Quote from: mobodick on September 06, 2011, 02:08:53 PM

Do you want to force me, for instance, to eat more vitamins because you (or society or whoever) think it is 'better' for me?

As I explained throughout the discussion, the question is of access, not of forcing.

Necessities are not opinion, they are objective facts. If you have access to the necessities, and still decide not to use them, it's not going to be imposed on you.

What I don't understand is why should we forcefully deprive people of the necessities, even though we can technically provide them.

A dystopia comes into place as soon as you coerce people into doing certain things. By providing access to the necessities, as well as education and a nurturing environment, you are creating the basis for a civilisation worthy of this name.

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There is no hard distinction between 'good' and 'evil'.

I already explained this before. Good and evil are loaded terms and mean almost nothing. Let's start from the basic: necessities, then you can build up from there.

Sadly, people tend to get into semantic arguments of meaningless discussions about good and evil, while billions are starving to death.

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What you would need is perfect clones, raised in identical environments, fed identical information so they would have identical moral values, if such a thing is even possible.

It's not possible, and it's not even meaningful to talk about that. You don't need such conditions to know that people need food, clean water and air, shelter, education, a loving and caring environment to grow up. Regardless of what you or I think, the science shows that.

If you still in doubt about this, please see this course before continuing any further:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D

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There are no universal morals.

...and they are not need for the sake of the argument.

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It's the field between egoism and alturism, a battle between spending energy for your own purposes or for the purposes of your community (which may or may not be serving yourself).

This is another common misconception. Every action one takes is for self-reward. The only difference is how many people you consider to be part of your extended family, and if you understand that your happiness is related to that of others. If you have that realisation, people call you altruistic. If not, they call you egoistic.

It's just a matter of how educated you are about human relationships.

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If you can predict how society will function in the future you may be able to get a general feel of how morals will change.
But nothing hard or definitive.

You don't need anything definitive. It's like saying that until we understand 100% quantum mechanics, we should not try and build LCD screen, lasers and so on. Yet, we did, and it's working out wonderfully.

According to your reasoning, something like The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is completely meaningless, because it's not definitive.

http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

Oh yes, also sociology, psychology, anthropology, behavioural neuroscience, physics, mathematics... all meaningless because they are not definitive.

meh.