All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively the land.
The Land Ethic, A Sand County Almanac. Aldo Leopold
I wish there was a political party whose first principal was a question; "does this comport with nature?"
And asked that question, as its first principal, honestly. Not seeking to ask it in some preconceived of manner in which the answer to the question is known before the question is posed.
And not in a way that always aligns with the questioners personal interest and economics.
One that posed it honestly, and went from there.
Such a party would make nearly every political pundit and national politician today squirm.
Senators who come on Fox News every other week, or on Twitter every week, who are from the State of Extraction would disappear behind the dour looking Mitch McConnell rather than answer the question first, and go on honestly from there.
So would left wing politicians who take to the floor in Big Green Rectangle to proclaim allegiance with "gender care", having undergone "gender care" themselves, without answering this question first.
It'd be a step towards sanity in a major way.
Indeed, the very fact that such a question is not the first posed is responsible, in no small measure, for why American politics are as stupid as they currently are. The rational middle is gone, with the irrational agenda driven extremes in control.
This is why discussions on economics and production are totally divorced from reality on the right and the left.
And this is why discussions on existential biological issues devolve into anti-scientific diatribes that are linked with ill-informed world views rather than reality.
And this is also why those same issues become attached to extremist whose world view is ground not in science, but in ideologies of all type that are of their own fantastical creations, or those whose fantastical creations match a world the way they wish to see it, causing it to become impossible to debate or discuss any issue, as all issues all end up lashed to the philosophy, rather than the science, and reality.
Primum non nocere, first do no harm, we are told, is the first and most ancient rule of medicine. Perhaps for politics, that branch of philosophy which is applied in the same way that engineering is applied physics, should consider An hoc pertinet ad naturam?, does this comport with nature. This should be added be added to philosophy of all types, applied and not, as the first principal.
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2 comments:
De-center hunmans? Oh noes! A thought repugnant to both atheist lefties and pro-growth-all-the-time capitalists
Well, as we are part of nature, I'd prefer to think of it as properly centering humans. Perhaps de-narcissisng certain humans, however.
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