Ethics

Here's a little quote that caught our eyes from a rawstory titled "A conversation with Machiavelli's ghost" by Larisa Alexandrovna Published: February 28, 2006

"Can I say something about how I view human nature? I think it will help at least part of this conversation. I have a pretty dim view of human nature, as I think any serious historian must. Most human activities aren't very pretty, most of the time we screw up, it's rare when you find an exceptional person and even in such cases they often fall from grace.

And I'm not sure Machiavelli was wrong when he said that "man is more inclined to do evil than to do good." So I don't have high expectations, and I consider myself fortunate to have lived and worked at a moment when there were several really exceptional leaders in the world, from Reagan and Thatcher to Pope John Paul II to Havel and Walesa and Mandela and so forth. Those moments are rare, and short-lived. You don't see
many outstanding leaders today, in my opinion."

Now some people take the dim view of human nature - but QD generally does not. Nor does QD believe that history is a long forward march to progress. It is more like a knotted and tangled shoe lace which can never be untied.

But this question of how we view humanity is vital and perhaps the real difference between the left and the right. The right seems to believe that mankind is wicked and needs laws to prevent him or her from acting upon his/her own selfish nature. Whereas the "other" side sees mankind as basically good but susceptible to acts of destruction and evil.

But what of the third option, that one that is so disregarded b/c it doesn't trumpet the primacy of the human being - because it asks us to consider mankind beyond good and evil... what if the entire way we view mankind and the world is based on a sense of good and evil that is so hard coded in us we accept it to be fact. What if, indeed, nature and therefore mankind is completely amoral and the idea of "conscious" and "ethics" are merely complicated constructs developed to control individuals?

Is Queenie's Daughter saying there is no difference between right and wrong?

At an abstract level, yes, it is so. There's way more to this conversation - and perhaps we will post on it at length when we get off the clock...

On a related topic - here is a great post fromGlenn Greenwald ...