You've raised a good and complicated question. Let's leave the word "created" aside, since if it has its religious meaning, many people won't find it self-evident. I take the claim that "all men are equal" to be a way of saying what philosophers put this way: "All persons are entitled to equal moral consideration." It's not an empirical claim, since we don't get the answers to broad questions of moral principle by adding up the facts, though as we'll note below, empirical facts can be relevant to applying the principle. Notice a few things the principle doesn't say. First, it doesn't say what a person is; that's a hard question that we'll set aside. Second, it doesn't say that only persons are entitled to moral consideration. It might be that some animals are. It might even be - on some views - that parts of inanimate nature are too. Third, and perhaps more relevant to your question, it doesn't say that all persons have the same detailed rights. 10-year-olds don't have the right to...

Thanks for a few moments of idle amusement! Perhaps the best response is "Oy!" But to earn the huge salary in Merely Possible Dollars that the site pays me, a bit more is called for. So yes: it's a case of false analogy, and the analogy goes bad in indefinitely many ways. But one of them has at least some intrinsic logical interest. Suppose that as a matter of social policy, we set up a system that left everyone with a paycheck of the same size at the end of every month. What does that amount to? It amounts to saying that each person can acquire the same quantity of goods as each other person. Maybe that would be a bad idea; maybe the result would be that people would get lazy and less wealth would end up getting produced overall. But that's not built into to very logic of the idea. It's an empirical claim, even if a highly plausible one. There's nothing logical incoherent, as it were, about a system intended to produce completely uniform distribution of wealth, whatever the practical...

I'm a bit puzzled by your example; I'll get to that. But first, let's check a dictionary. Here are the relevant meanings from Webster: "To allow to be or be done without hindrance, prohibition or contradiction" "To put up with" You're certainly not obliged to tolerate your stale house guests in either of these senses. If you ask them politely to make other arrangements, you're well within your rights. But not all cases are like that. Sometimes I'm obliged to tolerate certain things even if it causes me pain to do so. If I don't like it that members of a certain group frequent my favorite coffee house, that's tough. I shouldn't do anything to hinder them, even if that makes my latte-sipping less pleasant. I may also not like the views you express as you address the town council. But I should tolerate your expressing them - whether or not that makes me happy. The point so far, then, is that there are things we really should tolerate whether or not it somehow makes us suffer. There's...

I'll admit to being a bit puzzled. Here's the bit where I start to feel things spin: ...is it not also true that in the saving of the life of the victim, we have "murdered" the free will of the murderer? Why can authority, in essence, save the existence of one individual, while condemning the existence of another, even if that existence involves violence or crime? If the police stop me from popping someone off, no one nor nothing is murdered. In fact, my free will , such as it might have been, stays intact. Stopping someone from acting on a particular choice isn't the same as killing their ability to make choices at all. And if it wasn't a matter of someone literally stopping me, but me thinking the crime isn't worth the punishment, then I've made a free choice between two options. In other words, as you describe the case, it's even less clear that my "free will" has been murdered. There's nothing odd in the thought that, when I make a free choice, I'm often weighing up pros and...

Let's flip the question around a bit. Suppose I believe that people who hold certain particular religious views are likely to favor policies I don't like and oppose policies I like. That gives me a reason to worry that if I vote for a candidate of that religious persuasion, I'd be voting for someone who wouldn't share my views on things I care about politically. And surely that's an acceptable reason not to vote for someone. It seems pretty different from racism or homophobia. People who wouldn't vote for an atheist, I'd guess, typically believe that atheists differ with them on questions that they care about. They see a person's atheism as an indicator of how the person would vote if s/he were a legislator. That still doesn't seem like racism or homophobia. Except... Experience suggests that people who wouldn't vote for an atheist sometmes have at least this in common with racists and homophobes: they haven't actually subjected their beliefs to scrutiny. It's very common to find people who...

Perhaps it's not so much a principle as a widely agreed-upon norm for setting potential conflict aside. We could imagine a society where the rule that everyone internalized was quite different: the person on the bench should always give their seat up to the newcomer. That would be a perfectly acceptable arrangement, and so there's no deep principle here; either way of settling priority is fine. That said, someone who bogarts the bench for hours on end just because they got there first isn't playing nicely. They never got the point of their mother's admonition to let someone else have a turn.

At least in the USA, political parties aren't monolithic. Though we're in a period where there may be more uniformity among Republicans (at least in Congress) than there has been historically, Republicans disagree among themselves, and any Democrat thinks ruefully from time to time of Will Rogers' famous quip that he didn' belong to an organized political party because he was a Democrat. People can follow their party or their church mindlessly, but that needn't happen. Many people belong to a political party because overall, the party fits their political values better than the alternatives, and because collective action is often more effective than hundreds of Lone Rangers acting on their own. But it's not unusual for members of Congress not to vote with their parties, and it's also not unusual for a registered Democrat or registered Republican to vote for a candiate of another party. So the comparison with the medieval Church seems a bit strained -- especially since the sorts of sanctions parties...

But if citizens project their attitudes onto the government, won't that amount to electing legislators who favor certain policies? And won't that likely result in the passage of laws that favor certain points of view and mesh with certain attitudes? And by the way, would MLK day have been made a holiday if there hadn't been broad public support for doing just that?

In the United States, the answer varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. A few states allow felons to vote even while in prison; many allow felons who have served their sentences to vote. There is a chart in this essay from the Sentencing Project . We might look at the issue from two points of view: justice, and broader pragmatic considerations. At least in the case of convicted felons who have served their sentences, it's hard to see the argument for denying them the vote. That's especially true if we're moved by the idea that by spending time in prison, they "paid their debt to society." But some people also point out that it's generally better for people to see themselves as part of the poltical process. If extending the vote to felons who have served their time makes it more likely that they will see themselves as stakeholders who have an interest in an orderly, democratic society, that's one more reason in favor of the practice.

It's hard to give a good general answer, but let's start with an analogy. I've been a faculty member for many years and I have some administrative experience. However, if someone came to me and said "Allen, the Dean is stepping down, and we need you to fill in as Interim Dean of Arts and Humanities," I would feel obliged to say no on the grounds that I understand my limitations and am quite sure that I am not well-qualified. (We'll leave the sorry catalog of my shortcomings to your imagination.) My becoming Interim Dean would be a bad thing for the faculty and students in my College. I would not be able to do the job well (reasons supplied on request!), and so I should refuse to be drafted -- even if Deans were elected by the faculty, and even if there was some reason to think that my colleagues might vote me in. The generalization is obvious: if someone really thinks s/he is ill-qualified for a certain office, and, let's add, if there are stateable reasons that go beyond possible false modesty, then...