Sidiqjan Tashbeg’s dictum. To the extent that you share something with others that makes you, with them, a community based on that X [with all recognizing the importance of the sharedness of X; otherwise it is not a community], you may participate in defining its rules. This is not imperialism; it is citizenship. That humanity which is shared provides an avenue for subjective participation in a process of electing what should be valued, but only to the extent to which the basis of the appeal is shared. (You’re lucky, this is sometimes self-policing—that is, adherence to this rule does not rely on my thinking it should be that way—because you get too far off of your experience, too far out of your fish bowl, and folks will look at you and laugh and go about their ways. [Shit, but what if you’re too powerful, and you can push them around despite being out of touch? (I bring this up as a challenge to my immediately proceeding statement.) Then you would be able to impose all sorts of horrible stuff thinking you’re righteous. Dang, and I still think, in the context of Imperial Europe in sub-Saharan Africa, that imposing those norms should not have been done. The proposed rule did not self-police there. 

Lothar van Trotha

So this tells me that we do need to make it a prescriptive norm, if we want it apply more widely, to prevent genocide. On what basis can we impose this norm, the thinking man wonders to himself? How about on the basis of the very dictum proposed here (Mr. Tashbeg's own norm norm itself). It is compatible with, uh, itself. (Would a rule that isn’t compatible with itself survive? [God says believers in God should stop believing in God.] Honest question. Perhaps, but I wouldn’t want such a rule in my head, and I wouldn’t want to propose that kind of bullshit to my community.)) We operate (and/or should operate) in the center of concentric rings of just moral projection. I suggest that if you want to change what’s going on somewhere, and your arguments rely on a basis of appeal that is not shared, you better find a common basis of appeal for that change; if you cannot, maybe you were wrong and the norm is not appropriate to translate across the contexts. I am proposing it should become the norm. What do you think?