Human Dignity: Religion, Politics, or Natural Morality?

The sentence against Socrates

In connection with his visit to Spain, and in particular his address to the Parliament, Pope Leo XIV has been criticized in some media outlets for having argued that democratic parliaments must be subject to certain basic moral norms, such as those associated with human dignity. It has been said that the Pope was speaking as head of the Catholic Church, that the Spanish Parliament is not composed solely of Catholics, and that he should not have questioned the legitimacy of the Parliament to enact laws, based on the majority rule. This is the paragraph that has attracted the most disagreement:

Language manipulation

A few weeks ago we learned the news that Stanford University had published a brochure specifying a list of words that should not be used because they are harmful. The news caused a huge uproar, as one of the forbidden words is American, which should be replaced by US citizen. Also on the list, of course, is abortion, as well as many other commonly used terms. A word whose exclusion caused a lot of rejection was victim, which according to the authors of this monstrosity should be replaced by a person who has experienced or a person who has been impacted. Among those who reacted to this absurdity, some media highlighted Elon Musk’s contribution, who published the following tweet:

This has gone too far, to say the least! @Stanford, what’s your explanation for this madness?

where, by the way, one of the forbidden words appears: madness.

Surveys and statistics: opinions and facts

Henry Whitehead (1825-1896)

We tend to confuse the majority opinion with the truth. This is wrong, as expressed by Henry Whitehead:

Never fear forming a minority of one; majorities are usually wrong.

But sometimes the consequences drawn from public opinion are even more misleading than the opinion itself. In an article entitled Are we xenophobic? published in a Spanish high-diffusion newspaper on March 17, 2011, the author discussed the result of an official survey:

...Citizens believe that immigrants receive from the state...

lots more (30.8%) or just more (38.7%) than they contribute.

And he drew from this result the following comment:

Any sociological diagnosis would understand these figures
as a breeding ground for a reactionary and xenophobic social culture.
Saying the opposite is tantamount to denying a consistent reality.

Science, ethics and democracy

John Boyne’s novel, The boy in the striped pajamas (2007) is about the slaughter in the gas chamber in the Nazi concentration camps. The book ends thus:

Of course all this happened a long time ago and nothing like that could ever happen again.

Not in this day and age.

Is this true? Those things can never happen again?

I think this ending is not right. First, it’s not true that it all happened a long time ago. Seventy years is not a long time for historic events. Second, it’s not true that those things could never happen again. Have we forgotten the Ruanda massacres in the nineties?

But perhaps the author meant that those things can never happen again in Europe. Have we forgotten the Srebrenica massacre and the Sarajevo tragedy, also in the nineties?

Or perhaps he means that these things cannot happen in a democratic country. Has he forgotten that Hitler reached power after a democratic election? Has he forgotten that the Athenian democracy was discredited for millennia by their death sentence against Socrates, the result of a secret vote that took place just after the restoration of democracy, which followed the oligarchy imposed by Sparta after the Peloponnesian war?