Category: Philosophy

Human Rights versus Corporate Rights: Life Value, the Civil Commons and Social Justice by JOHN MCMURTRY

ABSTRACT This analysis maps the deepening global crisis and the principles of its resolution by life-value analysis and method. Received theories of economics and justice and modern rights doctrines are shown to have no ground in life value and to be incapable of recognizing universal life goods and the rising threats to them. In response to this system failure at theoretical and operational levels, the unifying nature and measure of life value are defined to provide the long-missing basis for understanding the common interest, human rights and social justice—that is, the universal life necessities of humanity across cultures and the evolving civil commons infrastructures to ensure them. In contrast, the treaty-imposed corporate rights system miscalled “globalization” is structured to predate life means and support systems at all levels with no accountability beyond itself. Only the logic of life value, human rights and life-protective law, it is concluded, can comprehend or govern this inherently life-blind and cumulatively eco-genocidal regime.

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How Unexamined Premises Lead to World Oppression: John Locke, The Theory of Private Property and Money by Professor John McMurtry

Reproduced from:  https://artsonline.uwaterloo.ca/rneedham/sites/ca.rneedham/files/needhdata/McMurtry-1.html How Unexamined Premises Lead to World Oppression: John Locke, The Theory of Private Property and Money John McMurtry College of Arts Department of Philosophy University of Guelph The most fundamental principle of the market doctrine is the grounding of human right and freedom in private property. This principle is foundational because one… Read More

‘The spiritual crisis of capitalist civilization’ by Jeff Noonan

Human beings are integrally natural and social creatures, dependent upon natural life-support systems for their physical existence and socio-cultural life-development systems for the nurturing and realization of their emotional, cognitive, and practical-creative capacities.  Societies whose developmental dynamics become alienated from their natural conditions of existence face inevitable doom.  Oblivious to the ways in which their reproductive dynamics undermining the physical foundations of social life, they collapse the very basis upon which their institutions and value systems depend.  Let us say that any society which unsustainably converts scarce natural resources into tokens of social power (as, for example, capitalism converts natural systems and elements into money) faces a material crisis of life-reproduction.  The manifold environmental crises unleashed by capitalism, crises which persist even in the midst of on-going economic stagnation, are evidence that capitalism will ultimately face a problem of material life-reproduction.  Yet, this material crisis is not the only crisis that capitalist civilization faces.  Since human beings require not only life, but meaningful, purposive life, societies can also fall into what I will call spiritual crises of life-development.

Spiritual crises arise when the ruling value system and institutional structure of a society becomes alienated from citizens’ need to feel that they belong to a socio-cultural whole which values their contributions to its reproduction and development.  More precisely, spiritual crises arise when the ruling value system and institutional structure of a society actively alienate citizens by treating them as mere tools of its material reproduction.  When people are treated as mere tools of system-reproduction, their moral being as intrinsically life-valuable centres of experience, action, and interaction, cognizant of the social conditions of their freedom and well-being, and desirous of enhancing the social foundations of their individuality, are attacked.  In these alienated circumstances social problems are presented to the populace as technical problems to be solved by political and economic experts working in the service of the established  asymmetries of wealth and power.  Spiritual crises thus arise when ruling classes attempt to solve a material crisis of social reproduction by treating subaltern groups not as participating members of a social whole, but as passive objects whose life-interests must be sacrificed to the health of the system understood as a reified whole indifferent to the life-requirements of the people who live under it.

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‘The capitalist life crisis’ by Jeff Noonan

The failure of the Durban Conference on Climate Change, (December, 2011) to agree to anything more substantial than that all nations would work together to develop binding targets for reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 2015 is a metonym for the life-crisis besetting globalised capitalism.[1] Because global capitalism subordinates what John McMurtry calls “life-value”  to the expansion and accumulation of  money-value, it progressively undermines the conditions of planetary life-support, human life-requirement satisfaction, and meaningful human life-capacity development and enjoyment.[2]  Resources, relationships, practices, norms, institutions, and forms of life-activity have life-value when they:  a) satisfy objective requirements of human life-maintenance, reproduction, and development, b) thereby enabling the expression and enjoyment of the human life-capacities of sentience, imaginative and cognitive thought, and creative activity in ways which are, c) life-coherent.  McMurtry’s principle of life-coherence asserts that in order to be good, expressions of life-capacity must not only follow from the free choices of the agents who enjoy them, but must also, “consistently enable ecological and human life-together.”[3] In other words, good forms of individual life-capacity expression must contribute to, rather than undermine, the natural field of life-support and the social field of life-development within which individual life-activity is grounded.   The vaunted “liberties” of liberal-capitalist society are blind to the natural and social grounds upon which all good lives ultimately depend.  Hence, capitalism is a system that necessarily generates crisis in all important dimensions of being alive.  In the present essay I will explore the four most fundamental dimensions of capitalist life-crisis and the adequacy of egalitarian liberal, human rights-based cosmopolitan, and twenty-first century socialist responses to them.

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Watch “Justice with Michael Sandel” on YouTube

JUSTICE is the first Harvard course to be made freely available online and on public television. Nearly a thousand students pack Harvard’s historic Sanders Theatre to hear Michael Sandel, “perhaps the most prominent college professor in America,” (Washington Post) talk about justice, equality, democracy, and citizenship.

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Keynote Address by University of Guelph University Professor Emeritus John McMurty, entitled “Rationality and Scientific Method: Paradigm Shift in an Age of Collapse” given on March 19, 2008 at the University of Windsor

This paper explains what has long been missing across domains and levels of analysis: (1) the life-blind inner logic regulating contemporary paradigms of “rationality” and “scientific method”; (2) the reasons why these regulators of thought select for unforeseen consequences of ecological, social and economic collapse; and (3) the principle of life-ground consistency which corrects this systemic incoherence of thought regime.

KEYWORDS: academy, collapse, collective choice, full coherence principle, game theory, life and money sequences of value, mechanism, global market, rationality, scientific method, truth

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Is the denial of our mortality the root cause of all our maladies?

I deal with suffering, dying and death almost on a daily basis. On my ward rounds with my students at the hospital, I always think to myself or ask my students if the suffering or premature death of this or that particular patient could have been prevented. I have alcoholics being re-admitted over and over again… Read More