Natural Rights

[Drake Tungsten]

The concept and the word come as one: or casn you give me an example of a concept without its own word.

That thing you do when you're walking at someone in a hallway and you juke right, but they juke left, so you're still going at each other, then you juke left and they juke right and you're still going at each other, so finally you both stop, laugh at each other and someone let's the other person make the first move.

[GePap]

And that thing is?

[Sava]

DRAKE...

[David Floyd]

And how would you know you did not get back the right number unless prior to giving the cows in, you had the concept of how many you were giving him in the first place?

Precisely the point. No matter what you call it, you know that you lent *whatever you call two* cows to your friend, and only got back *whatever you call one*.

Has anyone ever been tired for the acts of Mao?

So because Mao wasn't put on trial and convicted, his actions were perfectly OK?

As for Pol Pot, he and his gorup becmae rebels, and the new admin. did seek them out.

So the Killing Fields were only wrong once the new administration said they were?

And sicne Stalin was denoucned after his death, people who acted with him. like Beria, could be taken out.

So murdering millions of people only became wrong when it was politically possible to say so?

All you are doing is reducing the definition of murder to whatever is politically convenient.

No, since this gets inot the area of the legitimacy of such laws,

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?

Since the trials were not held, and would not have been held, in German courts or using the German legal code, most certainly.

So, you are arguing that either a)there was an outside morality that made the German acts wrong, or b)might creates moral right and moral and legal legitimacy.

[Drake Tungsten]

And that thing is?

There's no word for it. It is a concept, however.

[David Floyd]

But without the ability to discover the facts the concept would be useless, since you are unable to act on it or use it in any way.

So you are admitting that the concept exists, outside of government or the courts?

And what you have never really provided is a good standing for your absolute vision of morality, which is the one things you must do.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I can prove natural rights 100%. I can make a compelling argument against moral relativism, and I can make a good case that your beliefs about the legitimacy of laws are wrong, and I can argue that rights cannot simply be created by the government out of thin air.

[GePap]

touche... (I don't even know what smiley to use).

Lets just see that concept last beyond this thread without you naming it.

[Drake Tungsten]

touche...

Don't worry; despite that little set back, you're still arguing for the correct side in this debate.

[David Floyd]

I'm going to play some C&C: Generals now, be back later or more likely tomorrow...

[GePap]

Originally posted by David Floyd
Precisely the point. No matter what you call it, you know that you lent *whatever you call two* cows to your friend, and only got back *whatever you call one*.

actually, you know you lent him more than one and you got back one. The important concept here right now is ONE, not TWO.

So because Mao wasn't put on trial and convicted, his actions were perfectly OK?

Depends whom you ask, no?

So the Killing Fields were only wrong once the new administration said they were?

They were only illegal after the fall of the regime: ad for them bweing wrong, someone didn;t think so: The Khmer Rouge.

So murdering millions of people only became wrong when it was politically possible to say so?

All you are doing is reducing the definition of murder to whatever is politically convenient.

Since neither morality nor law is universal, to a certain degree only those with political power can define and act on the concept.

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?

Becuase the question is what given the government legitimacy, which has zippo to do with universal moral codes. Should the power of goevrnemnt come from all people living under it? Only one specific group? From a mandate form heaven?

So, you are arguing that either a)there was an outside morality that made the German acts wrong, or b)might creates moral right and moral and legal legitimacy.

NO, The Germans were acting within a pre-existing moral and legal web that predates them, and without the power to overthrow it, the lacked the power to change it.

[Giant_Squid]

I sorta skimmed the rest of the thread without reading it completely, so if something was already answered and you want to ignore it go ahead.:

1) Natural rights are expressions of shared, universal desires.
1a) Not wanting to be enslaved and murdered are universal desires.

