Politics

Human Rights & Wearing Masks

Does the Metaphysics of Quality(MOQ) support those not wearing masks and instead support protesting against them? No, it doesn't. The great thing about the MOQ is that it's really simple and was created so just about anyone can understand it. The MOQ says that Human Rights are intellectual values which are separate to and distinct from biological and social values. Society absolutely has control over what you do with your body when it comes to looking after society at large.

When the MOQ makes a clear distinction between intellectual and social values - it is pointing out the fundamental role that society has played in our evolution. This role has been to control, for its own benefit, our biological selves. Often it involves giving our bodies things they need in order to protect them from other bad things such as starvation, disease and death.

With a pandemic knocking on our doors, society is well within its own rights to force people to physically wear a mask over their biological bodies and indeed, when it's available, to get vaccinated too. This is not about intellectual Human Rights - it's about society protecting itself from a deadly threat.

So why is there such a strong but small vocal minority around the world pushing against wearing masks and also pushing to refuse vaccines?

As with the great majority of issues in the world we see around us today - first and foremost it's the result of a failed metaphysics. Nefarious characters are justifying all sorts of bad and immoral things by exploiting the metaphysical failures generated by our current metaphysics. In this case a couple of failures come to mind..

For decades our current metaphysics has failed to morally protect social level values such as the social value of the working class and so there has been blow-back with a growing trend of anti-intellectualism.

For decades our current metaphysics has failed to support intellectual values against a media that has instead been driven by the social value of profit and the biological values of fear and titillation of the senses. Driven by access and power, the media has often seemed synonymous with power.

With such little intellectual accountability, the public is understandably growing distrustful and so here we are... having debates about whether wearing a mask is a human right or those refusing to do so are selfish.

The Metaphysics of Quality answers that they are being selfish, but with our current metaphysics and the failures of it over the past few decades - their attitudes are entirely understandable. It's time we adopted a new Metaphysics that beautifully and simply shows these error in thinking, and points us toward a better world.

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Cultural Values

Human rights don't logically exist. But it's ok - here's the solution.

Well some must exist, surely? Nope. None. Not one. It's an uncomfortable truth but it's true. And the sooner we acknowledge this the better.

You could say that the articles of the declaration of Human Rights that all nations have agreed on, demonstrate that they do exist. But at a pragmatic level - words are so very easy to weasel out of. One country or culture says one thing, while another culture says and means something completely different. Who's to say something just isn't lost in translation? And unsurprisngly that's the exact problem continually facing the organisation put in place to implement Human Rights.

But beyond the written words of Human Rights that have been translated into hundreds of languages - there's no way to logically say something is a right for all people, and something else, is not.

Of course we can identify the main culprit here as our metaphysics. We have a metaphysics which fails to acknolwedge the importance of values and morality. There's historical reasons for this but this is the situation we find outselves in - in the 21st Century. This makes world governing bodies such as the United Nations often impotent in finding agreement amongst nations about what's right and wrong and what a violation is and is not. And this isn't a problem that's going to go away. In fact - it's only going to continue and become more and more apparent until we start to use a language and logic which transcends cultures and helps to shine a light on the right, and moral, path forward.

Luckily the Metaphysics of Quality beautifully provides just such a path and language. It's an elegant, logical, philosophical framework within which we can make such judgements across all cultures and languages and say (generally speaking) whether something is moral or not.

This is the what Robert Pirsig lays out in Lila where he writes:

There is no such thing as 'human rights.' There is no such thing as moral reasonableness. There are subjects and objects and nothing else.

This soup of sentiments about logically non-existent entities can be straightened out by the Metaphysics of Quality. It says that what is meant by 'human rights' is usually the moral code of intellect vs. society, the moral right of intellect to be free of social control. Freedom of speech; freedom of assembly, of travel; trial by jury; habeas corpus; government by consent - these 'human rights' are all intellect-vs.-society issues. According to the Metaphysics of Quality these 'human rights' have not just a sentimental basis, but a rational, metaphysical basis. They are essential to the evolution of a higher level of life from a lower level of life. They are for real.

Robert Pirsig - Lila

It's really very hard to understate the size of these words so I'll repeat them. There's no such thing as moral reasonableness or human rights. There's subjects and objects and nothing else (See The Story for why).

But sadly until very recently the unique insight and beauty of the Metaphysics of Quality in solving this particular problem of Human Rights has been largely ignored by the academic community.

Of course that was until a recent graduate - Matthew Lafontaine wrote a masters thesis called - 'Human Rights as the Safeguard of the Intellect Against Society'. It lays out a very thorough and concise explanation of just how the Metaphysics Of Quality provides a far superior foundation for Human Rights than our current understanding and metaphysics.

It has been posted online and if you're intellectually inclined - I recommend giving it a read here.

This is a great paper by Matthew and I hope that one day the insights provided in it are recognised.

All going well - one day at the United Nations (or similar) it will use the Metaphysics of Quality as a foundational language of morality across all nations. From it they will be able to determine and easily talk about what countries are indeed being evil and immoral vs those that are not. Not from a he said / she said metaphysically unsound perspective, but one that has a logical and moral philosophical foundation which cannot be denied.

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cultural-values the-order-of-things the-law intellectual-morality human-rights