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Quote by: MachineCode0110  I doubt very much that any set of principles can ever exist that can be applied universally. |
How about the empty set? That is, no principle would be applied to all people at all times. It is trivially logically consistent and extremely easy to implement. Perhaps it leaves a bit to be desired, however.
We could also build singleton sets of principles, and unless my logical understanding is incorrect, these could never be logically inconsistent. Thus, "Murder is wrong" could be one such set, while "Murder is acceptable" could be another one, and another could even be "Murder is a moral imperative". Note the second one is, for all intents and purposes, equivalent to the empty set, as it is neutral on the one topic it touches. Obviously, the third set is not desirable, if our goal is to create a functioning human society, as all "good" people would see to the extinction of our species.
We can easily build larger sets from a singleton, though care must then be taken. For instance, suppose we built a large enough set to include various "wrongs", so that it might be desirable to add another item to the set considering punishments for committing a wrong. Assuming "Murder is wrong" has been included, then we could not add the item "Capital punishment is acceptable" to our set without breaking the logical consistency of it (using the definition of "intentional non-defensive killing" previously provided). Short of amending the definition of murder to include more and more exceptional cases (something not too advisable as it makes analyzing the logical consistency of our set quite a headache), we could not include those two notions in a set of first principles, as I understand it anyhow.