htown1980: A contract is between two parties. They may or may not be equal.
Equal as in:
Equal value. Equal in regards how they should be treated. Equal before the law. I wasn't using legal terms, but ethical terms. You brought in the legal act. Equal partners in an socio-economic context.
The point of the discussion is that one has to only serve the other. And I said no, because they are equal. Because both parties have responsibilities and rights be they by contract or law.
I wasn't suggesting that a company is a human.
You brought up an act which forbid unfair business practise or something like this to say this isn't the case. Which would roughly be the same as saying humans are not equal in value because there is a law against murder.
And this stands.
Even in the case of the law, both parties are considered
equal. They might have different rights. Different obligations. But no party is inherently better or worse than the other. Every claim you can make in a relationship between a developer and a consumer (considering you made a deal with the dev for simplicity sake) has to come either from the contract or by law. Not because the devs "has to serve your every whim". It is completely unimportant if a person is a rich billionaire or a poor schmock. Both have (theoretically) equal rights before the law. Same goes for companies (as far as the laws are applicable).
Bringing factors into a legal decision which are not important by law or contract is the fastest way I know to get a judgement repealed.
You really should know better than to read what you want into a single response. You know, that could get you into trouble.
And you found a spelling mistake. Good for you! I'm sure there are a few in what I just typed.
amok: I had the notions that law, ethics and philosophy have the same origins... going back to Plato, Cicero and so on.
Our laws go actually back to the slave trade of the Romans. ;-P
Sounds weird (and
slightly hyperbolic), but most of what we are using know was established by the Romans. Knowing them, they probably stole it somewhere, too.
But the philosophical impacts of the law are much more recent. Kant basically wrote the UN Charta. While you could of course say that the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment and beyond were also only copying the old dudes, it is there spin on things that is more relevant in general than the old sources.
Funny stuff happens when two laws of two different philosophical origins collide. The German penal code is mainly influenced by Idealistic thoughts. The juvenile penal code however, by positivism. Now, both are pretty much the extreme opposite in how they affected the laws they influenced. What makes this especially bad is that only the Idealistic position gets thought in law school. Guess how good our juvenile delinquency laws are applied? ...
Edit:
Maybe I should mention that philosophy is much more important with constitutional law, basic rights and criminal law then with your run down civil law. Kant really didn't have much to say about a car sale...
