[FRIAM] "All [persons] are created equal"

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Sarbajit, 

 

If I understand the shape of the globe correctly, you are waking up pretty
soon, and I would like to pick up the conversation about caste, if you don't
mind.    

 

I believe the proposition in the subject line.  Given the many ways that
proposition can be understood as plainly false, I feel that my belief in it
must be defended. 

 

In what sense equal?  Not in genes.  Not in uterine environment. .  Not in
early nutrition and cognitive stimulation. Not in social capitol. Not in
financial capitol.  Not in access to health care.  Not in exposure to future
parasites.  Not in almost anything that I can think of.   So, why is the
aphorism not just nonsense.

 

I find, that if I examine my thinking in this matter, a very primitive
metaphysics about the moment of an individual's creation.  What follows is
flagrantly silly, but here it is.   On my account, at the moment of birth a
soul is taken out of storage and assigned to a body.  By "person" in the
aphorism, I mean the combination of a particular soul with the particular
body.  These assignments are at random.  So, for good or ill, no soul
deserves the body it gets.   I cannot claim credit for my genes, my good
uterine environment, my social capitol, my financial capitol, my bad hip,
the draft deferment it provided, my getting a phd at absolute peak of demand
for phd's, my good education, even my FRIAM membership.  They are all
consequences of that initial, random assignment.   Now YOU may credit me in
some ways, because knowing that all these advantages have been assigned to
me may make me useful or pleasing (or the opposite) in many ways, and that
may bring me the advantages of your association.  But ==> I <== do not
==>deserve<== those advantages.  

 

This odd metaphysics leads me to enormous gratitude for the life I have been
allowed to live and great sympathy for rigorous taxation of the advantaged,
so that so much a soul's future is not determined by that moment of
assignment. 

 

I have no idea what happens to this primitive metaphysics if I try to
integrate it with my monism.  The religious scholars among you might
recognize as some backass weird perversion of Calvinism.  

 

 

Nick Thompson

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> 

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

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