(March 15, 2014 at 2:03 pm)Deidre32 Wrote:The ideals I quoted leave a person free to be as generous as he pleases. You can decide to be nice to everyone and not violate the ideal. It gives you the freedom to prioritize who benefits from your generosity. It rewards good behavior (those who deserve generosity are more likely to get it) and it penalizes bad behavior (those who harm others are more likely to be harmed in turn, though the ideal does not require that one do so).(March 15, 2014 at 12:26 pm)Tonus Wrote: "Do not harm those who do you no harm" or "do good to those who deserve it" is a much better ideal to start from, in that it allows us freedom to help those we choose and is more likely to lead to helping those who deserve it while avoiding those whose actions harm us.''Give what you get,'' is a pretty minimalist way to live, though. I think that if I'm only kind to those who are kind to me, what might that say about me?
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
