disclaimer: I am Catholic. And just because I've read Ayn Rand doesn't mean I agree with everything she says.)
Quote from extremestan »
Indeed. It's meant to show that "God works in mysterious ways" is not a logical cop-out -- rather, it's a cogent refutation of the theodicean problem, as unsatisfying as it may be.
"Unsatisfying" is an understatement, but correct. I usually take the concept to mean that we have to try to deal with our lives as best we can.
Out of curiosity, do you (you being any of the free-market advocates on this forum) believe there can be such a thing as a happy medium here? I mean, surely it's possible for a society at least approximate an amount of government aid such that the people who haven't received opportunities are sufficiently buoyed up and the people who have aren't overly pulled down. Or am I merely being a romantic moderate, if there is such a thing?
Quote from TIBA »
My God, man. It's called school. For the three or four years before that, why shouldn't private markets and communities provide as they did for millenia before the advent of industrialization made "kept women" a possibility for anything but the very upper class?
Well, they didn't, really. "School" as we know it is a fairly new phenomenon mostly begun on a grand scale as an effort by new nationalist regimes to simultaneously provide a modicum of education to the masses while teaching them such values as patriotism and the value of hard work.
In any case, the free market works best when each person be fully capable of putting their labor on the market without concern towards other things in their life. For women, children and childbearing are an obstacle to this freedom of labor. Wouldn't it be helpful to the free exercise of the market to remove the burden of child-rearing from women? From that perspective, free daycare doesn't seem like such a bad idea. You could try to leave it up to the market, but for some reason, probably cultural and antifeminist, our market doesn't seem to like day care very much, at least in the US.
In any case, welfare that pays people not to work has always been a bad idea. But are you really going to suggest that any aid program whatsoever by the government encourages people not to work? Take the daycare example; that actually encourages people to work. I notice that you think education is important; if it's government-sponsored, does that encourage parents not to work hard enough to pay for their child's education?
EDIT: Oh dear. Social Darwinism is having a local resurgence.
Quote from sentimentGX4 »
In a society, people must accept that it is only natural that some must die in starvation. It is not a matter of empathy but of common sense. If one wishes to contribute to charity, by all means go ahead. But remember never to ENTITLE the lower class with privileges. They have not worked for it and they are not entitled to anything. In the end, charity should never be an entitlement. There is no right to a decent quality of life without effort and hard work.
First, as empathic human beings capable to at least attempting to understand someone else's suffering, we generally try not to just let people "die in starvation," regardless of cynicism, or as you call it, "common sense." Common sense is what we use to attempt to craft solutions to these problems. In a world full of rational people, capitalism would result in an entirely bearable society; in our irrational world, with things like prejudice and despair, it does not. The "lower class" as a whole probably works much harder than you or I, but for entirely arbitrary reasons, we deem their work less valuable. (Yes, I know that the value of anything, including work, depends on its scarcity and therefore unskilled work is less valuable. Bear with me.) Because of many problems, including their often miserable physical and emotional situation, many of the lower class quite naturally give in to despair and decide that they will never reach an acceptable level of prosperity through hard work, leading to misery, broken families, substance addiction, and all the rest. Some have the emotional strength to avoid this turn of events, and a small minority even have enough to keep trying without help until they escape the trap of poverty. None of this would not occur if they or human beings in general were rational, but we are not.
We middle and upper-class people happened to be born in situations that were far less oppressive to the body and soul where we would have the opportunity to acquire skills deemed valuable, and thus we largely prosper. Again, the disparities in situation as well as the disparities in emotional makeup determine which of us especially prospers and which of us falls. The point is that both you and I are relatively fortunate in many ways. Those who have been less fortunate do not deserve your condemnation. If you would like to debate the ways and manners in which to help people help themselves, I'm all for it. If you would like to discuss how to obtain the funding necessary for such aid, I'd be delighted to talk. But please don't come from the assumption that people who were born poorer than you and will probably die poorer are utterly contemptible, because I won't stand for that.
