In the recent discussion on causation, I noted:
KF, 72: >>As I think about cause, I am led to ponder a current discussion that echoes Plato on the self-moved, ensouled agent with genuine freedom. Without endorsing wider context, John C Wright draws out a key point that we may ponder as a nugget drawn from a stream-bed:
Men have souls [–> that which gives us self-moved, responsible, rational freedom].
Once one accepts that premise, one must accept the conclusions that follow from it: creatures with souls are not evolved from slime, since spirit, being simple and eternal, cannot be brought into being by matter, which is compound, subject to change and decay, nor brought into being by any blind natural process; therefore, instead, spirit must be created in a divine image, with the faculties of reason and conscience and creativity. Living spirits like man hence are responsible each man for his own action, hence by right are worthy of the fruits each man of his own labor. Since this right comes not from the state, it should not in justice be abrogated by the state, for the right to property is sacrosanct, and, by the same logic, so too are all rights to life and liberty and to the freedom of the conscience. [–> I add, echoing the US DoI of 1776: the state enters, with the consent of the governed, as a common means to safeguard the civil peace of justice; that due balance of rights, freedoms and duties in community which cannot be reliably pursued otherwise — in which context, it has a legitimate power of moderate, prudent taxation as a cost-effective means to fund the defence and reasonable enhancement of the common good.]
Nor can a created being overstep the authority created into him by his creator, that is, Man cannot play God; which means he cannot slay innocent children in the womb nor murder the sick and elderly and useless gobblers of bread, nor breed men like dogsbreeders breeding dogs, nor commit suicide oneself, not even the slow suicide of addiction to self-destructive substances and ideas.
If man is created by divinity, it is not in his choice to demean and trample the image of God in himself nor his neighbor: modesty, honesty, humility, patience, prudence and temperance become sacrosanct.
Even such seemingly unrelated matters, such as the low dirt of modern speech, the crass ugliness of modern art, the vainglorious ignorance of modern schooling, become offenses against this divine image seen in man . . . .
If men have souls, what does skin hue matter?
It is that lost vision that is the context for the present endarkening of our civilisation, in which what we imagine is light is instead such darkness that we often imagine that light is darkness, accusing him who is Reason Himself and Goodness Himself of being an arbitrary would-be cosmological tyrant. That is why something as out of kilter as Euthyphro’s dilemma could even seem plausible. That seeming plausibility is a diagnostic sign of our soul-sickness.>>
I think, this is significant enough to headline. END