| | That's just it, Bob. I'm not talking about "classical logic" done in ivory towers with abstractions, or abstractions from abstractions, etc.
I'm talking about day-to-day reasoning done by the folks next door (the application of logical laws to human thought). One thought, which uses the third logical law which I presented, is that man should be free. It's not axiomatic that man should be free, but it's necessarily true. One way to get to this necessary truth is by examining the particulars of the world.One judgment/evaluation of whether or not man should be free comes looking at when men weren't free -- and noting what that's like. Here are telling quotes:
Frederick Douglass
Whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom.
The iron gate of our prison stands half open. One gallant rush from the North will fling it wide open, while four millions of our brothers and sisters shall march out into liberty. The chance is now given you to end in a day the bondage of centuries, and to rise in one bound from social degradation to the place of common equality with all other varieties of men.
Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.
The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.
If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! ... And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! ... your interference is doing him positive injury.
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives, and the lives of others.
Booker T. Washington
From some things that I have said one may get the idea that some of the slaves did not want freedom. This is not true. I have never seen one who did not want to be free, or one who would return to slavery.
No greater injury can be done to any youth than to let him feel that because he belongs to this or that race he will be advanced in life regardless of his own merits or efforts.
I pity from the bottom of my heart any nation or body of people that is so unfortunate as to get entangled in the net of slavery.
Recap:
Slavery doesn't "work." Therefore, its opposite -- "freedom" -- is safe to adopt as a guiding principle of human life on Earth. and, importantly, we don't have to go around examining every case of freedom to know this, either. One way to come to know this -- without studying every case of it -- is by disproving the opposite of it. In a case where it's one or the other -- disproving an opposite simultaneously proves it to be true (without even looking at each case individually).
If a fair coin were tossed and it turned up heads, you could say with certainty that the side facing down is tails -- you do not need to turn the coin over and look. It is precisely this "short-cut" to certainty -- being able to know the solution to life's shell games (without having to look under every imaginable shell) -- that philosophy alone grants man on Earth.
By knowing that it's opposite is wrong, we can instantaneously know that freedom is right (reductio ad absurdum). The problem is that too few folks adopt this correct way of thinking.
Ed
(Edited by Ed Thompson on 4/05, 2:26pm)
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