Now, given that moral understandings are not knowable the same way that the laws of physics are, this has created problems which are at the root of the insanity we are seeing right now, and have been seeing for over a century.
But the solution, in my view, is as simple as invoking a simple principle, like “provisional understandings with respect to human life, provisional but testable understandings with respect to the physical universe.”
We don’t want psychotic killers in our midst. We want peace and relative safety. We like having things and relative plenty. We want our children to live in a good or better world. These are not complicated moral premises which warrant excessive examination. There is plenty we agree on.
2. Communism does not abolish property rights–it merely reassigns them from individuals and groups to the State. Since the State is an abstraction, practically it does not do anything differently than what Kings of old did in asserting their claim, in principle, to everything. It grants ownership of everything to an elite, to an oligarchy, and does so without any moral restrictions on their use of that property. Marx was no ethicist. He had nothing to say about moral virtue other than that he rejected the “virtues” of the bourgeoisie. Given this, how to build, much less reliably build, people in whom any extent of trust whatever could or should be placed?
China, now, is run by the inheritors of all this. They are not Marxists. They are merely very rich, and in charge. It is simply a new Emperor, for a people which has had emperors for well over 2,000 years, depending on how you define the term. The Communist conceit and deceit is gone. It was a means to power for the same sorts of people who always run things. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
Without principled thinking, without the clarity which reason and the clean use of language enable, there is NOTHING which can be done to label and describe all this, much less prevent it.