@
Leontiskos , there's a lot in that, and I'm surely not going to be able to satisfy you easily. What follows attempts to make a start; I may come back to this post several times.
Leontiskos wrote: ↑April 22nd, 2022, 8:58 pm
The big question here concerns that last part of your first sentence, "...you're asking me here to go into more detail about what it is that is due to people
and how we know that."
Are these five things separate and distinct? Are they brute moral facts? Do we come to know them each separately? Is it through simple intuition? Are they known
a priori? Is there a reasoning process involved?
I'm weak on epistemology. But it seems to me that we use general principles to explain.
So for example, I'm using promise-keeping as an explanation for why you should pay your rent. And if you ask "How do I know that I should pay my rent?", that explanation breaks the question down into two parts - "How do I know that I promised to pay rent?" and "How do I know that promises should be kept?".
Where the first part is empirical and specific, and the second part general and logical (and includes the hard question of where oughts come from).
My discussion of dues identified 3 explanatory principles:
- promise-keeping
- restitution
- acknowledging reality = treating things as they are.
Where the third one includes treating people as people (even when they're your enemies) and truths as truths (even when spoken by your enemies) and good deeds as good deeds (even when performed by your enemies).
I'm inclined to think I can do no better than to claim all three as self-evident, answering "brute fact" or the equivalent. As a way of addressing the general question "how do I know that I should do these things?".
And focus on the more-empirical specifics of "how do I know that treating people as people means not killing/raping/robbing them ?". Or dumping trash on their property ...
Does that make any sense at all ?
To be clear, you would say that equality and the Golden Rule are not central when it comes to the big things, but only "when it comes to the small things"?
I'm saying that people disagree in the small things, which tend to be about the right balance to be struck where rights appear to be in conflict. Even when there is consensus about the big things, or about what those rights are.
And that I see the Golden Rule as distinguishing between a man who acts justly within a different belief (about the trade-off) and one who acts unjustly.
For example, we may disagree about where a right to free speech ends and a right to freedom from defamation begins. If you grant me the same freedom to insult you as you claim to have to insult me - the Golden Rule test - then whilst I may disagree with where you draw that line, I cannot claim that you are unjust. Because you are granting everyone their due as you see it.
This contrasts with a person who claims it wrong to insult groups they sympathise with, but feels free to insult groups they don't sympathise with. Who is unjust - there is no resolution of the basic disagreement which would make both halves of their behaviour accord with the principle of giving everyone their due.
(I think this echoes the Kantian version of the Golden Rule, about acting in accordance with what one wills to be a universal rule. But I never fully understood Kant).
Now you may be able to expand that application such that the Golden Rule underpins all of justice. But I'll believe it when I see it - it's not evident to me.
And any such explanation has to cover both halves of the question - how do we know that we should obey the golden rule , and how do we know that the rule requires any particular action ?
"Opinions are fiercest.. ..when the evidence to support or refute them is weakest" - Druin Burch