The law of do no harm is not impossible but rather a simple guideline that is very workable. I know people are always coming up with things like killing and animal for food is causing harm. the concept is really use what you need and not destroy the enviorment doing it, the questions should be if you are a family of four do you need a 10,000 sq ft house.
the other part comes form living a luxurious life style at the expense of others especially the poor, or wear the latest fashions that are made by slave labor in the USA or else where.. and yes they do exist. or eliminate employment so you can have a fatter salary.
The real problem is understanding just what is causing harm.. the solution does not lie in creating laws. just so people can break them. It seems most laws today are written to allow people to get around this very law.
Allan
On May 29, 2012 12:03 PM, "Lee Douglas" <leerevdouglas@gmail.com> wrote:
Do no harm is broad brush, and kind of impossible to live by though innit?
On Friday, 18 May 2012 05:13:01 UTC+1, archytas wrote:My stance towards most moralising is one of incredulity, yet I'm a
moraliser and believe most of our problems lie in our lack of personal
and collective morality. Economics as our political and business
class practice it is fundamentally immoral against a scientific world-
view, My view of science is that it is full of values and the notion
of it as value-free is a total and totalising dud. Only lay people
with no experience of doing science hold the "value-free" notion of
science.
You can explore some of the moral issues arising in modern science in
a lengthy book review at London Review of Books -
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n10/malcolm-bull/what-is-the-rational-response.
The book's topic is climate change.
Coming up to 60 I regard the world as a abject failure against the
promises I thought were being made in politics. I'm a world-weary old
fart now, tending to see the generations coming up as narcissist
wastrels who don't know what hard work is (etc.) though I think the
blame is ours, not theirs. I think the problem is our attitude
towards morality. The tendency in history is to focus on religion for
moral advice - this is utterly corrupt and we have forgotten that much
religious morality is actually a reaction against unfairness and the
wicked control of our lives by the rich. It is this latter factor
that is repeating itself.
Much moralising concerns sex. This all largely based in old fables
for population control we can still find in primitive societies such
as 'sperm control by fellatio' (Sambians) and non-penetrative youth
sex (Kikuyu) etc. - and stuff like 'the silver ring thing'. The
modern issue is population control and that we can achieve this
without sexual moralising - the moral issues are about quality of
life, women as other than child-bearing vessels and so on. We have
failed almost entirely except in developed countries - to such an
extent the world population has trebled in my lifetime despite
economic factors driving down birth-rates in developed countries
without the kind of restrictions such as China enforced.
We are still at war.
Our economics is still based in "growth" and "consumption" and notions
human beings should work hard - when in fact the amount of work we
need to do probably equates to 3 days a week for 6 months of a year.
75% of GDP is in services and only 6% in really hard work like
agriculture. We could have a great deal more through doing less and
doing what we do with more regard for conservation and very different
scientific advance. My view is it's immoral that we won't take
responsibility for this and review our failures. I believe this
failure inhibits our spiritual growth and renders us simply animal.
Human life may be much less than I value it at and just a purposeless
farce. The first step in a new attitude towards morality is to
consider living with a scientific world-view. The implications of
this are complex and probably entail shaking ourselves from a false-
consciousness to be able to see what is being done in our name. We
need a modern morality not based in the creation of fear and demons to
enforce it, or the feeble existential view of the individual. We are
social animals and need to get back to some basics developed with
modern knowledge, not in past religious and empire disasters.
Religion has a role in this in my view - religion we might recapture
from sensible history - I'd recommend David Graeber's 'Debt: the first
5000 years' as a read here.
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