Alonzo Fyfe

I am one who thinks that rights theories have several problems.

Chief among these is determining in what the rightness or wrongness (the good or the bad) in these rights consists. How do we determine where rights exist? What instruments do we create to detect their presence?

They are, in my mind, a myth -- a fiction. Perhaps it is a useful falsehood, but a falsehood nonetheless.

Contract theory has the following problem: What is the relevance between a hypothetical world in which there exists some sort of contract and this world where there is no contract? The fact that I should flee this house as quickly as possible in a hypothetical world in which this house is on fire does not imply that I should flee this house as quickly as possible in the real world where there is no fire.

Socio-biology may well explain where our desires come from -- our disposition to like and dislike certain things -- including those likes and dislikes that we sometimes call moral sentiments. But it also has a significant logical gap to cross -- the gap between what 'is' and what 'ought to be'. As the Scotting philosopher David Hume once argued, many of these systems of morality begin with relationships joined by the word "is" (facts about evolution), and end up with propositions containing the word "ought", without explaining how "ought" can be derived from "is".

(I, for one, feel that this fact/value chasm can be crossed. Yet, the sociobiologist fail to provide a suitable crossing.)

Argus

Right and wrong are purely man-made. So everybody has his own (selfish)opinion about whats right and wrong. Why should there be any lawyers or judges if right is so clearly?
By the way: Will there be more right if there are more laws? I don´t think so. Rights will rule out each other.
With a mass of laws, nobody will be sure what are his rights. But on the other side: With few laws there are holes that can be exploited by some. <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />
Which in the end means: No matter what you do, it´s wrong.
I heard Germany is the nation with the most laws.

August Spies

Bill or anyone:

Do you have sources I could use to support such a claim? thanks....

Bill

I was only able to do a quick search, but look at the information beginning at the sub-heading of "EVIDENCE FOR INTRAUTERINE HEARING AS MAJOR SOURCE OF LEARNING" in the paper <a href="http://www.transitionsmusic.com/ISMM_ARTICLE.html" target="_blank">MUSIC, STRESS REDUCTION AND MEDICAL COST SAVINGS IN THE NEONATAL INTENSIVE CARE UNIT</a>. That part of the paper has references to other studies, which the details of the references are at the end of the paper (as per usual for this sort of paper).

I personally feel that there is a strong scientific foundation for this claim.

== Bill

99Percent

wow, so many interesting things are being talked about at once here!

August Spies: However, clearly to have security you must give up some liberty. And in modern society to have security means paying taxes to a goverment, IE giving up property.

Actually its not the government of which you are paying "taxes" its the police of which the government has authority over. The police could be contracted out and then instead of paying taxes you pay the police for protection. The government only makes sure that the police itself doesn't become an aggressor over other property owners (which would be anarcho-capitalism).

Bill: Isn't it rather interesting that the folks who wrote the Declaration of Independence were all fairly wealthy white males?

At first glance it would seem that they enacted these rights in order to perpuate their own wealth. But why would they enact the rights if they could just buy weapons and armies and defend their wealth through force? I think they recognized the fact the wealth is generated much more easily if there is free trade between men when the basic rules are established from the beginning: right of liberty and right of property. They reasoned out that wealth can serve a much better purpose if no one was fighting over it and instead produced more of it.

Where it gets to be a serious "moral acid" is when the system is so complex that the liklihood of getting any serious consequences from cheating are so low as to make it silly for even honest people to not cheat.

Interesting concept: "Moral acid". I would think it shows underlying subjectivism in laws enacted that are clearly unenforcable - these are for example consensual crimes where there is no actual victim involved.

I'm talking about the infamous Internal Revenue Code of the United States of America. I figure that this code is more like a poker game, where I try to reduce my taxes as much as possible by categorizing my income and expenses in ways that end up minimizing my tax payments. This sort of a system becomes a "moral acid" because, as I said, it trains even honest people to cheat in circumstances where the liklihood of serious consequences is virtually non-existent. Once you begin compromising your basic moral values, it becomes easier and easier to cheat in other circumstances.

Yeah, the IRS enacts a whole bunch of unenforcable laws based on pure subjectivist politics. It dictates an endless charade of exemptions based on totally arbitrary and subjective criteria. When you get audited it becomes a battle on subjective values to determine if those deductions and exemptions actually apply to your situation.

Alonzo Fyfe: Chief among these is determining in what the rightness or wrongness (the good or the bad) in these rights consists. How do we determine where rights exist? What instruments do we create to detect their presence?

They are not detected as they are based on abstract ideas arising from reason and common sense.

First you recognize the economic necessity of mankind. Man contrary to animals does not obtain his resources for survival and well being automatically. He he has to produce them.

Secondly you recognize that man produces more and correctly if you allow him to decide for himself what is good, whatever it is, and how to produce it. You cannot force people to think. Thinking and therefore reason comes out of volition.

Thirdly, you recognize that men can and will cheat, steal, kill, coerce, threat, etc in order to take away resource already produced by others and get ahead economically. You find out the best way to eliminate cheating, stealing and killing and enhance freedom for the production of humanly produced values.

Out of these three simple premises you derive the right for liberty, property and pursuit of happiness.

Alonzo Fyfe

Not exactly. Out of these three simple premises you get a utilitarian defense of certain rules which, when generally followed, tend to produce an overall benefit.

Utilitarian (teleological) theories are typically conceived of as providing an alternative to rights (deontological) theories. They have been since Jeremy Bentham declared that talk of natural rights was "nonsense on stilts."

If one wants to define a "right" as a "rule that is generally useful", then that's fine -- the right ceases to exist the instant the rule ceases to be generally useful. But rights theorists typically hold a must stronger view, that the right persists indefinitely and independently of their general usefulness.

