Natural Rights

[BeBMan]

I think Berz has done a great job with this thread. First, all were against him, now all arguing against eachother....


David (bolded only to annoy Asher )

Again, precisely. A government CAN'T arbitrarily make up laws, BECAUSE of a universal moral code. Without a universal moral code, why shouldn't a government be able to legitimately make up any law it wants to?

I agree that a government cannot simply define moral per law. But it can make up laws in certain cases (eg. totalitarian states) as it wish.

However, I´d ask what do you mean exactly by "universal moral code". Do you think there is a set of values which is universal? Or even a concept of rights? Or do you think like Berz, that there are primarily "universal desires" (like not being killed)

[SpencerH]

Originally posted by Berzerker

Spencer -

My post deals with whether or not they exist by explaining their origin.

Explaining where pixies come from doesnt prove they exist (I've had to use other methods for that).

Then a society that allows for slavery and genocide cannot be condemned as immoral since the victims of such policies have no rights - no moral claims to be free from slavery and murder.

That's correct. Many societies throughout history, and some that still exist today, dont view slavery as unnatural (or wrong). The definition of murder changes from place to place and person to person so I cant see it's basis on any 'natural rights' that are common to all.

Life is natural, the desire to live is natural, and the desire to resist or avoid being murdered is natural.

So suicide is unnatural then?

[Agathon]

Well, this thread seems to have gone down the toilet.

Why are people still confusing the question of moral realism with the question of the existence of rights? They are separate questions.

Anyway, it's quite easy to show that rights based theory is religious rubbish. All one need do is pick on the fact that rights based theories really worry more about the purity of an individual's behaviour than the consequences of their decisions.

Take the simple case where there is a stark decision between killing one person in order to save 100 others from being killed by someone else. Putting aside for the moment attempts to change the case (which miss the point of the argument) it follows that if someone endorses a rights based theory, they can interpret it in two different ways.

1) Allow that the killing of one person in this case is morally justifiable because 100 violations of the right to life are worse than only one.

or

2) Allow the 100 people to be killed since rights based theories prohibit each individual from performing certain actions no matter what the consequences. In other words, what matters is that I don't break the rule, what other people do is their own business.

Libertarians don't like (1) since, among other things, when applied to property it justifies welfare and more generally it justifies the sacrifice of individuals for a common good (in this case that = the sum total of rights violations prevented by a lesser number of violations).

But disagreeing with (1) is stupid since you are effectively saying that 100 murders are better than one, as long as you don't do any of them. That would be enough for most people to reject (1) as hopelessly evil. Nevertheless, Libertarians are nothing if not pig headed so more is required.

This can be achieved by posing a simple question. What's makes violating the right to life bad? Is it the effect on the victim or something about the person who does it? It's obvious that (1) chooses the former and (2) the latter (with the proviso that the offender is me - I don't have to care about others or I would be back to an aggregation view). So for (2) the effects on the victims are completely irrelevant, the only thing of moral import is that I don't break the rule. This is so selfish that it can hardly be called "morality" - it basically asserts that my moral purity matters more than the suffering of others.

It's also senseless. What's the point of obeying the rule if it isn't to prevent suffering? Is it to preserve my own subjective feeling of moral purity? If it is, then it has nothing to do with morality.

What the Libertarian needs is some means of showing why the rule breaking of individuals matters irrespective of its consequences. And here we get to see what it's really about. A world in which following the rules is the only thing of moral import is a world in which the consequences are morally irrelevant - that is they don't have real value. So any suffering caused by someone following the rules has no real disvalue. We've heard this before in the idea that the things of this world are of no value and all that matters is that we follow God's instructions, which aren't designed to make our lives here better, but to test our moral purity for the admission to Paradise. In fact this is the only sort of account that can make sense of the idea that the moral value of rule breaking is entirely independent of its consequences.

And that is what Libertarianism is really about. It's religious morality and the people who endorse it are either religious fanatics trying to force Christianity on everyone else, or dupes who don't realise they've been had.

That's why natural rights don't make sense without God, and that's also why sane (i.e. non-religious) people should treat them like the crap they are.

[Lorizael]

Originally posted by Berzerker
As Loinburger points out, property (land) is a mess because of all the stealing that has gone on for millennia. But that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't try to respect property rights in the future just because of what has happened in the past.

This isn't really my argument, so I'm not gonna say anything more than, "This isn't really my argument."

I don't need to, you're assuming this creator is some old guy with a flowing white beard sitting on some heavenly throne who comes down once in a while to dictate policy to human secretaries. The universe exists and we didn't create it, therefore we can only look at creation to see evidence of a design.

