(no subject)

[ewt]

Since I'll be offline all day and feel like having some good comments to come back to:

Do people have intrinsic worth as human beings? What is the difference between intrinsic worth and value within a society?

Are there intrinsic rights, or only those granted by society?

Does truthful gossip (that is, passing on true information about someone, rather than making up or passing on fictitious stories) form a positive or negative contribution to human society? How and why? Under what circumstances? Why does truthful gossip so often turn 'bad' somewhere along the chain and venture into the area of untruth?

Will the landlord recharge the electric meter by the time I get home today? It's looking a little low. I can laptop for a bit with no electricity but I can't interweb, because something has to run the router. EDIT: it seems to have gone over into emergency credit or something.

PLN for today:
-tidy up a bit here, because it is currently showing the effects of three days of rehearsal and running around with not much downtime or sorting out time
-go have horn lesson, meeting with CDP
-go to Isle of Cats, arriving about 13.15, do lots of big sorting and tidying
-come back here at some point; I'm going to aim for about 21.30 because I've had so many late nights recently.

The hardest thing? Moving the keyboard from the loft to the living room so that when someone comes to pick it up at 7pm they don't have to navigate (or even see) the rest of the house. This needs two strong people, because the keyboard is heavy. Once upon a time I could have been one of those people but this is no longer the case.

Comments

[naath.livejournal.com]

I don't think anyone or anything has "intrinsic" worth; value is placed on things by society. On the other hand I think people *ought* to have value, and think that societies that don't accord people value are stupid/wrong. The same applies to rights (and *responsibilities*) the things you can (and must) do are governed by society, I don't think there are any 'intrinsic' rights - but again I think that a society that doesn't give what I consider basic rights and enforce what I consider basic responsibilities is not one in which I want to live. I think that it is Right And Proper to persuade other societies to do things that we consider Good if they aren't currently; but Bad And Wrong to force them to do so.

There are two issues with gossip
1)That stories grow in the telling and rapidly become untrue - leaving the 'victim' to correct the error; which is likely impossible since the gossip may well spread beyond their social circle or they might never know what stories are being told about them.
2)Often information transmitted by gossip is information that the originator did not want spread around; if I wanted to tell everyone something I'd put it on LJ in a public post - I don't want to have to assume that everything I tell to anyone will be told to everyone!