Right and Wrong. Check: Harm, Flourishing, Priorities. The Harm Principle: top priority. Flourishing: vital. Offense Principle: no priority.
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Telling Apart Right and Wrong.
Check: Harm, Flourishing, Priorities.
The Harm Principle: top priority.
Flourishing: vital.
The Offense Principle: no priority.
Here are 3 important and very helpful words. Harm. Flourishing. Priority.
The Harm Principle (from John Stuart Mill): liberty until harm. So the question is: does this harm, is it harmful?
What humans need to be able to do: flourish (Aristotle).
So the question is: does this encourage or discourage, enable or block flourishing?
And finally, what is is the priority? There are few moral absolutes - or even legal absolutes. One always needs to see what is the priority in any given situation. Instead too often people act as if a general principle were utterly absolute.
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Note: to say that a person must not say something because this offends someone else HARMS the person who is prohibited from speaking and discussing freely, diminishes that person's FLOURISHING and even the flourishing of the society.
In other words, even if someone prefers not to offend, since HIGH PRIORITIES are not to harm and to flourish, then clearly not to offend is a lower priority.
Similarly, in relation to priorities, one may not want to hurt someone's feelings, but if there is the diagnosis of a serious illness, it is a higher priority (in most cases, at any rate) to inform the person rather than not to hurt their feelings. Otherwise one HARMS the person who will not do whatever can be done to deal with the illness, and one cuts their chances of being able to FLOURISH. So not hurting feelings is clearly a lower priority.
Watch the video for information on 2 people with the same VALUES but different PRIORITIES: Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved as many an 100,000 Jews in Hungary - and Hess, the head of Auschwitz where 2,000,000 Jews were gassed.
Absolutely vital: to have our priorities right!!!
And in our society, we have been encouraged to get them utterly WRONG - for instance, to make the continuation of our society as lower priority than offending some people!!!
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August 17, 2017
Telling Apart Right and Wrong.
Check: Harm, Flourishing, Priorities.
The Harm Principle: top priority.
Flourishing: vital.
The Offense Principle: no priority.