Dividing everything into two parts sometimes is the quickest way to discover faults in the logical train, though it can perpetuate the illusion that everything is divisible into two parts, which may be the problem to begin with, but anyway...
There is a problem or there isn't. There is.
We're threatened with something like death, or worse, or we're not. We are.
There's a reason the Declaration of Independence and the charter of the United Nations, and many other prime documents begin with a statement of rights, a definition of moral values, and they point to the origin of the definition directly or obliquely. You have to start somewhere.
My thesis is most of us are trying to work out the problem from within it, and that that's never going to work. The moral system with which we want to solve the problem is part of the strategy the problem-makers have in place. Because you have to face it, not everyone has the same problem. People whose water is tainted with poison from someone's factory don't have the same problem the owner of the factory does; someone who's being robbed at gunpoint doesn't have the same problem the gunman does; a mouse being grabbed by a hawk doesn't have the same problem as the hawk. In the immediate sense, from a general enough view, from a wide enough perspective, all living things have the same problems - to live you have to eat, to eat you have to take something's life or its children or some other kind of by-product of its living.
There are many solutions to this same basic problem. Mosquitoes and pine trees are almost totally different in the solutions they apply to the same problem, to live and reproduce. None of that is moral, all of it is biological. Human beings bring their own strategies to bear to that universal problem and one of those strategies is morality. Morality allows us to live in large groups without constantly being forced to stop what we're doing and defend ourselves and our families and our material resources from each other.
This is made most clear when we look at a social situation that's describable as a "breakdown of civilization" or a devolving of social integrity - a return to savagery; there's lots of ways of describing it but they all mean that people are forced to become more individuals than members of a group, that the group is no longer protecting them.
So instead of devoting a relatively small amount of time and energy toward group cohesion, individuals must devote the majority of their time and energy to tasks that are necessary for those two irrefutable goals - staying alive and reproducing. For human beings this means a loss of adaptability and group strength, the two survival strategies that mark us out from the rest of our mammalian relatives most dramatically.
Human cooperation has put men on the moon and made us the world's dominant predator; and human adaptability, in some ways, and that's the thesis here, that it's only in some ways now, has been exponentially increased by the freedom and leisure time for experimentation that cooperation makes possible.
So there is a problem. Iraq. Terrorism. The liberal subversion of Christian American values. The financial predation of large institutions on working men and women. Fascist takeover of a vulnerably open society. Cunning and duplicity where courage and sacrifice were promised.
Pick one, make up a new one; they're all problems, and they're all real in the sense that they can be named, though often when you look carefully what's being named is a piece of something near the surface, and what's under there is not that thing that's been named at all.
Burglaries committed by drug addicts, burglaries committed by asocial thieves, burglaries committed by covert agents of secret political organizations, burglaries committed by estranged members of the family - all burglaries, all caused by different problems. It's the problems we're working on, not the symptoms.
What traps most of us is the valence, the thing that gives weight to a position - the individual has value and the rest of the weighing of things proceeds outward from that. Because if the individual has no value, no intrinsic inalterable value, then nothing that extends from the individual will have value.
So again, these documents from which we proceed to make the rules that bind us as social constructs start from a positioning, a statement of irreducible importance, or value.
It's a condemnation of our abilities to see and imagine, that children until very recently were not given the primacy they deserve. Though there's also the very real biological fact that until very recently children were a gamble, and the importance of the individual child was diminished by a mortality rate that in some periods and places was far over 50%. In those times and places children entered the world like soldiers, and like soldiers, had to be viewed with dispassion.
But children are the points on the line where we break into the future, where we become what we were going toward, to be; where what we are gets its fuller expression. So the valence should come from that.
An immediate difficulty is the failure, again, of most people to see and imagine that "children" are not the same as the individual children who are presently beginning their lives among us.
We were all children once; the young men and women of this time were recently children themselves; the actual children of this moment, given the world and a chance, will become young men and women and eventually old men and women themselves, and die eventually, like the rest of us.
This is the biological truth of our existence, though there is a refutation of that, or an attempt to refute it, by hedonistic science, and also by egotistic religion, despite the two of them seeming to be bitterly opposed to each other, on the surface.
So our moral values should begin and radiate outward from the primacy of children, the importance of children over and above our own lives. This is so obviously true it can sound almost vague, and vaguely unnecessary to state, except that my thesis here is that these values are not in place, that our children are being sacrificed, their lives and their futures rendered like the lives of cattle or poultry, their sustenance and their substance given to the children of something else, for the sustenance of its own children.
That's the problem.

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