First of all, don't make any assumptions about my assumptions. I was careful to say Creator and not God, unlike some others in this thread.

Your problem seems to be that you think there must be some purpose or intent to the universe. You say that in creation, there was a design (is that creation with a lower case c, btw, or is that the Bible's Creation?).

This is not a logical premise. It has no basis whatsoever. It's something you want to be true because you believe that there must be a creator in order for the universe to exist, and that, even if there is a creator, that creator didn't just expel the universe from his ass after a rather large portion of heavenly beans.

The universe was not created. Currently, science seems to indicate that it has always existed, and therefore it does not need an origin.

The evidence I can accept are the universal desires we share, that, to me, is the best evidence we can gather at this point in time...

This is circular reasoning here. You say that there is a Creator who made the universe. You say that this creator made natural rights. You say that the Creator shows evidence of natural rights in the universal desires of humankind. Then you say that the evidence of this Creator is in the universal desires of humankind.

That doesn't work. You prove the existence of a Creator by citing the existence of a part of the Creator's creation, but without actually presenting any hard evidence that the Creator had anything to do with that creation.

Edit: Spelling error and noticing the fact that, for some reason, it didn't bleep out ass. Was that taken off the censor list?

[Az]

I think that Berzerker is right on one point: ethics are derived from what people want. And what people want is more happiness not necessarily more liberty.

[DAVOUT]

The only sure thing we know about the universe is that a process is at work : from pure energy and extreme heat to particles then to black holes and at the end absolute coldness. That life has a role to play in this process cannot be totally excluded, as well as cannot be totally excluded that the Creator has written that part. But life can also be an unanticipated and even unwelcome side effect of the process, and this leaves us with observing the process as only source of understanding of what the process is aiming to accomplish and from that the purpose of the Creator.

This last point (an unanticipated and even unwelcome side effect of the process) would be the source of freedom for any lifeform, and consequently a natural source of any right they would like to express.

[GePap]

Originally posted by loinburger

Oh Gepap, no they're not. My cat is perfectly capable of distinguishing between "more food" and "less food" -- ordinal mathematics are certainly much simpler than, say, calculus, but they're mathematics nonetheless. (Unless my cat is only capable of distinguishing between "more" and "less" because I'm such an excellent tutor, but somehow I doubt that this is the case.)

You are mixing up the idea that becuase it can be represented mathematically, it is mathematics itself. BUt the symbol is not the thing in itsef. A cats ability to recognize between more and less does not mean the cat recognizes even arithmatic. Can you cat add? subtract? (subtracting being different from digesting)

So because I'm not omniscient and cannot always correctly apply my definition for the term murder, my definition has been somehow invalidated? This of course invalidates all definitions for the term "murder" (except perhaps God's, or Snoggo's...)

Actually, no, this does not invalidate the definitions that defines it as illegal, since the legality of the act would be determined by the authorities: that being the point. Without some authority to judge the act, the term of murder is meanigless: might as well just stick to kill.

You give one contrived example in which the "killing with premeditated malice" definition cannot be perfectly applied due to incomplete knowledge, and suddenly the entire definition must be thrown out? So, if I come up with one contrived example in which the US legal system cannot perfectly determine whether, say, a murder is 1st degree or 2nd degree due to incomplete knowledge, then do I get to ignore the US courts' definition of the term "murder"? Clearly without Magical Mind-Reading Devices (or something along those lines) our notion of murder has no practicality.

See above. The must be a reason for the term muder to exist, seperate from the term execution, assasination, manslaughter, and the old fashioned kill. Only in a system of courts, or at least, of judges, can what is murder be separated from that which is not murder: without judges of some type there is no use for the term murder, since no one individual has the legitimacy and authority to declare any specific act of killing as just that, murder (unless you introduce non-human judges)

Hardy har har. When you find a single non-human creature who is capable of writing mathematical equations, then I won't dismiss your demands as being mere flippancy.

It is not flippancy: you are substituting the symbol for the thing as is: just becuase it can be modelled mathematicaly does not make it mathematics.

The point being that you cannot arbitrarily redefine what is "justice" for a given group.

My point was that if "justice" can be redefined arbitrarilly by different groups, you can not claim there to be one absolute universal concept of it, unless you deny the ability of different groups to redefine justice for their own use.

Which presupposes that all concepts of justice are equally valid. Who cares if two concepts of justice are different, if one is inferior to another?

You have to explain how "inferior" justice is not still "justice", and thus able to justify something: after you explain how one arbitrary system of justice can be better than another.

