Talk:Might Makes Right

Really bad eggs

The first bad couple of sentences from the WP version show an inept understanding of the relationship between free will and ethics. "Because I decide what is right", it concludes, "false statements about what is right cannot hurt me, therefore they are not wrong"

The term can be used in the descriptive, positive way, in the same sense that people say that "History is written by the victors." Since every man labels what he thinks is good for himself as "right," only those who are able to defeat their enemies are the ones who can push their idea of what is right into fruition.

Another paragraph attempts to prove that immorality is morality and unsurprisingly fails. In the first sentence, the writer tacks on "In terms of morality" onto a phrase which can never be related to morality, other than being its opposite. "In terms of morality; those who are the strongest will rule others and have the power to determine right and wrong." It then assumes a definition has been created, and plops the whole thing into the anti-moral cookie cutter of a linguistic definition-gone-bad: the philosophical term Norm. "By this definition, the phrase manifests itself in a normative sense." It then indulges in namedropping a slew of the most immoral and anti-moral terms and advocates s/he could find. "This precise meaning is used to define a moral code for society to follow in the works of Nietzsche and others, discussions of social Darwinism, Weberian theme of the authority of the state (e.g. 'Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft')."

Here am not using 'moral' to imply any of the silly taboos that have sprung up around positive, victimless activities such as drugs or sex, but the ethical baseline of 'do no harm' . In practice I like to go with, "do less harm than good", and the alchemical principle of turning bad motivations into actions with good consequences. Speaking of which, gotta get around to those astrological articles sometime. Alchemy and astrology are both bad habits from my youth (neither of these belief systems are true as originally devised) with a startling amount of usefulness for humanity (both have these white-hot tools for describing social interaction, as good as any religion is as a source of philosophical ideas) Anarchangel 22:47, 21 January 2011 (UTC)