You are yourself every bit as much as I am myself. It seems obvious right? Well it is obvious but within debates both in Malta and World-wide we seem all too often to forget this essential truth. There is no element of choice in being who you are. It is a reflection of the sum of your personal interpretation of your internalized interpretation of your observations of the stimuli that surrounds your life.

Likewise thinking what you think is relatively involuntary and therefore not a choice. This is why many persons experience unpleasant thoughts that they desperately try to push out of their minds while other persons wonder where their previous more pleasant thoughts drifted from.

The way that you express yourself is more down to choice but even so there remains a degree of impulsiveness – of habits that are hard to suppress. In western countries there is the tendency to shake hands upon meeting. In fact I would break this section down into three parts. Firstly, one’s habits, secondly one’s communications, where one converts one’s thoughts into a medium through which those thoughts are successfully conveyed, and thirdly there is the performance, a series of acts that are devoid of the real implications attached to equivalent actions in reality (an example of such would be acting out a stabbing motion upon a stage). Lastly the actions that you perform are primarily down to choice, though the root may be entrenched within that which you think or are, and this completes the hierarchy from the internal to the external.

The reason why I consider this to be important lies within my belief that the legal and political systems within many countries fail to recognize the above in their daily dealings. The result is that the conclusions which are reached are logically incomplete and sometimes even incompatible with society at large.

Example fields where this blind-sightedness strikes include the inequitable treatment of different sexes, races, sexual orientations, marital statuses,political orientations, religions and more, within the context of identical circumstances. Likewise this same blind-sightedness applies to the loading of certain forms of deviance against other forms of deviances.

This aside, if one were to take the adjectives to be, to think, to express and to do, and were to throw each into the context of representing different grades of rights, then one would end up with a very simple, conservative yet liberal and also effective means of evaluating and comparing the conflicting interests that can make up some of the more profound of dilemmas. For example, is it wrong for one human to kill another? Why or why not? Do traditional instructions of indoctrination provide ourselves with a reason better than ‘because it is written in this text’ or ‘because the other person has the right to live’? The later statement is by far more credible a response than any variant of ‘because X says so’ but would we be able to explain this effectively or would we get caught within indefinite loops of ‘because’?

Through the acceptance of a certain hierarchy in the different degrees of rights and the use of such as a logical tool in the quantification and assessment of ethical questions one may find that the result would be a social fabric of greater consistency and with fewer elements of hypocrisy than that which more traditional legal concerns provide.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Metaphysical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.