Judging from what I have been reading on this site about Universal Law, I must have experienced a different academic upbringing than your average American student. Fact is, I am not American so I can’t speak for the education that the kids across the border are getting. All I know is that I’ve flagged every single article under this title as being off-topic – mind you, maybe some more than others but they are all off the mark.
My personal experience has taught me that “Those that can, do. Those that can’t, teach.” That’s why I have always taken everything taught to me by my schools’ instructors with a pinch of salt. I must say that it wasn’t until I was exposed to the practical factual-based lessons at the college level that I truly began to immerse myself into my learning with a serious eye to my future. Now, things were beginning to get interesting. All that went before, from grade school right through high school, I had always considered to be some kind of glorified day-care. I just breezed through, never did a lick of homework, wrote my essays the few periods before I was required to turn them in, and basically shot the bull on my exam’s essay questions. The multiple choice questions were usually a no-brainer. I knew a lot already. I still managed a 72 percent life-time average by the end of high school. Not bad for a slacker.
Sorry for the digression. That was about my presumption that students were basically being misled by their instructors about the concept of Universal Law. Either that or about it being okay to not do the research before they started writing about something they knew nothing about. What was it Benny Hill said..? “Do not assume, for when you assume you make an ASS out of U and of ME!”
Just to set the record straight, here is the stub from Wikipedia about the concept of Universal Law: “In law and ethics, UNIVERSAL LAW OR UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLE refers to concept of legal legitimacy whereby those principles and rules for governing human conduct which are most universal in their acceptability, their applicability, translation, and philosophical basis, are therefore considered to be most legitimate.”
By way of example, let us present an aspect of universal law. Consider that the US and the western world in general has been attempting to democratize the world and to a great degree they have encountered considerable success – just look at the fall of communism in the former Soviet states. The implication is that there is an underlying ethics to those principles and rules for governing human conduct which can be implemented most successfully in a fair and democratic system of representation by the people for the purpose of governing their affairs in the most equitable and fair manner and that these fall under a system called a democracy.
There is a key word in the stub from Wikipedia. That word is “ethics”. We could conceivably have a universally accepted set of principles and guidelines for governing conduct which are corrupt to the extreme. That in itself would not violate universal law if the concept of ethics were not integral to their definition. Universal law compels the implementation of ethical practices governing the conduct of human affairs such that a legal application in agreement with a generally accepted philosophical understanding of what constitutes fair practice is paramount to its fundamental rulings. That is the understanding of universal law. Physics, meta-physics, cosmology, Einstein have nothing to do with it!
