[ExI] Natural law

[Dan]

I definitely see a difference and most natural law types would too. Let me try 
to explicate this. It's one thing to say X has a nature and quite another to 
explain how particular aspects of X's nature came about. One could say a lot 
about X without ever figuring out how X came to be. (Were this not so, then one 
must believe nothing can be known about anything because one would always start 
with no knowledge -- since, presumably, one does not start with any starting 
knowledge of the nature of originating processes. In fact, it seems knowledge 
works exactly the other way: we start with what is here and now and discover the 
past, including causal processes like evolution, through looking at things as 
they are now, no?)

Regards,

Dan


From: samantha <sjatkins at mac.com>
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Fri, August 20, 2010 6:57:43 AM
Subject: Re: [ExI] Natural law was Religions and violence.

Keith Henson wrote: 
On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 11:29 PM,  <samantha <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:    
>To be more precise, naturals come from the actual nature of the beings involved. 
> In other words they are based in reality.  I don't think reality requires God. 
>  If in reality human beings have certain critical characteristics dictating 
>that they best interact with one another (the only domain of rights) in certain 
>ways and not others then these are rights inherent to their nature.  It will be 
>difficult to claim that human beings have no particular nature in reality that 
>is relevant to the proper way for them to act towards one another.     
>
Humans certainly have species wide "human nature" and the only way I know of 
that they could have obtained the collective characteristics that make up human 
nature is natural selection.  (If you think otherwise, you probably should not 
be reading this list.)  So you can predict that the elements of human nature 
were (over evolutionary time in the EEA) good for gene survival.  The same 
follows for derived matters such as "natural law."   

Do you  think you are addressing the same subject?

- s


      
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20100820/390b5057/attachment.html>