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

Sat Aug 28 10:49:45 EDT 2021

Hi, EricC, 

Thanks for chiming in.  Missed ya.  As you can imagine, I have some comments. 

I think you may have missed the email in which I argued (no doubt persuasively) that the second clause of the aphorism is conjunctive, not elaborative.  Thus to be “born equal” is something broader than to  have been endowed with those rights.  We would have to read a lot of Rousseau (?) (etc) to find out.   Perhaps somebody on the list has done that work already?  Also, understand that when I say that my inquiry is metaphysical, I mean a kind of logical exploration into the positions behind one’s own beliefs: Finding that I am a radical redistributionist, what MUST have I believed a priori to make that position LOGICAL. I know The List thinks I have gone dotty, but  I challenge the rest of you to do the same.  What kind of a foundation would have to go under the rickety shack you call your beliefs that would make it stand up straight?  “The nuns beat me with a ruler” is by itself insufficient.  What did the nuns TEACH YOU by beating you with a ruler.  

Otherwise, I think you keep confounding similarity with equality.   Equality has to do with the degree to which I can claim to own the advantages (or disadvantages) accrued by the assignment of my birth.  

Good to hear from you.  

Nick

Please somebody forward this to John Dobson! 

I don’t think I believe in flat-lining inheritance.  I am not sure why, because it seems a moral imperative to me.  But the counter-argument would go something like this:  One of the reasons that many people get  up in the morning is to secure the future of the children and grandchildren, etc.  A lucky person just isn’t lucky if s/he cannot pass some of that luck along.  That’s what leads me to some sort of a redistributive taxation scheme.  (The scheme that Sarbarjit describes seems more retributive than redistributive.)  

Nick Thompson

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

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

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, August 28, 2021 10:04 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "All [persons] are created equal"

" All persons would be created equally .. in a perfect world."

Hard disagree. Perhaps in a perfect we would reduce the extreme inequities a bit, but it would be a much less perfect world if we created actual full equality. This is part of my long-standing disagreement with Nick's attempts to flat-world inheritance. 

We are in a BETTER world because people had a variety of experiences growing up. Some had a new bike magically appear for them one day. Some sold lemonade all summer and got one themselves. Some never got the new bike they wanted at all. Some never even got a used bike. Some were punched and had their bikes stolen. I'm not talking about watching a sibling literally starve to death... but I am talking about a broad range of unequal personal and social starting places. We are a better world because people live very different lives, pursuing very different goals, informed by different experiences, and thereby coming at problems from very different perspectives. 

"All people are created equal" is a claim about how we have socially agreed to treat people as if they were "endowed by their creator" with certain basic rights. Those are what is now called "negative rights", rights not to have others interfere with you in certain ways. But in a grand sense, people are not equal, and we wouldn't want them to be; it would be disastrous if they were. 

As tempting as it is to arrogantly declare that the world would be a better place if it everyone was just like me... I also know that's not true. There is no individual for which it is true, not even one as amazing as I, and not even one as amazing as you. 

On Fri, Aug 27, 2021 at 9:00 PM Sarbajit Roy <sroy.mb at gmail.com <mailto:sroy.mb at gmail.com> > wrote:

Nick, 

I am not a metaphysicist to debate such things with you. Can just state cold facts.

All persons would be created equally .. in a perfect world.

However, when the world they are born into is imbalanced, in actuality their weightage depends on the circumstances of their birth and the larger society(s) they are born into

Attempts, by poiticians. to change that imbalance invariably create a cure worse worse than the disease .. killing sparrows in China or introducing rabbts to Australia. For instance, the reverse discrimination presently practised in India against Brahmins has been taken to extraordinary lengths by "vote bank" politics

Brahmins students are not eligible (barred in law) to apply for 87% of seats in engineering or medical colleges in India.

They must openly compete with the entire population of applicants for the remaining 13% of seats

To get admission into a top engineering college, a Brahmin student must get at least 72 out of 90 multiple choice questions correct in what is acknowledged to be one of the world's toughest entrance exams, whereas a reserved category student can get in even after getting all 90 questions wrong.

So if I look at it dispassionately, the problem with gaining true equality is politics and politicians. The misguided attemptsof the USA to promote / inmpose "democracy" and "equality" in third world countries inevitably results in the installation of dictatorships or puppets fronting for miltary regimes as a reaction. Afghanistan is a good example of it.

Sarbajit

On Fri, Aug 27, 2021 at 1:34 AM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> > wrote:

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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