(March 21, 2012 at 8:10 am)NoMoreFaith Wrote: Agreed, the justice system in many countries leaves alot to be desired. My objection is primarily to the point that he has a "human right to true justice" which seems to be equated with that of vengeful murder.
Those are not compatible under humanism and I would object to the idea that it is justice of any kind, never mind true justice.
Sure, you could ask a bunch of your peers about whether its okay to go murder the guy, and trust them to tell you not to.. but the implication is that you should already know that if you subscribe to humanism, which makes the discussion irrelevant.
If we consider the golden rule of morality as an opt in/opt out situation. Then if you breach the golden rule, then you are no longer protected by it. Which suffers a problem of regress. If you murder the person who killed your family, do they then have the right to murder you, and so on and so forth.
This could easily descend into a discussion on the death penalty if I'm not careful which is a thread of its own (and no doubt already done to death).
The death penalty is a simple topic for me: I'm against it. Even if it's meant to execute the guilty, the fact of the matter is this: Do we REALLY trust the government with that kind of power? And given that this is a representative democracy, all it takes is one falsely-accused man being executed, one innocent man killed...to make murderers out of us all.
In such a hypothetical situation, I can't imagine that someone will react rationally. Human beings, after all, are emotional creatures, and even the most rational-minded of us might very well snap under such conditions. One might almost hope their friends would support them...help them, even. One thing that often is such a pain in the ass for us human beings is that we WANT to believe we'd be calm, cool, collected even in the face of the worst tragedy imaginable, after all. Ultimately, the point of going to your friends, seeking their council, is to have them there to reaffirm what you already know if you are a humanist; that taking your revenge by killing the man is the wrong thing to do. People are weakest when they're laid low, after all; it's best to have a failsafe, something for people to fall back on emotionally. Someone in that much despair, given the CHANCE that his friends might help him in what he, at that moment, wishes to do more than anything else, will go to them, hope they'll see it his way. The likelihood that they can stop him, talk him down from it, is much higher if he goes to them with this desire.
Always the little details that can make the most difference. After all, one cannot do the job of five, and everyone needs help from someone else. Easier to let yourself succumb to emotions, even for a few moments, and to therefore walk into a situation where you will be calmed from your emotional distress, than to simply rely solely on rationalization of the self.
Mehmet: It is that thinking that causes so many issues. People who say "it can't be done because we're all different!" If everyone who said that actually said the complete opposite, such moral and ethical standings would be far more pervasive. Humanism isn't very clearly defined by much more than, as previously stated, the Golden Rule. Each humanist is likely to react differently to different external stimuli, and each one will live his or her life differently than the others. Better this way; no dogma or people in charge leading their "flocks of sheep" like the christians so adore to be referred to as.
