00. preface
01. being an answer to mr. burke's attack on the french revolution
02. combining principle and practice
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before i get into this, i just want to make it clear that i'm not opposed to human rights. i'm a secular humanist, which i interpret as a response to nihilism. that is that i realize that all concepts of morality are abritrary, and present deriving rules using reason as a prefered alternative to any random authority. i agree with paine and the natural rights theories back to antiquity on the necessity of placing reason as the center of ethical thought, rather than authority. yet, i think it's imperative that we understand morality as a social convention in order to not lose it's dynamic nature, and consequently facilitate it's derivation from reason. deducing a set of fixed moral principles is reducing reason to a type of authority. so, it's not just that paine's argument comes from an untested and largely contrived logical necessity, or that his ideas about generational change are inconsistent with each other, it's also that i feel the idea of assigning the source of rights to a single, immutable cause is incompatible with the idea of building a society based on reason. this is a discussion that is still relevant for the time being, until biology can present a cohesive theory of the evolution of morality.
should read burke first.
- hobbesian perspecive of society developing
- argues explicitly for bourgeois overthrow of the aristocratic class, which overthrew the church. influence on marx.
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