> > I accept a variant of the "golden rule", I just don't accept that it's > anything other than a personal and social contract. >
OK, so just to be clear, you think that no social or personal contract is actually better than any other. (Clearly there have been a number of social contracts on human behavior and many thousands of personal contracts). Ethics are like aesthetics, there's personal taste, the taste of the public at large, but nothing is actually true. BTW, I'm not trying to prove anything more than what Weinberg (a well known scientist who has sold many books that discuss his viewpoint) and I agree upon the subject: there is logical-calculus basis for ethics. You either accept certain axioms as truths without proof (admitting straight out that you are positing those axioms) or you say they are arbitrary, and that there is no means of distinguishing one set of axioms from another. The other alternative, which I see many people use, is sliding in a disguised version of the naturalistic fallacy through the back door. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
