Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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ORIGINAL: CuriousLord
A premise of our society continually strikes me as misstated, at best. "All men are created equal". What does this actually mean?
Not being an American, I'd have even less grounds to say so than you do, but it strikes me as prose, and "self-evidently" false.
The gist of it might be that society should not target any group to hinder them. If so, it's certainly time to spin up the CD player for a requiem. I can't come up with a decent substitute for the declaration of independence that I would be happy with using in any nation I founded in a few minutes of posting, though, so I probably shouldn't try to come up with one for a nation that's already founded that I don't even live in.
'course, if I ever did found a nation, it'd probably be nuked out of the waters in about five seconds flat, but, hey... 
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Does this equality mean opinions should be considered with equal weight? The democratic notion would seem to imply this.
It was considered democratic when women weren't allowed to vote. Of course, it did say "men", and might not have meant "man" in the sense of "human". And opinions haven't been given equal weight in a long time. Votes never have.
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Still, when it comes down to setting a high social instutition, would it be best if a group of educated did it or the population as a whole had an equal input on all parts?
Depends on what your goal is. That's part of what I meant when I commented that there is a lot of stuff that underpins "consensual reality" that doesn't have any analogue in objective reality. You could of course go for a plutocracy, theocracy, a "beneficial dictator for life", a constitutional dictatorship, or any other model, but they have their respective drawbacks and don't serve the same goals.
In a sense, in modern society, media is an intrinsic part of government, and the propaganda model of the media formulated by Chomsky et al is interesting in that context. Guess you could call that version of democracy something like a mediocricy. 
My analysis is that the main purpose, and main benefit, of democracy as practiced in the modern world, is to limit the amount of damage any one government can do in a given timeframe. It also serves as a low-Q filter on societal impulses, damping overshoot and ringing while adding transmission delay, to use signal processing terms (they're quite appropriate).
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I fear the latter option would yield an entirely irresponsible institution.
Such is presumably the case, yes. Of course, it would also lead to there never having been any USA, given that 2/3 of the population were opposed to independence at the time. Apropos the being equal bits.
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I certainly don't want votes being counted on how to go about space exploration!
That's more a question of doing a job than of building the foundations of a society.
IMO, a reasonable approach if we ever colonize other planets would be to have an approach where any group of 3+ (smalles true plural) individuals can forward a model, and then have people choose the one that fits them, and draw up the territories according to population. In effect, engineered societies.
Of course, on the world we have, that would uproot billions, and wouldn't be practically doable, even if every other concern were addressed. And nobody will be asking me when it is time to start the colonization process, wisely enough. 
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Poor astronaughts would become kamikazee, perhaps gaining distinction from such in only a lack of practical targets.
Indeed. But, as noted, there's a difference between building a society and doing a job.
Basically, engineering a society, or the underpinnings of one, is a job for experts, which excludes politicians; but such experts will, if suited to the job, admit that the goals will have to be selected by someone else.
By analogy, the Gov't tells NASA where they can go etc., and NASA builds the rockets, etc.
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Does this mean humans have equal value of lives? That a doctor, who is about to invent the cure to cancer, has the same value of life as a child rapist/murderer?
In my opinion, yes. And it is a plausible interpretation, although I doubt the founding fathers would approve of "taking it that far".
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How could two lives even begin to compare in value?
By making each life an immeasurable quantity, for instance.
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Still, despite being undefined and lacking in reason outside of a grasp at romantic notions (though perhaps not without their reasons in the contemporary of such a statement), much of our social structure and order is based off such a thing. While I would credit this school with preventing the exploitation by those misjudging, this causes flaws despite its purpose in preventing others.
As noted, all present societies are constructed with roots in consensual reality, which emerges from a vaguely defined majority vote among prejudices, preconceptions and other traditions. The net result cannot be coherent or self-consistent; hence, there must be flaws by any measurement and according to any goal.
But that's kind of starting to stray from the topic, even if it covers the underpinnings for consent, so perhaps PM would be better?
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: Ability to consent - 
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