Well, I'm not going to fight you too hard over this, though $100k/year definitely puts you in the upper end of the middle class middle class (2.5 times average income). I will offer, on the other hand, that people who become wealthy do so by not spending money. In short, the best way to grow and protect wealth is to be frugal with it- the "rich" accouterments that we're used to seeing in movies is really only typical of the super-rich (People that are worth several tens of millions or more in terms of net worth).
Again, I'm going to stress that how "rich" you are depends on both quantitative amount of money you make and where you like. Cost of living in Los Angeles is very high. I kind of have a similar situation to Stax, and the impression that I've always had is that people cease to be middle-class when they don't necessarily need to work. Both of my parents work very hard at their jobs and help out with all sorts of organizations in the community as well, so we've always felt much more middle-class to me than some people I know.
You're probably right about the habits of those who acquire wealth, though. Wealthy people use money to make money, where as the merely middle-class among us tend more to use to to buy the necessities (and comforts) of life.
Quote from Infinitive »
The boom of the Euro helped Ireland's economy because its own currency had long been devalued as a result of the long-standing internal conflict between Catholic and Protestant guerrillas. In the same timeframe that you mention, a permanent ceasefire has taken hold and those groups have disarmed. I can imagine that the end of regular terrorist incidents might have a pretty serious effect on the willingness of businesses to invest.
I might also point out that joining the internal open market of the EU helped out Ireland a lot. Many of the poorer countries that have entered the EU have seen enormous amounts of economic growth because companies from the more established economies (Britain, France, Germany, etc.) invest in them for lower labor costs and other benefits, which is made possible by the lack of trade restrictions that the EU provides. It's kind of a smaller-scale version of the Third World outsourcing that large multinational corporations do.
I just got into Least I Could Do, and it's funny in a completely screwed-up kind of way. http://www.leasticoulddo.com
And for something really old, try Help Desk. It has no art to speak of and the humor is almost entirely based on the writing, but it stabs Microsoft with the fork of death in the funniest way I can imagine. http://ubersoft.net
If we could get nuclear fusion to work I'd support that without hesitation, but I have no idea if it can work at all outside science-fiction.
It's not so much getting the material to fuse that's the problem, it's converting the released energy into something we can use. Containment for fusion reactions has to be so impregnable that no one can actually figure out how to get a turbine or some other electricity-producing mechanism in play. There's some sort of national test reactor that can produce several terajoules of energy for about a millisecond by zapping deuterium pellets with lasers, but it's not continuous and no one has figured out how to store the energy. All in all, fusion is a long way off.
And why does this necessitate a moral law? Even if my neighbour experiences pain the same way as me, it's still a non sequitur to derive from that a moral law dictating I should not cause him pain. It only follows if he has the same moral consideration as me, and that is not a scientific given: it's an ethical question, and a relative one at that.
Oh, I see what you're getting at now. Let me state this, then: since I believe the ultimate purpose of morality (however imperfectly realized) is to maximize human happiness, it follows that if I would become unhappy as a result of a some action, it would be immoral for me to perform that action on another person, since it would most likely make them unhappy as well. That's my personal definition of morality, which someone could dispute. In my view, however, everyone wants to be happy, but it would be immoral to gain happiness at the expense of someone else's happiness; thus, we make moral laws to create a society where (hopefully) people can fulfill such desires as they have without harming others and become happy by doing so.
All this is extraordinarily idealistic and utterly impractical for the real world, but it does work fairly well as a rule of thumb for easier moral judgments.
Quote from Mad Mat »
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that people make moral differentiations: destroying iron ore is not immoral, destroying a paramecium is not immoral and destroying a cow is, for many, not immoral. Why would humans be so special? Why stop at cows and not go further to, say, those with severe mental handicaps? Any way you look at it, the line remains arbitrary.
This is the finicky point for almost any set of moral judgments, from abortion to vegetarianism to what-have-you. I'm probably not rational enough to make a fully informed decision on what constitutes a person for the purpose of morality, but I'd suggest this (highly general) rule: if we know that a species as a whole is sentient, then any member of that species should be treated as a thinking person even if they are less mentally capable than others because we know for certain that they have the possibility of being sentient. I'm less concerned with whether or not a person discerns sentience outside the human race, since we really have no way of knowing if a cow can think.