I can't really argue with this because you're using it as a definition, but I can point out some problems. First, not wanting to be murdered is not a universal desire - what about suicides? Obviously this kind of thing is a very small fraction of the population, but if there are any exceptions it makes it difficult to use. Second, I would clarify this to avoid situations like "It is a universal desire to be really rich, therefore I have a right to a lot of money". You explain this in Sava's post by making rights a "universal desire that does not infringe upon the desires of others." Every desire has a possible conflict with another person's; your desire to live may conflict with your archenemy's desire that you were dead. You also refer to it as "a right that does not violate the right to be left alone", but you fail to give an argument for why your desire to be left alone is any better than my desire to interfere with you (and if you do not believe that the desire to interfere with other human beings is a pretty universal one, you haven't been looking )

In a more psychological sense, we would have to analyze this concept of desire, and we would find pretty easily that people only desire one thing - happiness. If I desire a new car, it's because it would make me happy to get it. In the same sense, if I desire freedom of religion, it's because practicing my religion makes me happy (or being interfered with in it makes me unhappy). This would make happiness the ultimate right, superseding the subordinate "right" not to be interfered with, which exists only because being interfered with makes you unhappy, and would lead to a utilitarian system.

2) Natural rights are moral claims of ownership beginning with oneself and his labor, but moral claims consistent with universal desires.

Doesn't follow. "There is a universal desire to live, therefore you shouldn't kill anyone"? We need a postulate to link these. Maybe "If there is a universal desire for something, you shouldn't act against that universal desire", but that's basically just assuming the argument as a postulate, which you can do but it doesn't prove much . The Golden Rule might work better, but it would have the side effect of justifying all sorts of other moral things in an equal sense. I don't want to be stolen from so I shouldn't steal, but on the other hand I want free health care so I should make sure other people have free health care, and if I have to steal to get it there's no obvious reason to prefer one of these two things over the other.

2a) If you "own" yourself, then you own your labor.

Depends on a preconceived definition of ownership and stuff. First, I would say that before we came up with this whole system no one would speak of owning themselves. They'd just say they were themselves. Ownership is a relation between two different objects. X owns Y. Saying X owns X seems to me as problematic as saying X is the son of X. I suppose you could say X owns his body, but that posits a soul of some sort and gets all metaphysical. Also, there is a bit of problem between labor and fruits of labor. I cut down a tree and make a nice wooden table. I own the work I put into that table, but there's no real reason why I should own the wood. I suppose you could say no one owned the wood before I did so I took it and now it's mine because I can't sell the table without selling the wood too, but that sounds more like an argument from convenience than anything logical or philosophical.

3) Natural rights are limited to human interaction, not interactions with other life forms.
3a) If a lion eats you, we don't say the lion has deprived you of your natural right to life.

I don't think this follows from anything else here. It seems more like an argument from convenience because we can't talk a lion into acting morally anyway. But you've debated it enough here so I'll leave you be on that particular point.
On the other hand, you do try and extend natural rights in the other direction, saying humans can come to own nature, which seems like a massive contradiction of saying natural rights are limited to human interaction. If I decide I own a tree, that's saying natural rights come into play in my relationship with that tree.

4) They come from existence, i.e., by virtue of your existence, you have natural rights given by that which created the universe and life. In other words, the only evidence we have of this creator's "will" or "design" is what we can see in nature, and since we don't see chains around us leading to those self-appointed "leaders" of our destiny, they have no moral claim to make our decisions about how we live.

Aak! You're looking at a very limited portion of the manifest Universe as the Creator's will. If you are alive, then you say that by virtue of the fact that that's the way it is, the Creator wanted it that way and I have no right to take it. But if I murder you anyway, then THAT's the way it is and it seems the Creator wanted that too. You are taking arbitrary human actions and drawing a line exactly where you want it and saying that's God's will. In other words, you're around, you make money, I steal the money. You're saying the first two actions are part of God's will and the last action is not, despite God having permitted the last action exactly as much as He permitted the first two.
In a broader sense, one could say if there's a Communist government, then that's what God must have wanted since they won whatever revolution led to there being a communist government, so we should follow them. I seem to remember a whole lot of Renaissance people using this exact argument with exactly the glaring omissions at the convenient points that you are.

[loinburger]

Originally posted by GePap
Oh Loin, mathemetics are a human creation.

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.)

And who decides both premeditation and malice? if I come pout of nowhere and kill someone, what can you possibly use to call that murder, if you have no way of knwing if it was either a)premeditated or b) with malice (however malice is defined here)?

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...)

