Evangelicals have no claim to moral superiority when they back Putin.
Moral superiority is true. It exists. We agree on this, you just call it law and I call it right. The issues wind up being interrelated so the question is, how do we decide? It's an ethical question in the highest sense. How do we distinguish ethics from morals, or 'vice versa'? There is a distinguishment between ethics and morals, we agree on that, the people who don't agree on that are Nazis. But what is the distinguishment?
Once we separate morals from ethics, it's not like the rest of ethics besides morals is 'Kansas', it's got mountain ranges and it's got oceanic deep trenches, but according to which measurement, or according to which conception, or according to which ethics, are both morals excluded from the rest of ethics, and the rest of ethics morals excluded is a rich 'contour map' rather than just a 'flat' space?
I have finally read "natural law rights", I had never seen it explicit, although the notion existed, but finally I read it somewhere. Someone wants to say that 'natural law', which is a distinct theory, actually supports absolute moral rights (which is my moral theory or ethics or ethical theory, depending upon your preferred homonym, no deliberate disrespect intended). This is not true. Rights are self-existent, self-evident and God-given. You'll note that me saying "God-given" does not alter the full meaning and 'punch' of the first two. Like the inverse of the distinction between oh say a prefatory and an operative clause.
So for me the question is two-fold, what are our universal rights? and what is a person? We answer these questions politically, politics being the "art of the possible", this is one of those areas where politics is the only possible solution, if there even is a solution. The United States Constitution is the greatest achievement in the history of mankind----and it's a 'blowout'. 'Hands down' our constitution is the 'best thing going', and 'it isn't close'.
Our (Americans) answer to both of my questions is not given by some formula, but instead by a procedure, expressed in our written Constitution, and expressed or materialized in the operation of our regime. 'In layman's terms' we grapple through the administration of our three major branches of government. The president is absolutely powerful within limits, our legislature is absolutely powerful within other limits, and our Supreme Court is absolutely powerful within still other limits. They each constantly enter into skirmishes with each other as the decades go by. One of the most important skirmishes happened early, when the Supreme Court decided that they had the absolute power to judge laws enacted by the legislature.
Ever since the power of the S. Ct. has only grown in regard to my two questions posed above, about absolute universal moral human rights. What are our rights? and what is a person?
You can't answer these questions well without a cogent theory. So the parties nominate justices based on their 'judicial' theory, which is the same as their ethics, just highly detailed in the discipline of law. It's also therefore another word for their legal theory, which is jurisprudence, so their 'jurisprudential' theory is also another way to say it. And their 'political' theory too can be seen in all this morass as well, it's not completely distinct, none of these words are 100% distinct from all the other ones, it's a mess of a space, linguistically, and it's really kind of a shame because of how deeply important this problem is for mankind.
Problem being, what are our rights? and what is a person?
Also since Republicans nominate certain justices and Democrats nominate certain justices, we can see patterns in their rulings which reveal their individual theories. We can describe these theories, through observation of their rulings, just as well as we could also read the Bible and 'figger out' what it all means. We can generalize, find commonalities, and we can and do label them; "conservatives" and "liberals".
Liberals to me are people who believe in human rights. Conservatives to me believe in paternalism; they believe in including some ethical mountains or ethical deep ocean trenches into morality, through lawmaking. So I rather think of the S. Ct.'s "conservatives" as liberals, and not the "liberals". But that's mainly I think because the "liberals"' 'observed ethics' to me is utilitarian informed legal positivism, which isn't the same as "conservative" at all, which I take to mean, I believe in rights, but I believe that certain ethical choices are important enough that we are going to try to impose them on people 'for their own good'. The right they are OK infringing is our right to ethical independence, which is also called our right to the pursuit of happiness, which always begins with how we distinguish between morals and ethics.