@Blinking Spirit: For a fictional example of how the Catholic Church might react to an alien species, try Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card. Xenocide most explicitly mentions what you're talking about, but it doesn't really make sense without the rest of the trilogy. Of course, someone of your intellectual caliber might be allergic to Orson Scott Card, but don't ask me - I'm not even out of high school yet.
Then it's unfair to judge nazism objectively by this criterium: nazism obviously does not subscribe to egalitarianism.
I disagree, since I consider the principle of a similar response to at least basic stimuli (e.g., pain) to be a basic fact about human nature. It's not a philosophy or a way of looking at the world, it's simple truth.
Quote from Mad Mat »
The problem is that humans differentiate among those who are deserving of moral consideration.
Just because we do differentiate and always have doesn't mean that it's moral. People have always harmed and killed others - does that make it right?
The reason that a basic acceptance of human similarity (I'm avoiding equality because it's a loaded word and goes into a lot of nonsense) is so important is that people always justify themselves when they harm another by claiming that the person isn't "like" them, or isn't "civilized", or, in extreme cases, that he or she isn't even human. The ideology of Nazism bases its desire to exterminate Jews (as well as gypsies, the disabled, and homosexuals) on the fact that they are not part of a specifically defined race of people who are assumed to be the benchmark of "humanity" (or civilization, if you prefer). Nationalism is such a dangerous force because it usually promotes unity by way of the rejection of whatever group of people is deemed to be the Other and therefore incapable of feeling as the united people do. Terrible wars, suffering, and misery result. If this is a moral outcome, then morality needs a new way of thinking.
I don't mean to get off-topic, but this issue is extremely important to me. I apologize for the digression.
Your criterium is human suffering, by this you assume egalitarianism and liberalism (as opposed to totalitarianism) as good things. The ideology in Mein Kampf (that's to say, I've never read Mein Kampf so I'm deducing the ideology from the actual events in the 30's and 40's) holds that not all humans are morally equal, hence those million deaths may be warranted in their view. It's also strongly nationalistic, obviously opposed to liberalism (as 'defined' before), so even the deaths of actual citizens may be warranted.
The bottom line is, you've got to ask yourself: what makes you think that the current Western system is better than the nazism of the 40's? And if you find the reason(s), you need to try and strengthen it/them with rational arguments, if possible. Otherwise, you do end up with relativism (which does not equal the end of morality or tolerance of whatever you find gruesome).
Well, if you want to go that deeply into the issue, I use the good old-fashioned Golden Rule: If I wouldn't want to undergo something, I'll assume that nobody else does either. This does assume that every person has the same emotional capacity as me and is "morally equal", but I consider that a fair assumption. Consider that any person, when hurt, will show similar signs of pain or when happy, shows similar signs of joy; also consider that all of the literature and collective creative output of humanity dwells on similar emotional themes. There are vast differences across cultures, obviously, but all of these differences are merely variations on a theme. Similarly, people vary greatly in their physical appearance, intelligence, and emotional makeup, but the similarities clearly outweigh the differences - no one would consider two humans less similar than a human and, say, a cat. Since all humans are fundamentally similar, it's perfectly logical to make the associative connection and assume that if an action would cause me pain, it would most likely hurt another person to a comparable degree. Since I prefer to not experience pain, I conclude that performing that action is immoral.
All of this reminds me of my question. Do you believe that the Christian moral system is fundamentally rooted in human happiness? Specifically, do you think that God gave humanity this moral system by whatever means for the purpose of making us happy (or at least happier)?
Considering they both have the same God, I would think so...
Christianity just adds Jesus as the son of that same God.
Well, there's a bit more to it than that. Judaism is the religion of the old covenant made specifically with Abraham and his descendants, i.e., the nation of Israel. Christianity is the new covenant made with all people. Christianity did originate from Judaism, but it's a whole separate thing; the same is true of Islam.