The only way i can see that anyone other than the person who killed could possibly know if it was premeditated and with malice is with some sort of court proceding, meanign that prior to a court of some type, the notion of murder would have no practicality.

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.

When you find me a math equation created prior to either of these, and without any connection to these, then you have a point.

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.

Who is changing the words?

You said this:

Previously posted by Gepap
since what is "justifiable" can change if you change what is "justice" fr a given group.

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

You agreed that to have somehting be "justifiable", you must have a concept of justice", but not all concepts of "justice" are the same, so the same act may be "justifiable" at one point, and "unjustifiable" at another.

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?

The concept and the word come as one: or casn you give me an example of a concept without its own word.

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).

Originally posted by Sava
david floyd just killed the thread

Aw, you're just jealous.

[Lorizael]

Berzerker, with the existence of a creator, absolutely everything you say is correct, though there are some vague points left, especially with regards to property.

But you've yet to show any evidence of a creator.

Without a creator, you have no argument whatsoever.

Show that there is a creator.

[Berzerker]

I'm baaaack! Had to check my victorious fantasy baseball teams romp through the mediocre competition. Nice to see someone not babbling on and on about animals though. But I see a new debate about the definition of murder has taken over. Oh God!

Squid -

I can't really argue with this because you're using it as a definition, but I can point out some problems.

Well, I'm using rights (moral claims) and universal desires as synonyms to avoid the subjectivity moral arguments usually sink into. You know, "you're immoral", "no I'm not", blah blah blah. Morality has to be based on a broader principle and when that principle is applied to various issues, it becomes easier to see the truth.

First, not wanting to be murdered is not a universal desire - what about suicides? Obviously this kind of thing is a very small fraction of the population, but if there are any exceptions it makes it difficult to use.

Ugh that was dealt with, but telling you to go look it up is like asking you to find that needle I hid in a haystack. Oh wait, Gepap and I debated that in another thread, so here goes: suicide isn't murder, even if I can convince someone to help me die. Murder implies a victim who doesn't want to die. I should add that the universal desires I'm talking about exist with all things being equal (is that a valid phrase here?), so creating caveats that make death more preferable to a life of immense suffering doesn't mean the person hurting wants to die, much less be murdered, just that a more peaceful and sooner death is the better option. Remove the suffering and you remove the desire to end the suffering via death. Like the conjoined twins (not exactly suicide) who decided to take a huge risk with their lives rather than continue on in that situation...

Second, I would clarify this to avoid situations like "It is a universal desire to be really rich, therefore I have a right to a lot of money".

Actually, that isn't a universal desire, plenty of people try to lead a humble existence from monastic monks to Hopi Indians. But a right is not a guarantee you will fulfill your desire, only a moral claim against others using force or fraud to keep you from pursuing your happiness.

Every desire has a possible conflict with another person's; your desire to live may conflict with your archenemy's desire that you were dead.

As far as rights are concerned, a right to live is a right against others killing you (small distinction, but I want to avoid nitpicking )

You also refer to it as "a right that does not violate the right to be left alone", but you fail to give an argument for why your desire to be left alone is any better than my desire to interfere with you (and if you do not believe that the desire to interfere with other human beings is a pretty universal one, you haven't been looking )

To continue from my last response, your desire to interfere (conflicting desires) is not universal. The desire not to be murdered is universal.

In a more psychological sense, we would have to analyze this concept of desire, and we would find pretty easily that people only desire one thing - happiness. If I desire a new car, it's because it would make me happy to get it. In the same sense, if I desire freedom of religion, it's because practicing my religion makes me happy (or being interfered with in it makes me unhappy). This would make happiness the ultimate right, superseding the subordinate "right" not to be interfered with, which exists only because being interfered with makes you unhappy, and would lead to a utilitarian system.

You had me up until that leap into ideology. Utilitarianism isn't concerned with what makes you happy, it's concerned with increasing the happiness of some people at the expense of the happiness of others as long as the outcome is ostensibly a net gain in happiness (or somethink like that).