(As a motive- (desire-) utilitarian myself, I have no problem with definitions of rights that ultimately reduce rights to utilitarian concepts. It's the non-utilitarian conception of rights as independent moral properties that I object to.

Such properties do not exist.

[ April 26, 2002: Message edited by: Alonzo Fyfe ]</p>

August Spies

99percent:

But why would they enact the rights if they could just buy weapons and armies and defend their wealth through force?

This seems a little like saying "why would kings make up arguments for divine rights when they could just use force?"

well because the revolution was also pushed by the lower classes and no one would have bought it if a new aristocrisy was clearly being layed out.

They are not detected as they are based on abstract ideas arising from reason and common sense.

I always find it humorourus that people will argue natural rights are merely "common sense"

If they are self-evident, why does EVERY natural rights theorist have a different view of them? Why won't even hobbes and locke agree on what they are?

boneyard bill

Locke's views of human rights were not widely accepted even in his own day. When Jefferson wrote the declaration, he had to change Lockes' "life, liberty, and property" to "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness." Including the term "property" as a right was too controversial. It was the conservatives of his day who would object to such a claim and would have done so on much the same grounds as we do today. Locke's philosophy presupposed an individualism that we do not possess. We are "by nature" social animals. How therefore can we possess "individual" rights that supercede the social order? We are products of the social order, not autonomous agents who possess some special essence that is independent of society. Of course, it is common for us today to think of ourselves as autonomous agents but the idea doesn't hold up to critical analysis. Individual rights are the achievement of a society, not the grounding principles of one. Civilization has survived for millenia without such a concept. Our rights are traditional, not inherent or God-given.

This is the reason it is so difficult to transplant democracy to other cultures. Look at all the former colonies. The Western powers left them with democratic forms of government but very few of them have remained that way. India is an exception and so are the Phillipines. But what other former colonies remain democratic? Very few. Rights must be embedded in a wide array of social institutions not just in a few government documents. In a society where a "good family man" does whatever he can to help his relatives, you are going to have a government built on nepotism and chronyism, and leader who didn't fill government positions with relatives would be regarded as derelict in his duty. This is just one example among many. Not possible forms of social arrangements lead necessarily to human rights in the Western sense of the term.

August Spies

Good post bill, if you have time to elaborate id like to read it. Ill post some more thoughts tomorrow, 5 in the morning. shite.

boneyard bill

August Spies writes:

If I'm going to get into it I might as well do the whole nine yards. So lets begin with the moral question itself. So let me distinguish between natural rights and natural law. Natural rights is the claim of certain enlightenment philosophers ie. Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau; that human individuals possess certain inalienable rights that can be discerned though reason to be a part of the natural order of things. Natural law is the claim of certain ancient philosophers, particularly the Stoics, that moral principles can be derived from nature through the use of reason. I agree with natural law and disagree with natural rights.

I begin with the proposition that humans are, by nature, social animals. As such we can determine what is morally proper behavior for social individuals through the old bromide, "there's honor among theives." Consider a group of people who were out to achieve a certain set of goals - power, wealth, fame, etc. They were prepared to do anything whatsoever to achieve these goals. Morality was to influence their behavior in no way whatsoever. They were prepared to lie, kill, torture, terrorize, whatever. No moral principles of any kind were to be allowed to interfere with their aims.

The question arises. Although they are committed to lying, disloyalty, betrayal, murder, and terrorism as preferred methods for dealing with their targets; how well would these principles work in dealing with each other?

It should be apparent that the application of these principles within the group would be disastrous. They will never achieve their goal of conquering the world, or even the tiniest part of it if they cannot trust each other. If they lie, cheat, betray, and murder each other; they will become a completely dysfunctional group.

The principles of honestly, loyalty, obedience, and committment to a common purpose are essential characteristics of a functional social group. These are moral principles as opposed to immoral ones. This is natural law. These moral principles aren't simply expedient principles for a functional social group. They define what a functional social group is. They are inherent in the nature of any society.

Natural rights are not inherent in the definition of an individual. An individual who does not own property, is not free, is not permitted to criticize the government, and isn't even allowed the full fruits of his own labor; is still an individual and a perfectly functional one.

Rights are not conferred on the individual by nature. They conferred by the society itself. Historically rights and obligations were not clearly distinguished. The serf had a right to till the soil. But that right included the obligation to give a percentage of the crop to his liege lord. The knight had a right to maintenance from his lord but also an obligation to defend his lord, and the serfs, from attack by marauders and thieves.

The idea that an individual had rights apart from responsibilites seems to have arisen in the middle ages and found particular expression in English common law. In a nascent sense, at least, it was present in British common law even before Hobbes and Locke wrote on the subject. But Locke, in particular, was interested in defending the point in support of the Revolution of 1688 which had, after all, overthrown the king.

But Locke was also heir to Descartes, and it was Descartes, more than anyone else, who had created the notion of the autonomous self. "I think, therefore, I am." Descartes' self is defined exclusively as a thinking subject without reference to relationships with any other creatures or to society as a whold. This individualism has played a huge role in defining our understanding of individual rights. And it is because of this self-understanding that Locke and others could claim that these rights were "natural" and inherent and not merely the achievement of their particular social order.

But if natural rights are not inherent in nature, they are nonetheless extremely practical for the social order. We have seen that individual freedom has opened up huge areas of creativity and innovation from people of lowly birth who have produced great benefits for society as a whole. Michael Faraday comes to mind and, of course, Thomas Edison.

But then we see that individual rights are not really the rights of individuals but the right of the society as a whole. Individual idiosyncracies are tolerated because a few of these crackpots turn out to be creative geniuses. And this raises the possibility that we can go too far in asserting individual rights. And there's also the question of how one could, or if one should, try to transplant these rights in other countries. But I've said enough for now.