[JonnyBGood]

Originally Posted by Dante Hicks

This is rather broad, and difficult to answer in one post.

You don't have to answer them in one post dude!

Overall I'd say that most philosophical approaches to this topic seem to be attempts to systematise basically intuitive notions of "fairness". One of the things that I like about the Dec of Independence is that it just says : we hold these truths to be self-evident. This seems to be a more honest approach then trying to retrospectively intellectually justify pre-existing ideas about morality.

I like the declaration of independence too but it seems to be just too much of a get-out clause. Self-evidential second-order facts can be denied and it's difficult to make a meaningful counter-argument beyond "u r wrong".

Of course, some "intuitive" morals are bunk and can be torn down as generally harmful to freedom or justice generally. However, the base ideas seem to be rather axioms. Sure, we can try to analyse why some people dislike others suffering (e.g. appeals to psycho-analysis, looking at their cultural background, evolutionary psychological explanations about altruism and so on) but I'm not sure that really gets us anywhere.

Me neither. I didn't think I was doing that...

I don't however think laws are just about restraints on individual action. I mean, perhaps most criminal law can be simplified down to that but that doesn't really tell us much about (say) tort or contracts. I think generally it's a notion of what's "fair" or not, and that heavily influences what laws tend to persist in most societies.

Surely you can just say "people cannot promise, where promise is defined as contract blah blah, to aid others in x way for y in return and not do so"? I'm afraid I don't really know of any law that doesn't boil down to individuals interacting.