Saturday, February 14, 2009

Streaks of thought: Streak 23

People whose lives revolve around issues way beyond survival are the ones who often need justifications which undeniably rely on the faith in survival. That's probably one of the reasons life is valued much more (in terms of investing money for a system) in US compared to other poorer countries.

An instance as simple as deciding to board a roller-coaster at Six-flags can highlight the importance of faith: Do we check for each nut and bolt of the machine we are boarding? Do we know for sure if everything is safe? It's just the faith in the system that if something goes wrong things will be "justified" appropriately by the system. Since human made systems cannot be perfect we ultimately tend to show faith in karmic system.

Have faith, fun and a happy Valentine's day whether you have a Valentine or don't.

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Human rights and money

Recently I had to take a few courses on issues involved in researching human data. There I got to see some of the basic assumptions (beliefs) guiding the system design to protect human rights. An e.g. is: "Respect for Persons incorporates at least two ethical convictions: first, that individuals should be treated as autonomous agents, and second, that persons with diminished autonomy are entitled to protection."

The ability in sustaining, enforcing and evolving such basic assumptions are a measure of development of a society or system. Only a handful of countries in the world have measurable development. What I mean is that for example in the assumption in above there needs to be clear quantifiable measure of autonomy or amount of protection etc. There's some level of such analysis based on money in US. I heard from one of my previous colleagues that for e.g. a law enforcement should not cost more than a million dollars per life or something like that.

Without human rights all the fight in making money for life is useless. Money and human rights advocation have to be grown on par because of the mutual-dependency for any sort-of real value of either of them. After all what's the use of money if we don't spend it! Spending on human rights is a smart investment because it motivates human life perpetuation: a self-justified anthropic reason:)