Natural Rights

[Agathon]

Originally posted by GePap


No, he is saying you can not prove the Ought simply by proving there is the is. He is saying you have to prove the ought independently, with another arguement.

Exactly.

[Agathon]

*Applauds the Templar*

[David Floyd]

You floundered around for a couple of hundred posts and the debate ended, mainly because I couldn't be bothered with it.

Yeah, OK

Then, if you say that it doesn't matter who does it.

Sure it does. If I commit murder, I'm acting immorally. If someone else commits murder, they are acting immorally.

And it also loses you the argument since if what it does to the victim is what really matters then we should prevent that happening as much as possible - in other words we should lower the overall number of rights violations.

Obviously we should undertake every moral means to prevent murder - and NOT committing murder is a very moral and very easy way to start behaving morally.

Sometimes this may involve murdering people ourselves to prevent a greater evil.

Murdering 1 person because someone who holds a the power of life and death over 100 tells you to is NOT preventing a greater evil. It's simply committing murder because someone told you to.

You can also in my scenario prevent them killing 100 people by killing one, if he gives you the choice.

Oh, well, if he gives me the choice, then I will choose the option that he should not kill 100 people, and that I should not (will not) kill one person. But the decision of whether or not to kill 100 people ultimately lies with him. I can tell him not to do it, but he ultimately decides - it's his responsibility.

In my case you can stop him doing it.

Funny, I didn't see the option in your scenario where I could physically take action against the murderer, or the option where I knew his name and location and could call the police.

This is simply false. If you don't kill someone in my scenario 100 people suffer.

Sure, but that's a result of someone else's immoral behavior, not your moral behavior. Surely you won't argue that my decision NOT to commit murder was responsible for someone else deciding TO commit murder.

Of course you didn't cause this, but you had the power to intervene.

The only "power to intervene" would be taking action against the murderer, to restrain him. I guess I could also intervene in the life of the one innocent person I am being asked to kill, but that is a different and unrelated situation.

You are changing the case. If he says that he will kill 100 and you have good reason to believe that he will carry out his threat (and we have good reasons for predicting other peoples' actions all the time) then if you really care about there being less overall evil in the world you will commit the one murder.

I don't believe that morality is a math equation. Morality governs each individuals behavior. Someone may very well carry out a threat to commit mass murder, but that act ultimately isn't predicated on my decision to commit murder, but rather on the decision of another person to kill 100 people. He will decide "yes" or "no".

You can't get out of this by saying that the actions have no bearing on each other because in this case (and thousands of others where people force decisions on us by promising to do things) that claim is simply false.

Just because the mass murderer is trying to shift blame away from himself and onto me doesn't change the fact that we are responsible for our own actions. Are you trying to make the argument that I am responsible for the deaths of 100 should I choose not to commit murder? THAT is clearly preposterous - I had nothing to do with those 100 people, and most likely don't even know who they are.

If someone calls me on the phone and tells me that he has 100 people, and will kill all of them unless I kill the next person I see, then I hang up and call the police. I don't go out and commit murder hoping to influence someone else not to commit murder. That's stupid.

The real question is, do you think 100 murders are worse than one? And if you believe that, it is wholly irrational to settle for more if you really believe that what's bad is what it does to the victim.

Murder is wrong no matter how many people you kill. It's wrong for me to murder 1 person, and it's wrong for someone else to murder 100 people. Murder is ALWAYS wrong.

[GePap]

quote:
If you kill 1 person because he says that if you don't, he'll kill 100, you haven't prevented the murder of 100, you've simply murdered one person. Only HE can prevent himself from murdering 100 people, UNLESS you can take action against HIM.

I agree with DF on this, but this is just a function of this particualr example. More important is an exmaple were you KNOW that if you kill one, then you will stop him from killing 100, since the possibility of "lies" has been neutralized. In that instance, you have a moral choice of which wrong is the lesser wrong: you commiting a murder (whether is is justifiable murder is an open question) or whether by refusing to commit a violation of rights yourself, you did the better things than by not stopping the violation of the rights of 100 times as many people. Now, the person most at guilt remaisn the one planning to kill 100, since it is his choice that sets of the chain of events, but even if the whole scenerio stems from the choice of that one individual, you are still given a choice, even if a rather imperfect one.

[GePap]

Another issue for Berz:

You idosyncraticaly define murder as "unjustified killing of an innocent", and you went so far as to say that killing a murderer would not be murder (I must assume becuase he is not innocent).

The question is whether one can possibly ever forfeit Natural rights. You say rights come from our creation (which gives us a moral sense, according to Berz) and universal desires. The thing is, you seem to think that if you violate the right of another, all of a sudden your existence (the result of your creation) and your universal desires (certainly the murderer des not whish to be murdered) no longer matters. The question is why? What can posibly deny you your Natural rights simply becuase you chose to ignore your moral sense?

[David Floyd]

More important is an exmaple were you KNOW that if you kill one, then you will stop him from killing 100, since the possibility of "lies" has been neutralized. In that instance, you have a moral choice of which wrong is the lesser wrong: you commiting a murder (whether is is justifiable murder is an open question) or whether by refusing to commit a violation of rights yourself, you did the better things than by not stopping the violation of the rights of 100 times as many people. Now, the person most at guilt remaisn the one planning to kill 100, since it is his choice that sets of the chain of events, but even if the whole scenerio stems from the choice of that one individual, you are still given a choice, even if a rather imperfect one.

Actually yes, this is a much better example. If you are acting with complete information, it would be appropriate to restrain the person. By "complete information", I don't mean that God came down and told you - I mean provable information.

