Contents
- How to organise the debate
- How users can earn money
- The central theme: the human path
The Human Path Debating Encyclopedia (DE) is a proposal to build a social media service suitable for ethical networking. It is intended as an instrument of humanity’s self-knowledge for all people of the world, regardless of their worldview, nationality, religion, etc.
How to organise the debate
In the DE, users are encouraged to express their views as clearly as possible. Impartiality will be achieved by publishing as many writings on each topic as there are different views.
The aim is not to reach a consensus or to convince opponents. What is most important is to clarify the differences of opinion and to deepen one’s own arguments by studying the objections.
The aim is not to reach a consensus or to convince opponents. What is most important is to clarify the differences of opinion and to deepen one’s own arguments by studying the objections.
All publications uploaded to the service can be shared. This way, also people untrained in writing or speaking can fully participate.
An essential new feature is this: anyone can assemble a debate panel from the site’s publications and lead the resulting discussion. Moderating requires both an ethical attitude (supervision of a fair debate culture) and an intellectual effort (structuring the debate, dividing the theme into sub-themes, ensuring that the debaters stick to the point and take into account and respond to opponents’ arguments).
But no one is obliged to start arguing against outright lies and nonsense. Panel leaders can exclude hecklers from their panels.
Especially in political controversies, debaters often do not discuss the same subject at all, just because they use concepts differently and do not even notice it. Therefore, the DE has a special section for definitions. The users of the DE can upload different definitions of concepts to the service. If there is a debate concerning, for example, ”socialism” and ”capitalism”, the debaters ought to link to the definition they support.
Recommended Quotes
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
Recommended Reading
How users can earn money
Users can set up sites and groups to share speeches and writings published in the DE. In these pages, users can take their own ”steps on the human path” – that is, to create publications with the help of, for example, a mind map-type application. In this way, each participant can use the service to build an independent and well-considered overall view of the world.
Users get the ad revenues of their pages in the DE. The service encourages them to engage also in other kinds of economic activity, where they can utilise the social capital created by the service. Over time, the liveliest and most fruitful conversations will arise in sites where the debate is fair. In this way, the principle of “getting paid for truthfulness” will be realised.
The EU, other international organisations, states, universities and research institutes in different countries are welcome to launch the DE project. In our view, the global DE should aim to operate under the auspices of the United Nations or some of its sub-organisations.
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
The central theme: the human path
In these times, every serious and responsible party, NGO, scientific community and citizen has to reflect critically on the bases of their thinking; to re-create their worldview.
Each current of thought has to set themselves a challenge to learn from history in a new way. Every current and individual person has to ask the question “What is a human being?” in a new way.
For these reasons, the name of the Debating Encyclopedia is Human Path, and therefore it is also the main theme of discussions. The theme includes all philosophical, historical and social sciences, but also some fields classified mainly as natural sciences (ethology, paleoanthropology, archaeology, neurosciences, etc.) Furthermore, it includes the situation in one’s own country and the present-day world, together with the prospects of humanity.
A top-down division of such a broad theme into sub-themes would, in our view, be wrong. The division in itself is a philosophical statement.
Every current and individual person has to ask the question “What is a human being?” in a new way.
In the DE, each user or user group (scientific school, party, organisation, university professor, etc.) organises discussion on the main theme (or some aspect of it) in the way they want.
The initiators are to organise studies on the entity of the Puolakkaist philosophy of history in the DE, starting from the most general questions: What is everything? What is knowledge? What is justice? What is the human essence? What is human good and evil? We then proceed through the basic phases of human history to the present day and to the question “What is to be done?” At each stage, debate panels are set up in which our views are compared with other, divergent or opposing views and in which participation in the debate is open to all. [1]
In the DE, people may also discuss any topic related to, for example, hobbies or other interests. Still, each participant should take a position on the main theme, even if only by sharing, reacting or commenting.
REFERENCES
[1] It is precisely in this way Matti Puolakka hoped his philosophy to be published.
FEATURED IMAGE
People demonstrate against rasism and fascism in Helsinki, Finland on September 24, 2016. A man who took exception to a neo-Nazi demonstration in central Helsinki on September 10th died a week after he was assaulted at the demonstration. PHOTO: Lehtikuva / Jarno Mela
OUR VIEW: Humanity first! Towards an ethical civilization.
PART 1. IN WHICH ERA ARE WE LIVING?
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