Conversation Continues: First, Sandefur has no reason to worry that anything in his posts are hostile towards me. We are discussing ideas, and he is free to be as hostile towards ideas as he wants to be. I wouldn't have gotten involved in the discussion if I wasn't ready to have my ideas challenged passionately.

Besides, I know he's above the kind of mean spirited stuff that gets flung about in less classy parts of the blogosphere (you suck!) (No, YOU suck!) (Oh, YEAH? Keep it up, and I'm going to Post in |337 $PE4k!!)

Whatever. With Sandefur, it's all about ideas, so let's see how well mine hold up.

Well, actually, there isn't much to say. Aside from some bad wording he found in my last post he's got my position nailed down.

First, as to "outlined," I was referring to rights outlined in, say, the bill of rights or other law. You and I may have an absolute moral right that exists and has existed through all eternity, but unless it is delineated somewhere in writing with the signatures of legislators, we're not going to get any protection of it by our government.

I hope that makes sense.

I'm really talking about two different things here--the first is absolute morality, a set of laws that are fixed and in place that cannot be violated nor changed, that have been and always will be.

The second is the structure and morality of our actual government. This one is fluid and changing, moving either towards the tenants of real, absolute morality, if the people are enlightened, or away from it, towards depravity and oppression, if the people are not.

So when I said that rights-based morality was not absolute, I should have been more careful about using the buzzword absolute. What I intended to say was that the means we have of trying to build morality into the system--of delineating rights that are not to be violated, even by the majority--doesn't automatically lead to a hard-and-fast set of rules that everyone will agree on (I believe the sentence, as first typed, read "Rights-based morality has some wiggle room").

So then comes his summary of my position: It’s not okay; it’s immoral and beyond the legitimate power of the majority, but they just have so much power that it’s impossible to stop them from doing it.

Would I agree with that? Basically.

I feel that it's important that the majority have power. Even though he qualified it, Jefferson still said, "the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail." His qualification was that it was possible to abuse that power, not that we should take the power away from them.

That power can definitely be abused. And that's why the government can only be moral inasmuch as the people themselves are moral.

And, again, all of this is only referring to the states. The constitution has already spoken and none of this should be happening on the federal level.