I think that we can assume that since the Judeo-Christian moral tradition does not require the death of millions of people (never mind the extraordinarily skewed criteria for death), it is essentially far better than the moral system espoused in Mein Kampf. Relativism has limits, in my opinion, and it hits them on the question of human suffering.
@Card Reaper: Um, yikes. Catholic schools where I live would probably not try to pull that off, and I'm kind of shocked that yours did. Anyway, judging by your second example, I'd say that this sort of attitude is fairly common at your school, and frankly I think that finding someplace else would be the best option. The BOE doesn't really have any jurisdiction - it's a religious school, so they're perfectly allowed to espouse what they consider to be religious ideals. I'd take issue to some of the theology, but that's just more reason to find someplace else. I don't know what the educational options are in your area, but unless you're in the middle of nowhere, there's probably another school you could find.
What would be the better word? Unneeded? There is no way to beat around the bush here.
I'm sure that you don't intend to become a politician or a public figure, but in that business and in others there's straight talk, and then there's talk that reveals a complete lack of compassion. If you don't find yourself in need of great stores of compassion, that's quite all right, but it does mean that people won't listen to you.
Quote from Pacman »
First I'm not an American. Second, I'm far from xenophobic. And I don't understand how you make that ******* conclussion! I think I'm less xenophic then most of the people on this forum!
What I tried to say is, protectionism is a fact!
Production is very effective in China. They have huge cities that only exist based on producing one single object. If there was a total free market, these products will overrun Europe and the US. It will be good for the consumers here but many companies can't compete with this mass production in China.
Many governments want to protect the industry in their own country. It's a simple fact.
I didn't object to you stating that governments often protect industries, I objected to you making the unfounded assumption that the evil Chinese would destroy the industries of hard-working, noble Europeans and Americans if their farsighted governments did not protect them. Perhaps I'm overreacting, but when people draw conclusions like that (and I am overstating your argument from before, because I hear it everywhere), I get very annoyed. We've had this sort of talk around for years, and all it ever does is justify xenophobia. In America we have politicians claiming that the evil Latino immigrants steal our jobs and leech off our social services. Before them, it was the Chinese and Japanese. There's a long history of this sort of crap. Pardon me if I was unfairly associating you with it, but I really have an axe to grind on that subject.
On the topic of subsidies, they're only fair if either a)farmers in every country get the same type and amount of subsidies from their government or b)no one gets any subsidies at all. Since "a" is impossible due to the vast disparities in governments, "b" is the only fair choice. It is, however, politically impossible to bring about this happy state of affairs, particularly with the American farm lobby and its cheering squad of Midwestern states. We would have to convince every developed nation to simultaneously drop their farm subsidies, and God knows that the entire Midwest and France, Germany, and half of Europe would scream to high heaven at the thought.
Quote from Phyrexian »
What I am saying is: Rich-world farming subsidies distort food prices that hurt poor farmers in developing nations.
Entirely correct. Not to mention that farm subsidies disproportionately benefit giant agricultural corporations, at least in the US, and have greatly aided the near-elimination of small independent farms. To be fair, the continuous state of overproduction in the American agricultural sector prior to the 1930's and the Dust Bowl didn't help much, but government subsidies played a major role. The existence of ConAgra and its ilk also plays a role in all sorts of environmental misery in the Midwest and a host of other problems, but that's a rant for another day.
Quote from Ahasver »
Food prices are probably more effective by oil prices than subsidies. In fact, there is so much that goes into the production of food that no one can clearly say. Poor farmers in developing nations are not hurt by corn or soy production in 'rich countries' (you seem to have a loose definition), they are hurt by the inability to export their goods. Large companies are the ones who swoop in to help them, and pay off the governments to let them get away with murder. In the end, the farmer is in just as bad shape because he cannot keep his crops.
