Comment by clairity

that's a false dichotomy for the rhetoricians. it's both, and more, and more complicated than that.

we spend the first 18 years or so of our lives empirically deriving those first principles together, along with the derivations of our ancestors in the form of documents like the constitution. since none of us are intrinsically perfect, we have a whole running population who nonlinearly superpositions our perspectives to create a common, if dynamic and imperfect, consensus of what's reasonable in a social context, and what's not.