At times we see an obsession with denying any pre-eminence to the human person; more zeal is shown in protecting other species than in defending the dignity which all human beings share in equal measure. Certainly, we should be concerned lest other living beings be treated irresponsibly. But we should be particularly indignant at the enormous inequalities in our midst, whereby we continue to tolerate some considering themselves more worthy than others. We fail to see that some are mired in desperate and degrading poverty, with no way out, while others have not the faintest idea of what to do with their possessions, vainly showing off their supposed superiority and leaving behind them so much waste which, if it were the case everywhere, would destroy the planet. In practice, we continue to tolerate that some consider themselves more human than others, as if they had been born with greater rights.
Priority for people, especially the human & poor.
My aim is to show the reader the magnitude of the error [in our over-reliance on "the emissary" (L-brain) and concurrent under-appreciation of "the master" (R-brain], and its consequences. I say ‘show’, because I cannot, any more than anyone else, prove anything finally and irrefutably – the material with which we are dealing makes that impossible; but rather I wish to take my reader by degrees to a new vantage point, one built upon science and philosophy, from which, in all likelihood, the view will appear at the same time unfamiliar, and yet in no way alien – indeed rather the opposite. More like a home-coming. From there the reader must, of course, make up his mind for himself.
(Location 193)Applies to almost all inquiries, doesn't it, other than simple math and logical tautologies?
On the matter of God, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould put it rather clearly: To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists.
We have vainly and foolishly tried to be civilized in opposition to nature—not only to the natural world that is the matrix of human life but also to our own savage nature within. We must therefore create a civilization that transcends savagery without opposing it.
An even greater obstacle to understanding derives from the fact that we have a powerful non-logical impulse to make our own and other human actions seem logical.
Liberals, to schematize, embraced capitalist modernity. Conservatives responded by opposing the liberal embrace.
Thus it would generally be a decisive refutation of a moral philosophy to show that moral agency on its own account of the matter could never be socially embodied; and it also follows that we have not yet fully understood the claims of any moral philosophy until we have spelled out what its social embodiment would be.