Well, you're right about the massive fossil-fuel inputs that go into crops these days, but you're entirely wrong on the second issue. The prices of grain crops (and some specialty products) from developed countries are kept artificially low by government subsidies, thus no one will buy grains from a developing nation that could be bought more cheaply elsewhere. Subsidies are what makes it impossible for Third World farmers to export their crops profitably (plus other factors, like miserable access to transportation). Large companies tend to only interest themselves in specialty crops from developing nations, like coffee and tropical fruits. You can argue neo-colonial business practices in that arena, but not for most staple crops. If anything, the nations that suffer the most are the ones without specialty crops to export that are stuck with subsistence farming; this is why the agricultural situation is better on the whole in South America than in Africa, not that either is particularly wonderful.
EDIT: And again I take too long to post and miss something important. Um, Sentiment, both Europe and the US have enormous resources. They have abundant amounts of arable land, minerals, energy resources, etc. Most importantly, each has a very well developed infrastructure and a highly skilled workforce. Obviously this varies a lot from region to region (Western Europe vs. Eastern Europe, a lot of regional variation in the US), but overall, their economies are some of the strongest in the world. The US, incidentally, is the breadbasket of half the world. Don't write us off yet. I might also point out that Japan is probably the most resource-poor of the industrialized nations, and its economy stands at number 2 (or 3, depending on how China's doing) in the world as a result of its well-educated workforce and various areas of economic specialization. Singapore is a major player on the world economic stage, for God's sake. It's all in how you specialize.
Frankly, I think all the regressiveness that various people have been pouring out on this topic is disheartening. The best way to deal with changes in the world is to grab them by the horns and work with them as best you can, not try to stop them in their tracks. Metternich tried to stop liberalism and nationalism and failed; Bismarck used each for his own purposes (however unscrupulously) and ended up with the strongest nation on the Continent.
That collectivization was intended to be what you were saying, or at least I thought it was. You seemed to be suggesting that God had created a class of people whose sole purpose was to be miserable so that someone else could help them and be edified; if that's not what you meant, then we have little argument.
I still object somewhat to the idea of God testing someone - it feels a bit too Old Testament for me. I would think that if you took that position, you'd always be asking, "Is this a test from God? Should I respond well and fulfill his will?" instead of finding a moral code and trying to stick to it as best you can.
Pardon my humanism, but people should not be "used" for anything; they are far too complex to be treated as tools. That is what I object to in your statement - the idea that miserable people exist for the sole purpose of permitting you to help them. No person exists for a single purpose, especially not for another person. If they did, they would merely be objects; thus the reason for my comparison.
Well, yes, simple compassion and the Beatitudes require us to help those who are in need. This wasn't my problem with your statement. Perhaps you didn't intend it this way, but you would have a class of people existing solely to serve those more fortunate, i.e.,you and I, by allowing us to serve them and learn compassion. I take a different view. In my opinion, poverty and misery are symptoms of a complex world working in ways beyond our comprehension. God asks us to be kind to others in reaction to this unexplained unhappiness, so that they become less miserable. He didn't create misery as a test to continuously require service from us for our own edification.
Yes, yes, we know you're terribly witty. People who are always witty and never meaningful are generally either called smart-alecks or nihilists. Take your pick, listen to PandasRPeople, and please stop.
As extremestan (and many other philosophers before him) have said, everything will probably work out in the end, but God is mysterious. Generally, Christians (or anyone else who believes in a benevolent God. Not all Christians actually do, mind you) either deal with this or become atheists.
Because the philosophy was, on the whole, more powerful than the dogma? Most of what you refer to is Old Testament-based and therefore allegorical or poeticized at best, and the rest are rituals, which tend to be odd wherever they crop up. Have you been to a football game lately?
I do like what I've read of that book, mainly because it's more philosophy than dogma. Dogma irritates me, mainly since most of it thinks that I should be executed.
Although, just for the poetry, I must say that Lamentations and Psalms are my favorites.
Having just read and been most fascinated by Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, I can't even describe how much this statement distresses me. By your own logic, you just condemned many, many people to lives of, as you say, sickness, poverty, and pain so that you could react to them as if they were objects, not living people. I don't care what brilliant piece of theology you've thought up; misery in no way exists to satisfy our need to be bloody charitable.
(Disclaimer: I am Catholic. And just because I've read Ayn Rand doesn't mean I agree with everything she says.)
