We have a "right" to own guns, but not a right to health care, food, shelter, clothing, employment

[patrice]

127. I still use labels as social orienting points, but all is in process & always has been, so what we

need is better contacts with one another, not just labels, which, just right off the top of my head I would say, would begin with putting things like religion, which (above all other labels) claims that responsibility for personal contact for itself, aside and would support each person in claiming those responsibilities for themselves. That doesn't mean that most people MUST give up their identifiers/labels, only that they consider changing the relationships between those identifiers and OTHERS, as empirically necessary, to consider thinking more in terms of dynamic human relational patterns discovered in actual lives and not just their own. Somehow we need to change whatever it is that people find threatening about that and help them to see it as a possible source of authentic strength and security.

One thing that might help would be for people to know that moral relativism is not evil. Moral relativism does not mean that there is no right, nor wrong. It means that people are responsible for right-and-or-wrong themselves. Moral or ethical relativism means that that which makes some-/anything right and-or wrong inheres in the factors and elements of a situation itself, not in the labels that "we" stick on things. Moral relativism is an essentially rational process. It doesn't mean that there are no principles; principles can be/are extracted logically from human experience by each mind-heart, they can be relatively stable and useful, shared and also relatively unique. Let's just consider whether there should be different relationships between principle and experience. Principle, especially more abstracted, or more extremely extrapolated, principle, should not always come first, more or less excluding experience, and experience should be held at least at parity with principle in order for mind-heart connections to emerge and be orienting points to individuals and their cohorts.

Labels can be helpful in all of that the same way that street signs are, but when you get to wherever it is that you are going, that last street sign is not the cause/reason/motive/purpose of your going there.