I deeply appreciate your effort to help us recapture the now lost depth and richness of our social lives with diversity.

Diversity of experience makes us socially stronger and less insecure, and thus freer and more open in our relationships.

Such fearless freedom is essential before we can ever regain our lost existential state of nature.

Diversity, however, is beyond good and evil.

Diversity’s utility has a reality to each and every one of us that is too real to be justified or even enforced by such moral dictate.

We know that Diversity’s greatest utility is that it WORKS!

Good and evil are unnecessary fictions embellishing and even fetishizing utilitarian fact.

Those who need to fetishize a utility with moral value constructs are NOT true believers, and are always the first to betray their feigned belief, and deny the utility of that which they have never truely experienced.

Diversity need only to be truely experienced for its utility to be believed.

I get the impression that some of the criticism is splitting hairs and even picking nits (eww).

For example, to take the issue of diversity down to the question of positions of electrons, is a reductio-ad-absurdum. Same case with ennumerating seven generations in terms of a precise number of years. First, the definition of generation in terms of number of years varies. Second, taking the phrase in its symbolic meaning enhances its meaningfulness and effective usefulness: as with “the spirit of the law” vs. “the letter of the law.”

For a few years I’ve been working on some essays exploring questions that include the foundations of ethics. I’m in the process of setting up my own website where this stuff will be published, and this should occur fairly soon, so I’ll refrain from posting a bunch of it here. Some of my ideas may be useful to you in areas such as the is/ought question and the issue of foundational values complimentary to the value of diversity.

(A friend is on the phone, I have to scoot…)

Pedophilia: let us not forget that our own culture is absolutely drowning in the heterosexual version. For example in a number of states including Texas, the age of consent to marriage is 14, with approval of the parents. Thus a rich old pedophile finds some 14-year-old girl on the poor side of town, bribes the parents with promises of sharing the wealth, and makes off with the kid; when she turns 18, he dumps her, pays off her and her family, and goes for the second round with some other 14-year-old girl. The fact that it can happen means that it necessarily does happen, or at least that it is permissible under the prevailing morality. See also the absolutely huge number of popular songs involving an older man singing love-verses (more aptly, lust-verses) toward a hypothetical girl child: “You’re sixteen, you’re beautiful, and you’re mine,” and “she was only sixteen, you know what I mean,” and all the rest of that kind of garbage, across a number of musical genres. (Lately we even see the trend in certain sectors of popular music to glorify overt rape.) Etc. etc., on ad-nauseam.

Murder: Very insightful to disentangle the verb “to do” from the verb “to be” in this instance. Our culture is saturated with do/be conflations, most obviously in the use of occupational titles as statements of identity (e.g. “I am a telephone switching systems engineer,” yes I’m guilty of this one too). But the more emotionally charged the doing-action, the more difficult to disentangle from the state-of-being, as with murder. You caught that one, which most people including myself have let pass. And doing so is not the same as minimizing the gravity of the crime of murder (as would go the typical counterclaim in such cases, e.g. where someone is accused of being soft on crime). The gravity of the crime remains; the identity of the person is not identical with the deed.

Re. Kant: his two axioms were a) treat people as ends-in-themselves rather than as means to other ends, and b) act only in accord with principles that you would hold as universal. Of these the first is the more arbitrary, in the sense that it derives from something other than the rigorous application of logic in and of itself. I have some ideas about this which I’ll be publishing on my own site when the site is up. But in any case, (b) is supportable from logic without need of recourse to other preceding principles (i.e. “consistency of rules” is a subset of “logical consistency generally”). And back to the first point, it is certainly consistent with the neotribal ethic, or at minimum inconsistent with the “economic man” ethic of both capitalism and Marxism where humans are always turned into commodities i.e. means to other ends.

OK this posting is getting too long as per my custom or bad habit as it may be:-). ’til next -
-G

The argument works fine down to the cellular level. Even large DNA molecules, I would bet, always differ, if only by a few isotopes. No need to push it to the atomic scale, unless of course you can cite a reference.

Couple of nits.

First, life seems to have evolved from the “baseline” (prokaryotic bacteria) to simpler (e.g., viral) as well as more complex forms. I think this strengthens your argument.

Secondly, as I understand (perhaps wrongly) “no two atoms alike” has not been established. You could argue that any two atoms of the same isomer differ in position and velocity, but the point would lose its meaning.

Thanks again.

Then again, I spent most of my time in the anthropology department in those days. This really is a long sidetrack on a meaningless, throw-away bit of supporting evidence, after all. I could refer to sex with young boys in ancient Greece in general and still have my bit of supporting evidence on quite solid ground.

For example, the Catholic Church demands absolute chastity from homosexuals. It is commonly called anti-gay. If I understand Plato correctly, he would similarly demand utter chastity if it were possible in Athens. Thus the Christian reading of Plato is commonly called an anti-gay reading of Plato — which does not prove that Plato *was* anti-gay — or even that we can arrive at a common understanding of what it means to be “anti-gay” or “pro-chastity.”

What we mean by “gay” is a very different thing from what Plato was talking about. Plato very harshly condemned sexual activity between two consenting, male adults, as a crime against nature. He was apparently a big fan of older men bedding younger boys. From our perspective, this looks like a contradiciton, but not from the Classical perspective, where sex had less to do with gender, and more to do with the assertion of dominance.

I don’t regard wikipedia as a scholarly source

Nature does. I consider it on par with any other encyclopedia–that is, at best, a starting point.

You and I seem to operate from very different semantic contexts, to the point where we are frequently in danger of talking past each other. For example, the Catholic Church demands absolute chastity from homosexuals. It is commonly called anti-gay. If I understand Plato correctly, he would similarly demand utter chastity if it were possible in Athens. Thus the Christian reading of Plato is commonly called an anti-gay reading of Plato — which does not prove that Plato *was* anti-gay — or even that we can arrive at a common understanding of what it means to be “anti-gay” or “pro-chastity.”

I don’t regard wikipedia as a scholarly source (its conflation of Ficino and Plato is shocking), nor do I regard J. Addington Symonds as anything other than a propagandist.

The wikipedia entry cited mentions “chaste pederasty” — which seems awfully close to a contradiction in terms. If a relationship is intentionally chaste, it fails *my* definition of pederasty.

However, the wikipedia does reference a far more restrained work:
http://www.practical-philosophy.org.uk/Volume4Articles/PlatoTheoryOfLove.htm

That has the kind of careful language I would call scholarly.

Two possible interpretations of this issue seem to me worth mentioning: one is that Plato’s highest love is predominantly intellectual, possibly fervent but always a form of rational activity.

Amir’s cited language is restrained: wikipedia’s is not. Amir admits the possibility of different interpretations: wikipedia seems to be an advocacy piece.