Xiado said:
Baneat said:
Xiado said:
Baneat said:
emeraldrafael said:
Freedom, cause with freedom comes the chance to make eqaulity, while equality only leads to less freedom (case in point, affirmative action).
You cannot have both.
Equality means I am the same as you (I=you)
Freedom leads to Egality, which means I'm worth the same as you on principle, I get no special treatments for any reason(I=>you). Everyone keeps their worth in Kant's way (As rationality is a necessity to morality, it is natural that morality applies to rationality).
If I = you and you = everyone else, then, by all being the same, we are worthless, or at best worth no more than one person. If I force your hand into hiring people you do not want to meet quotas, we're getting closer to the brave new world.
So when people balk at the idea of someone saying "I don't believe there should be equality" - they might have a better, more important principle.
You misunderstand the use of equality. It's not the idea that everyone is the same, but rather equality-of-rights. No-one argues for equality, they argue for equal rights, not because it sounds better but because it is different. The worth of one person is not a fixed value. You are worth only what you think you are. There is no arbitrary principle that measures your worth as a person. But you are equal to one person. Try to come to terms with the fact that you are only one person, and there is nothing to truly decide your worth other than yourself.
Equality of rights is egality
Communistic equality really is equality (They used hedonic principles to measure your worth, easiest way for them to do this is to give everyone the same shit as everyone else, to act only on "The greater good" < The good described here is happiness, but not quite utility since Marx fucking hated Bentham (I've never seen one philosopher rip down another so bad))
I have issues with parenthetics
It's been a while since I read the Communist Manifesto, but I don't recall anything about absolute equality being mentioned by Marx, though he did believe in equality of rights. That and the 'greater good' seems to be more of the utopian socialists bag. Later communists extrapolated Marx's ideas, but he never was an idealist in that sense; he just thought that political inequality was a way for the rich to divide and conquer the poor.
It's not in the manifesto, I have the quote, I have the author, I do not know where he wrote it, but it was a reliable source (From a textbook)
- He basically calls Bentham (Maybe mill? I'm not sure of the timeline of that guy compared to marx) a ripoff of some shitty old french philosophy, called them hacks and not worth a second glance, then went onto show that utility is shite because it's too one-dimensional in its end (Which is your basic hedonic calculus criticism) - I see how this can fit into the Manifesto. Real commies who derived themselves from Marx, I think they may have misunderstood him and his works slightly, with deadly consequences, because, really, they were trying to equate everyone to achieve some form of average utilitarianism. Still - noone's yet to beat Hitler's misinterpretation of Nietzche.
P.S - Got it -
"Not even excepting our philosopher, Christian Wolff, in no time and in no country has the most homespun commonplace ever strutted about in so self-satisfied a way. The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he who would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch. Bentham makes short work of it. With the driest naiveté he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man. Whatever is useful to this queer normal man, and to his world, is absolutely useful. This yard-measure, then, he applies to past, present, and future. The Christian religion, e.g., is "useful," "because it forbids in the name of religion the same faults that the penal code condemns in the name of the law." Artistic criticism is "harmful," because it disturbs worthy people in their enjoyment of Martin Tupper, etc. With such rubbish has the brave fellow, with his motto, "nulla dies sine line!," piled up mountains of books."
Karl Marx - Das Kapital - Chp. 24 Endnote 50
