I have some doubts regarding the category this issue belongs to; on the one hand my capacity to argue my ideas is very limited, on the other, I really want to elicit comments that deal with the topic rigorously so that I can learn from you. I will understand your arguments way better than I can produce mine, so if you can bear with my poor analysis, I´m hoping good ideas might be contributed by knowledgeable members. On top of my lack of philosophical understanding, I am also not a native English speaker, so I might confuse you with my choice of words. I hope your wits can overcome all of this.

The matter: I am very concerned about values and the philosophical ground for rights and duties, not only within the human species, but throughout the Universe. This question is more critical now than it was a hundred years ago, when Western supremacy and the apparent ultimate triumph of the Enlightenment in the world made unnecessary to go beyond subjective, culturally bound, basis for the values and human rights we Europeans wished the whole of human kind to be aware of. Jacques Maritain, who was involved in the draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, commented then that the process had turned up very well, so long as nobody asked what the foundation for these rights actually was.

Well, we are no longer in the position of ignoring this conundrum. Neither the objectivist theory nor the subjectivist theory managed to solve the problem. Basing values and rights in eternal universals did not work, becouse Reason found its own limitations in the twentieth century, as you all know better than I do; I like to think that was actually a great achievement, a solid edifice for Socrates´ demand that at least we should know that we don´t really know. You can not tie values to a network that will always have a loose end, as Einstein´s best friend in Princeton stated in his Incompleteness Theorem, and other developments such as those derived by the criticism of Wittgenstein´s works.

However, subjectivist theories, based on preferences and feelings and cultural biases have seriously undermined Ethics itself, not in theory but in practice, by imposing moral relativism understood as anything goes.

I understand, or misunderstand, constructivist approaches as a middle ground that leads to nowhere. If A and B are dead ends, anything in between is also a dead end, becouse all the points share the same dimensional status, a common framework, a straight line nobody dares to step off of.

In my merely intuitive understanding, I want to argue that none of these approaches bear in mind how useful the metaphor of relativity (not relativism) have been beyond Physics and Cosmology and still is to deepen our knowledge of the phenomenal world, or as I like to think of it, the "signal" the "real thing" sends us as we are able to construct it in our imagination. In Einstein´s tale, spacetime is both objective and subjective; it has universal properties and also local values. In fact, the essential, universal, apparently unchanging core features such as the speed of light, depend on measures to be different in each scenario or "conjunction" involving both the observed and the observer, imagined as separate, if we want those features or regularities to be really abiding and continual.

I believe this metaphor could help us establish a way to establish a set of values and a doctrine of human and non human rights and duties that is independent of culture and can speak to different people. On the one hand, we have very compelling evidence that logic and mathematics, is not just a human construct, but cultural tools to communicate with a "signal" or phenomena that computers and living things, indeed all processing structures we are aware of, also need to deal with. For example, crows don´t have a formulation of the Archimedes´ Principle, but they do understand that the level of a liquid in a container rises in proportion to the amount of stones you have to introduce in that liquid. They must have a sort of non verbal notion of the causal relationship, becouse they are shown to be able to collect enough stones to make the nuts reachable in the experiments. Another beautiful example is how animals who need to move fast and swiftly in a fluid, such as fish or birds, tend to be sculpted into a vesica piscis basic body structures. Some can do both water and air, such as flying fish and some birds adapted to fish under the surface. This means that Vesica Piscis itself is a cultural product, with religious and esoteric meanings in different regions of the world; but the same underlying principle is working in those animals save energy and our minds find mandorlas in art beautiful. It´s a simple mathematical equation that saves energy in locomotion and also happens to make human visual perception cheaper.


So it is reasonable to assume, unless new experiences demand otherwise, that logical-mathematical language, even spoken in our human dialect, is a lingua franca we share with the rest of physical reality. Our axiological and ethical systems should speak that language, and be linked with the signal, with the shared human experience of it that is, which is Science. Science and Reason can not give us why we should care about things; but they do deal with the things we care about, so before any subjectivity is brought to the table, this common ground must be recognized and our preferences need to be related to it to be valid. The founding myths our values and set of rights and duties are based on, need to be shaped by the force of the fluid, must interact with the signal.

And that interaction means that values must be both constant and be balanced out to take context into consideration, just like cosmologists do with their calculation. For example, emigrants value both freedom and security, but to emigrate they need to put more weight in freedom than in security to save both, as they will lose everything by not taking some risks inherent to migrating abroad. When they are established though, they have to value security more to keep their freedom, so they vote for Trump and the wall. Values are constant for these people, but their local (contextual or situational) dimension and weight change to remain, as Emperor penguins changed their original shape into a fish-like one to remain. Whales have done the trick several times already, so I would not rule out terrestrial whales again in an after-human future.

I hope any of this makes any sense. The whole point is to agree that empiricism and logical-mathematical language, flawed and polluted and incomplete as they are, is the only code all humans, animals and phenomena in this universe, so far as we know, can use to communicate with each other. It is the code planets use to synchronize their orbits and avoid crashing against each other; if it works for them it should help poor humans too. And from this point I derive that values and rights have to use it too, at least on a fundamental level, which in its turn implies to understand how context modify them to keep them universal, to keep them attached to the natural laws of Reality.

If my text is inappropriate, I will be happy to relocate it to a more suitable category or another forum. It is comments that count anyway, I just tried my best to direct them to a problem I really care about.