"Unsatisfying" is an understatement, but correct. I usually take the concept to mean that we have to try to deal with our lives as best we can.
Well, they didn't, really. "School" as we know it is a fairly new phenomenon mostly begun on a grand scale as an effort by new nationalist regimes to simultaneously provide a modicum of education to the masses while teaching them such values as patriotism and the value of hard work.
In any case, the free market works best when each person be fully capable of putting their labor on the market without concern towards other things in their life. For women, children and childbearing are an obstacle to this freedom of labor. Wouldn't it be helpful to the free exercise of the market to remove the burden of child-rearing from women? From that perspective, free daycare doesn't seem like such a bad idea. You could try to leave it up to the market, but for some reason, probably cultural and antifeminist, our market doesn't seem to like day care very much, at least in the US.
In any case, welfare that pays people not to work has always been a bad idea. But are you really going to suggest that any aid program whatsoever by the government encourages people not to work? Take the daycare example; that actually encourages people to work. I notice that you think education is important; if it's government-sponsored, does that encourage parents not to work hard enough to pay for their child's education?
EDIT: Oh dear. Social Darwinism is having a local resurgence.
First, as empathic human beings capable to at least attempting to understand someone else's suffering, we generally try not to just let people "die in starvation," regardless of cynicism, or as you call it, "common sense." Common sense is what we use to attempt to craft solutions to these problems. In a world full of rational people, capitalism would result in an entirely bearable society; in our irrational world, with things like prejudice and despair, it does not. The "lower class" as a whole probably works much harder than you or I, but for entirely arbitrary reasons, we deem their work less valuable. (Yes, I know that the value of anything, including work, depends on its scarcity and therefore unskilled work is less valuable. Bear with me.) Because of many problems, including their often miserable physical and emotional situation, many of the lower class quite naturally give in to despair and decide that they will never reach an acceptable level of prosperity through hard work, leading to misery, broken families, substance addiction, and all the rest. Some have the emotional strength to avoid this turn of events, and a small minority even have enough to keep trying without help until they escape the trap of poverty. None of this would not occur if they or human beings in general were rational, but we are not.
We middle and upper-class people happened to be born in situations that were far less oppressive to the body and soul where we would have the opportunity to acquire skills deemed valuable, and thus we largely prosper. Again, the disparities in situation as well as the disparities in emotional makeup determine which of us especially prospers and which of us falls. The point is that both you and I are relatively fortunate in many ways. Those who have been less fortunate do not deserve your condemnation. If you would like to debate the ways and manners in which to help people help themselves, I'm all for it. If you would like to discuss how to obtain the funding necessary for such aid, I'd be delighted to talk. But please don't come from the assumption that people who were born poorer than you and will probably die poorer are utterly contemptible, because I won't stand for that.
Again, I'm going to stress that how "rich" you are depends on both quantitative amount of money you make and where you like. Cost of living in Los Angeles is very high. I kind of have a similar situation to Stax, and the impression that I've always had is that people cease to be middle-class when they don't necessarily need to work. Both of my parents work very hard at their jobs and help out with all sorts of organizations in the community as well, so we've always felt much more middle-class to me than some people I know.
You're probably right about the habits of those who acquire wealth, though. Wealthy people use money to make money, where as the merely middle-class among us tend more to use to to buy the necessities (and comforts) of life.
I might also point out that joining the internal open market of the EU helped out Ireland a lot. Many of the poorer countries that have entered the EU have seen enormous amounts of economic growth because companies from the more established economies (Britain, France, Germany, etc.) invest in them for lower labor costs and other benefits, which is made possible by the lack of trade restrictions that the EU provides. It's kind of a smaller-scale version of the Third World outsourcing that large multinational corporations do.
