the first commandment

dogma is almost always an unfortunate thing. i say almost always because 1) adherence to the dogma of human survival is what allows us to have this discussion in the first place and 2) there possibly exists a dogma of being non-dogmatic that would disprove an absolutist view of dogma anyway.

the tragedy that unfolds in human discourse is that critics of one dogma usually possess some other strict set of prescriptive beliefs and those that are non-dogmatic are usually less vocal and thus less effective in shaping the discourse. discourse is then reduced to often impractical dichotomies and society is left subject to the pendulous whims of the resultant power struggle.

who is right? who is wrong? are there any absolutes we can use as self-evident frames of reference? it is hard enough to find absolutes in the process of observation in the physical universe so it will be even harder to find such absolutes in the realm of moral prescription for thinking/reactive self-interested human agents. (my opinion: morality-based-existence has become an intractable optimization problem given the size of earth's human population and finiteness of resources technologically available to us. translation: "every man for himself, unless we find a way to harness illimitable energy and sustenance without harming others.")

i will propose though that in the midst of our uncertainty we use as our basic self-evident truth the tautology i introduced earlier. human beings can only carry on this discussion if we continue to survive. this is common sense but we need to be reminded of it. all attempted codification of morals must positively feedback into long term human survival if we are to come up with solutions to the problems we face.