For example, if you were to overhear someone bragging in a bar about how he had 100 hostages, and it was obvious he was serious, it would probably be appropriate to restrain him until the police arrived and let them sort it out. Obviously, if the guy told you what his plans were in an attempt to get you involved, it would certainly be appropriate to restrain him. But it's hard for me to imagine a realistic scenario where you have complete information.

As to killing the person, it would be appropriate only if you witnessed him about to kill those 100 people (or however many), the same as any other case of defending another.

[David Floyd]

Note that even if you don't act to restrain the would-be murderer, I don't think you are responsible for those murders. Again, you are responsible for your own actions.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by David Floyd
So individuals are better off without any of their property? And what if a society decides that slavery is OK? It may be immoral, but who cares, right?

The fact that you say that it's better to own private property as opposed to the community owning community property has absolutely nothing to do with your idea that private ownership is a natural right. You're just saying that people would want private property more. Where's the connection with the idea of natural rights. What if they prefer community property? Then what do you have to say about natural rights?

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Lorizael
The point is that if natural rights were to exist, then if every person were granted those rights, there couldn't be a better situation.

If you think so then you should make that argument, but just saying that people should have rights, because otherwise the universe would be upset is pointless. What really matters is that people have the rights which will benefit them.

[GePap]

Originally posted by David Floyd
Note that even if you don't act to restrain the would-be murderer, I don't think you are responsible for those murders. Again, you are responsible for your own actions.

Not doing something has just as many consequences as doing somehting: different set, but consequences nonetheless, including moral ones.

[David Floyd]

You're just saying that people would want private property more. Where's the connection with the idea of natural rights. What if they prefer community property? Then what do you have to say about natural rights?

If 100% of them want communal property, that's fine, but when any single person wants his or her property back, that person has a right to it.

[David Floyd]

Not doing something has just as many consequences as doing somehting: different set, but consequences nonetheless, including moral ones.

I didn't say that you aren't responsible for ANYTHING, just not responsible for the act of murder committed by the other person.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by David Floyd
If 100% of them want communal property, that's fine, but when any single person wants his or her property back, that person has a right to it.

Not if the govt takes that right away.

[loinburger]

Originally posted by GePap
You can not know the exact mechanism of why your cat may chnage behavior: perheps the thinking is "enough to satisfy my hunger" vs. "not enough to do it".

It doesn't really matter what you call the concept, the fact remains that my cat clearly has some concept for "more" and "less" (or "enough" and "not-enough" or whatever else you want to call it) that exists independently of human language.

And I do question your use of "mathematics" in this sense. No, I do not think that a cat's possible understanding of quentity differences equates to "mathematics"

Why? And what would you prefer that it be called?

It does not behoove you to prove anything, if there is no judge.

Who said anything about proof? I needn't prove to anybody (except perhaps myself) that somebody acted with malicious premeditation in order for me to alter my treatment of that person accordingly.

The very concept of murder can not exist free of the concepts of law, or at least norms, morality, guilt and innoncence, justice and judgement.

1. The concept of "premeditation" exists independently of that which you have listed. The concept of "malice" exists independently of that which you have listed. Both of these terms have legal definitions, yet both also have non-legal definitions which are still applicable. There's your pre-societal concept of murder.
2. Why would it matter if a concept of "murder" cannot exists without a concept of "morality"?

Actually, language is, given all the different languages that exist, an arbitrary creation of man.

Language is not "created by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle." Societies don't just randomly invent words and insert them into the lexicon, nor do they randomly invent grammatical structures etc. In other words, language is not arbitrary.

...there is no UNIVERSAL language that all humans use...

Not all human languages are the same, but all human languages have common elements.

If different groups can have different languages, they can have different systems of justice.

And if different groups have languages that share common elements, then they will have concepts of justice that share common elements (and thus systems of justice that share common elements, assuming that they maintain internal consistency).

You know there is A word for it, even if you don;t kow it.

You believe that there is a word for it. However, there is not always a word for it. In that case, you'll often invent one. (Bootylicious. Funktified. Phantasmagoric. Etc.)

The question is, can you know of a concept knowing there IS njo word for it, no word for it YOU could know.

No word you could know? Of course there's no such thing -- when a concept arises that does not have a word associated with it, then we simply assign a word for it (assuming that the concept is worth integrating into our lexicon).

Exaclty my point! ICould we not then assume that prior to the existence of the word for it, the concept of it also did not exist?

Of course not! If I describe a "sort of furry two-ton heavy thing that makes bleu cheese," and for the sake of simplicity I start calling it a "spunkilator," then are you claiming that the word "spunkilator" spontaneously came into existence with my first describing the "sort of furry two-ton heavy thing that makes bleu cheese"?

At best you can show me that al mammals have an innate sense of "more", "less", so forth and so on.

Well then, there's your concept-without-language.

(birds call to each other to communicate: is this langauge?).

Language: "Any means of conveying or communicating ideas." In other words, if the birds are calling to each other in order to communicate, then by definition they are using language.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by GePap

I agree with DF on this, but this is just a function of this particualr example. More important is an exmaple were you KNOW that if you kill one, then you will stop him from killing 100, since the possibility of "lies" has been neutralized. In that instance, you have a moral choice of which wrong is the lesser wrong: you commiting a murder (whether is is justifiable murder is an open question) or whether by refusing to commit a violation of rights yourself, you did the better things than by not stopping the violation of the rights of 100 times as many people. Now, the person most at guilt remaisn the one planning to kill 100, since it is his choice that sets of the chain of events, but even if the whole scenerio stems from the choice of that one individual, you are still given a choice, even if a rather imperfect one.

That's my example. You have good reason to believe he will go through on his threat. It doesn't absolve him of responsibility at all.