Adapted from a comment on: The Doomsday Clock: Can Artists Save The World?
at 1/21/2010 5:53 PM EST
With about two hundred thousand (or a couple of million) years of experience with song and dance and call and response bringing us together, it is easy to feel agape or a sense of connectedness with others on seeing such joy and exuberance in those vids.
If we are to develop our moral sense sufficient to restrain the destructive power that we now possess that flows from our ability to understand and manipulate the material world, we might do well to recognize moral principle as natural law governing social interaction. We may come to see that a close examination of moral principles is necessary simply from the standpoint of survival. When we consciously engage our moral sense, we exercise it more fully.
Just as there are consequences when we disregard other kinds of natural law, (such as when we disregard the law of gravity which governs the interaction of massive bodies and are injured in a fall), there are consequences when we disregard the laws that govern social interaction.
If we pretend to ourselves and to others that it is a legitimate use of government to threaten to destroy a city, (even in the face of the fact that governments get their power from the people, and no person has any moral authority to threaten to destroy a city), then we are violating a basic moral precept that no person has authority to give or delegate a power to others which they do not possess themselves
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If we persist in this error and continue to hold nuclear arsenals, then we will eventually experience severe adverse consequences of this
serious moral lapse. There is a basic fact about threats: they remain effective only if they are occasionally backed up with action. Although
there is usually, (always), a time-lag between the moment that basic laws of nature are disregarded and the moment that the harmful impact of
our error is made manifest, there can be no doubt that the workings of the basic laws of nature are inexorable. (The truth will out.)
If we resolve to abide by moral principles in the political and economic realms, we will not only end the practice of maintaining nuclear
arsenals, (we might instead use the fissile material to generate electricity, thereby making it unavailable as a weapon of war, while also
reducing our desire to burn coal and oil toward such end), we would also end the systematic neglect of PUBLIC property rights.
Property rights are a subset of human rights, which we MUST respect to be in accord with the golden rule, (a universally accepted moral
principle).
We have a well-developed sense of private property rights, which is reflected in our culture and in our political and economic systems.
Less well developed is our sense of public property rights. We believe that we all own the air and water, (and some would say other natural
resources). We all have an equal right to use them and we have, collectively, a right to stop others from taking too much or messing them up.
(This is intrinsic to the concept of ownership.)
But when industries take or degrade natural resource wealth in pursuit of profit, we do not require that they pay a fee to the people, the
owners of the resources, as compensation for the damage done or value taken. There is a thorough, systematic neglect of PUBLIC property rights.
There is no compensation paid by users of these resources to the owners, (the people at large); nor is there an effective mechanism whereby the
overall rates of taking of resources and levels of pollution are kept within limits acceptable to the people at large. (The idea that we have a
collective right to limit environmental impacts--and basic democratic principles--would appear to dictate that actual environmental impacts
ought to be kept within such limits.)
A public property rights paradigm would mean an end to extreme poverty in the world, and could provide the foundation for a sustainable and
just civilization.
Biodiversity as a Public Good
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