I just got into Least I Could Do, and it's funny in a completely screwed-up kind of way. http://www.leasticoulddo.com
And for something really old, try Help Desk. It has no art to speak of and the humor is almost entirely based on the writing, but it stabs Microsoft with the fork of death in the funniest way I can imagine. http://ubersoft.net
It's not so much getting the material to fuse that's the problem, it's converting the released energy into something we can use. Containment for fusion reactions has to be so impregnable that no one can actually figure out how to get a turbine or some other electricity-producing mechanism in play. There's some sort of national test reactor that can produce several terajoules of energy for about a millisecond by zapping deuterium pellets with lasers, but it's not continuous and no one has figured out how to store the energy. All in all, fusion is a long way off.
Oh, I see what you're getting at now. Let me state this, then: since I believe the ultimate purpose of morality (however imperfectly realized) is to maximize human happiness, it follows that if I would become unhappy as a result of a some action, it would be immoral for me to perform that action on another person, since it would most likely make them unhappy as well. That's my personal definition of morality, which someone could dispute. In my view, however, everyone wants to be happy, but it would be immoral to gain happiness at the expense of someone else's happiness; thus, we make moral laws to create a society where (hopefully) people can fulfill such desires as they have without harming others and become happy by doing so.
All this is extraordinarily idealistic and utterly impractical for the real world, but it does work fairly well as a rule of thumb for easier moral judgments.
This is the finicky point for almost any set of moral judgments, from abortion to vegetarianism to what-have-you. I'm probably not rational enough to make a fully informed decision on what constitutes a person for the purpose of morality, but I'd suggest this (highly general) rule: if we know that a species as a whole is sentient, then any member of that species should be treated as a thinking person even if they are less mentally capable than others because we know for certain that they have the possibility of being sentient. I'm less concerned with whether or not a person discerns sentience outside the human race, since we really have no way of knowing if a cow can think.
@Blinking Spirit: For a fictional example of how the Catholic Church might react to an alien species, try Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card. Xenocide most explicitly mentions what you're talking about, but it doesn't really make sense without the rest of the trilogy. Of course, someone of your intellectual caliber might be allergic to Orson Scott Card, but don't ask me - I'm not even out of high school yet.
I disagree, since I consider the principle of a similar response to at least basic stimuli (e.g., pain) to be a basic fact about human nature. It's not a philosophy or a way of looking at the world, it's simple truth.
Just because we do differentiate and always have doesn't mean that it's moral. People have always harmed and killed others - does that make it right?
The reason that a basic acceptance of human similarity (I'm avoiding equality because it's a loaded word and goes into a lot of nonsense) is so important is that people always justify themselves when they harm another by claiming that the person isn't "like" them, or isn't "civilized", or, in extreme cases, that he or she isn't even human. The ideology of Nazism bases its desire to exterminate Jews (as well as gypsies, the disabled, and homosexuals) on the fact that they are not part of a specifically defined race of people who are assumed to be the benchmark of "humanity" (or civilization, if you prefer). Nationalism is such a dangerous force because it usually promotes unity by way of the rejection of whatever group of people is deemed to be the Other and therefore incapable of feeling as the united people do. Terrible wars, suffering, and misery result. If this is a moral outcome, then morality needs a new way of thinking.
I don't mean to get off-topic, but this issue is extremely important to me. I apologize for the digression.
Well, if you want to go that deeply into the issue, I use the good old-fashioned Golden Rule: If I wouldn't want to undergo something, I'll assume that nobody else does either. This does assume that every person has the same emotional capacity as me and is "morally equal", but I consider that a fair assumption. Consider that any person, when hurt, will show similar signs of pain or when happy, shows similar signs of joy; also consider that all of the literature and collective creative output of humanity dwells on similar emotional themes. There are vast differences across cultures, obviously, but all of these differences are merely variations on a theme. Similarly, people vary greatly in their physical appearance, intelligence, and emotional makeup, but the similarities clearly outweigh the differences - no one would consider two humans less similar than a human and, say, a cat. Since all humans are fundamentally similar, it's perfectly logical to make the associative connection and assume that if an action would cause me pain, it would most likely hurt another person to a comparable degree. Since I prefer to not experience pain, I conclude that performing that action is immoral.
All of this reminds me of my question. Do you believe that the Christian moral system is fundamentally rooted in human happiness? Specifically, do you think that God gave humanity this moral system by whatever means for the purpose of making us happy (or at least happier)?