The "tip of the tongue" phenomenon -- you know that you have a concept for "something," but the word escapes you at the moment. Or you know that you know the answer to "something," but the answer eludes you. In both cases you know of a concept (and can probably describe the concept in vague terms), but you do not know the word that accompanies the concept. Then, when the word is supplied, you smack yourself on the forehead and say "That's the word I was looking for!" The phenomenon has been studied in many psychological studies -- f'rinstance, it was found that (good) gameshow contestants are able to press down their buzzers well before they even know the answer to a question, because they know that they know the answer -- they know of the concept in question, without actually knowing the name of the concept (until their brain is able to dig up the answer).

Ah, but from the beginning you know there IS a word for it: the problem here is not recaling a word that exists in your memory, just not being recalled at the moment. Is this thing you point out the same as "knowing" the concept and knowing there IS no word for it?

[GePap]

Good post Agathon.

Oh Berz: you say people have a universdal desire not to be murdered: fine, so whata bout being killed unjustifiably when guilty? What about being killed justifiably when innocent? What about being killed justifiably when guilty? Do people mind those? (and what do you call somoene killed justificably when innocent? Since by your def., that isn;t murder)

And another thing: all human beings have a universal desire not to strave, one that is even backed by a powerfull physiological mechanism known as Hunger. Given our creation and hence 9according to you our moral code), would you not say all human beings have a right NOT to starve, just as they have a right NOT to be murdered?

Or does the fact that you can starve without another person starving you make it all OK? BUt what aout thoese people with the power to have someone NOT starve? What is the morality of them NOT doing something to fulfill the fundamental universal desires of man?

[Imran Siddiqui]

You don't have to believe in "God", that doesn't mean someone or something didn't create the universe. As for animals, do we have a right to not be eaten? No. So why claim animals have rights against us eating them? Animals may or may not have a sense of property, I think they do because of how they act when another animal invades their territory, but rights are moral claims and animals may not have a sense of morality so what's the point of continually asking about them?

Something created the universe, but how or why did that 'thing' grant us rights?

And whoever said anything about animals rights not to be eaten? If, as GePap said, you are saying that species have no rights in regard to other species that doesn't matter (though one wonders why that should be the case). What should be a problem is that interspecies animals do not seem to have these rights that humanity does. If rights are natural, this doesn't seem satisfactory.

But evolution did result in one species having the intelligence to recognise issues in terms of morality.

What should that matter? If creation gave rights, then why should the species that recognizes 'moral issues' only have those rights? Why would creation pick and choose who has rights?

[Imran Siddiqui]

And another thing: all human beings have a universal desire not to strave, one that is even backed by a powerfull physiological mechanism known as Hunger. Given our creation and hence (according to you our moral code), would you not say all human beings have a right NOT to starve, just as they have a right NOT to be murdered?

Ouch... that was a good one . If natural rights ARE our universal desires, then Berz you open up a can of worms. No one wants to starve, no one wants to be without shelter.

[Kidlicious]

I don't understand the importance of a right being natural or not. If it's not natural does that mean we shouldn't have it? If we want to have a right why do we have to decide if it's natural or not. I think that some people just use this argument to fit their political views, but I don't see any validity to the argument.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Kidicious
I don't understand the importance of a right being natural or not. If it's not natural does that mean we shouldn't have it? If we want to have a right why do we have to decide if it's natural or not. I think that some people just use this argument to fit their political views, but I don't see any validity to the argument.

If rights are natural, in a sense they can not be changed, and thus only one form of poltics is valid, that which accords to all these natural rights: all other forms of politics then are immoral. So this is a very important debate.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by GePap
If rights are natural, in a sense they can not be changed, and thus only one form of poltics is valid, that which accords to all these natural rights: all other forms of politics then are immoral. So this is a very important debate.

But rights can be changed. They can be taken away and granted. You can say that unnatural rights aren't valid, but what does that matter unless you have the political power to deny them?

[Imran Siddiqui]

Yep, GePap is correct... if there ARE natural rights, then there is only one right answer, and one form of government that is 'right'. If there are no natural rights, then governments can grant and take away rights and not be considered 'wrong'.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Ouch... that was a good one . If natural rights ARE our universal desires, then Berz you open up a can of worms. No one wants to starve, no one wants to be without shelter.

I give Berz a possible out, sicne he can always claim that since you can starve without the explicit moral act of another, not starving is not a right: but if he whishes to take this out, he does need to say why the explicit act of allowing someone to starve (given that you may have the resources to stop it wihtout yourself or those you are resposible for starving) is not a violation of this fundamental moral code.