Doesn't follow. "There is a universal desire to live, therefore you shouldn't kill anyone"? We need a postulate to link these. Maybe "If there is a universal desire for something, you shouldn't act against that universal desire", but that's basically just assuming the argument as a postulate, which you can do but it doesn't prove much . The Golden Rule might work better, but it would have the side effect of justifying all sorts of other moral things in an equal sense. I don't want to be stolen from so I shouldn't steal, but on the other hand I want free health care so I should make sure other people have free health care, and if I have to steal to get it there's no obvious reason to prefer one of these two things over the other.

Health care isn't free, someone pays - and I doubt you'd find universal agreement on taxing Peter to enrich Paul. Btw, the Golden Rule does play into this though, but as some of the more biblically minded people here (like Obiwan) has pointed out, that rule would have us act positively towards others instead of just leaving them alone. That's fine, but there are plenty of busybodies who would then start interfering with everyone else because they'd want others interfering with them (they say with a straight face) in the name of their "salvation" (just don't try it, that's a one way street inspite of their claims ). You know, this kind of person - "I need to put you in cage to stop your sinning, but don't you dare put me in a cage when you decide I'm sinning".

Depends on a preconceived definition of ownership and stuff. First, I would say that before we came up with this whole system no one would speak of owning themselves.

True, but slavery, e.g, has a way of promoting language in more simple terms - as Frederick Douglas said: slavery is man-stealing (I love that simplicity).

Ownership is a relation between two different objects. X owns Y. Saying X owns X seems to me as problematic as saying X is the son of X. I suppose you could say X owns his body, but that posits a soul of some sort and gets all metaphysical.

The soul isn't necessary, just existence, being, or presence.

Also, there is a bit of problem between labor and fruits of labor. I cut down a tree and make a nice wooden table. I own the work I put into that table, but there's no real reason why I should own the wood. I suppose you could say no one owned the wood before I did so I took it and now it's mine because I can't sell the table without selling the wood too, but that sounds more like an argument from convenience than anything logical or philosophical.

If no one else owned the wood, no one but you can have a moral claim to it.

Aak! You're looking at a very limited portion of the manifest Universe as the Creator's will.

Sorry, can't see beyond what is within range of my binoculars. But if the creator has a different design somewhere else, that's for the people there to see.

If you are alive, then you say that by virtue of the fact that that's the way it is, the Creator wanted it that way and I have no right to take it. But if I murder you anyway, then THAT's the way it is and it seems the Creator wanted that too.

Which is why universality and the moral principle it creates matters. No one wants to be murdered, and not everyone wants to murder.

You are taking arbitrary human actions and drawing a line exactly where you want it and saying that's God's will.

No, just using universality to avoid subjectivity. If we all agree on the line, we have a moral principle to work with.

In other words, you're around, you make money, I steal the money. You're saying the first two actions are part of God's will and the last action is not, despite God having permitted the last action exactly as much as He permitted the first two.

This assumes God allows behavior or has the power or desire to stop it. But I've been waiting for someone to make this argument, very good (not that I see it as a flaw since I'm dealing with universality and morality).

In a broader sense, one could say if there's a Communist government, then that's what God must have wanted since they won whatever revolution led to there being a communist government, so we should follow them. I seem to remember a whole lot of Renaissance people using this exact argument with exactly the glaring omissions at the convenient points that you are.

I'm not a communist or a determinist, nor do I believe that the creator endorses all behavior simply because it occurs. But if there is any morality the creator can endorse, it would be universal desires since these are the hard wired evidence of a creator's "will".

Thx Squid, that was one of the better posts.

[Berzerker]

Lorizael -

Berzerker, with the existence of a creator, absolutely everything you say is correct, though there are some vague points left, especially with regards to property.

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.

But you've yet to show any evidence of a creator.

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.

Without a creator, you have no argument whatsoever.

Someone or something created existence, doesn't matter to me who or what, only that we can look at creation for evidence of "intent" so to speak.

Show that there is a creator.

I could, but then I'd have to kill you.

If this creator really appointed people like Hitler and Stalin to run our lives, I'd expect to see some evidence other than their ability to bribe or scare people into killing at their behest. 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...

My God, I must have spent 5 hours on this thread tonite...Hey Squid, must be evidence the creator wants me to spread the good word...