Well, there's a bit more to it than that. Judaism is the religion of the old covenant made specifically with Abraham and his descendants, i.e., the nation of Israel. Christianity is the new covenant made with all people. Christianity did originate from Judaism, but it's a whole separate thing; the same is true of Islam.
I'm sure that you don't intend to become a politician or a public figure, but in that business and in others there's straight talk, and then there's talk that reveals a complete lack of compassion. If you don't find yourself in need of great stores of compassion, that's quite all right, but it does mean that people won't listen to you.
I didn't object to you stating that governments often protect industries, I objected to you making the unfounded assumption that the evil Chinese would destroy the industries of hard-working, noble Europeans and Americans if their farsighted governments did not protect them. Perhaps I'm overreacting, but when people draw conclusions like that (and I am overstating your argument from before, because I hear it everywhere), I get very annoyed. We've had this sort of talk around for years, and all it ever does is justify xenophobia. In America we have politicians claiming that the evil Latino immigrants steal our jobs and leech off our social services. Before them, it was the Chinese and Japanese. There's a long history of this sort of crap. Pardon me if I was unfairly associating you with it, but I really have an axe to grind on that subject.
On the topic of subsidies, they're only fair if either a)farmers in every country get the same type and amount of subsidies from their government or b)no one gets any subsidies at all. Since "a" is impossible due to the vast disparities in governments, "b" is the only fair choice. It is, however, politically impossible to bring about this happy state of affairs, particularly with the American farm lobby and its cheering squad of Midwestern states. We would have to convince every developed nation to simultaneously drop their farm subsidies, and God knows that the entire Midwest and France, Germany, and half of Europe would scream to high heaven at the thought.
Entirely correct. Not to mention that farm subsidies disproportionately benefit giant agricultural corporations, at least in the US, and have greatly aided the near-elimination of small independent farms. To be fair, the continuous state of overproduction in the American agricultural sector prior to the 1930's and the Dust Bowl didn't help much, but government subsidies played a major role. The existence of ConAgra and its ilk also plays a role in all sorts of environmental misery in the Midwest and a host of other problems, but that's a rant for another day.
Well, you're right about the massive fossil-fuel inputs that go into crops these days, but you're entirely wrong on the second issue. The prices of grain crops (and some specialty products) from developed countries are kept artificially low by government subsidies, thus no one will buy grains from a developing nation that could be bought more cheaply elsewhere. Subsidies are what makes it impossible for Third World farmers to export their crops profitably (plus other factors, like miserable access to transportation). Large companies tend to only interest themselves in specialty crops from developing nations, like coffee and tropical fruits. You can argue neo-colonial business practices in that arena, but not for most staple crops. If anything, the nations that suffer the most are the ones without specialty crops to export that are stuck with subsistence farming; this is why the agricultural situation is better on the whole in South America than in Africa, not that either is particularly wonderful.
EDIT: And again I take too long to post and miss something important. Um, Sentiment, both Europe and the US have enormous resources. They have abundant amounts of arable land, minerals, energy resources, etc. Most importantly, each has a very well developed infrastructure and a highly skilled workforce. Obviously this varies a lot from region to region (Western Europe vs. Eastern Europe, a lot of regional variation in the US), but overall, their economies are some of the strongest in the world. The US, incidentally, is the breadbasket of half the world. Don't write us off yet. I might also point out that Japan is probably the most resource-poor of the industrialized nations, and its economy stands at number 2 (or 3, depending on how China's doing) in the world as a result of its well-educated workforce and various areas of economic specialization. Singapore is a major player on the world economic stage, for God's sake. It's all in how you specialize.
Frankly, I think all the regressiveness that various people have been pouring out on this topic is disheartening. The best way to deal with changes in the world is to grab them by the horns and work with them as best you can, not try to stop them in their tracks. Metternich tried to stop liberalism and nationalism and failed; Bismarck used each for his own purposes (however unscrupulously) and ended up with the strongest nation on the Continent.