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Human Rights
- Thread starter Danoff
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Danoff
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There is no such thing as "your logic". Also, you appear to conflate logic with ideology here. So you dismiss logic as essentially just being my particular ideology. Not remotely reasonable.
I do understand why people think the way they do. The trolley problem gets two different answers from most people depending on how it is asked. When you're flipping a lever, people do math (1 is less than 5, therefore flip), whereas when you're pushing the fat man to stop the cart, they answer with a different part of their brain (killing someone is wrong, I can't do that). The two different parts of the brain are analytical (math) and emotional. It turns out, it's the analytical part of the brain that fails this, because it's not a math question. And the variations on the trolley problem prove that conclusively.
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Danoff
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In the case of the Trolley problem there are two solutions. One is to switch the lever, and the other is not to. One of them carries with it the logical consequence of infringing rights, and the other does not.
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Groundfish
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This is why Libertarian ideology is absurd.
No one can determine what constitutes rights.
However simultaneously you mustn’t infringe on others rights lol.
Sounds like an emergent ideology of the late sixties early seventies and collective drug abuse.
For Libertarians it’s one example of why their premises are so flawed.
Who determines what constitutes human rights?
See next quote
Here we see the effect of the premises of Libertarianism.
The answer is we need laws to answer that question.
Anarchy is insufficient to determine rights.
The rights depend on whatever society a person is in.
So Liberatarians believe trespassing is only wrong sometimes, however they simultaneously believe in private property.
A person or society either can own property or it can’t. It doesn’t go both ways depending how a person wants to argue at any given point.
You don’t get to define that depending on the situation.
Again who doles out human rights?
Objectively there’s no such thing. Rights are something people organize together in societies and determine.
Hence we choose to form govt and enforce laws.
In the USA there’s building codes so that my right to build whatever I want incorrectly doesn’t infringe on my neighbors right not to get burned down by my negligence.
Laws work great for stuff like this which is one reason anarchy is a poor concept.
Open borders is a nice way of saying anarchy. No borders delineating what society governs that region which therefore determines what rights it’s inhabitants have agreed to have.
No borders is the Wild West. Fastest gun is in charge.
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Nobody. Rights exist and are either recognised by or denied by laws.
Have a read through this thread.
Groundfish
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TBH I wouldn't mind going back to those days. What's mine is mine, what's yours is yours. I catch you stealing something I'll string you up or shoot you...
Bam, I just delt with our legal system and for profit jails.
/s
Groundfish
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Nice.
The thing about borders is without them no one knows what rights anyone has.
We know laws determine rights.
But without a border to determine where the laws are applied...
Imo it’s why the philosophy breaks down.
That’s all I’m saying.
With limited resources people’s rights I guess sort of overlap in a sense if you will...it’s not a very good explanation,
but it explains why laws are necessary.
That’s it, I respect the site and will avoid further postings here.
I expressed my opinion and why I believe the ideas presented were nonsense.
That’s enough postings for me.
The bottom line is 2 people may both have logical sound arguments, but those arguments can be based on conflicting premises.
Hence why I shouldn’t continue. No one has dominion over logic itself, but premises can and often do differ.
I have tried my best to present my opinions in a concise respectful fashion.
That’s enough for me.
And it’s true opinions are like well you know...
Cheers
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If only it was that simple.
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Not exactly, no.
The rational case for rights is obvious - as is the rational case against the lack of rights. Nobody doles them out, they simply exist (for reasons discussed in this thread). It's actually pretty easy to determine what rights are, and what they aren't - and thus also pretty easy to see how to respect them (and retain yours) and create laws that respect them without creating conflicts.
But too often people think laws give rights (they don't) and laws are rights (they aren't). And they create lists of 'rights' that are obviously in conflict with each other, based on what they think society should give its people, which further leads people down the path of thinking that rights are just laws (they aren't) and can come into conflict (they can't - even when being deliberately ignored).
Then at least one of the premises was not based on logic. That's why they need to be rationally examined right to their genesis.
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Danoff
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Nope. Not even remotely established. It's determined by the actions of people.
That sentence is nonsensical. It's like saying duck is insufficient to integrate equations.
Moral relativism. Try answering the Trolley Problem.
Nope. Not sure how you got there. It's like you didn't read what you were responding to. Do you have a question about it?
So... not moral relativism? Try answering the Trolley Problem.
Human rights simply exist, within logic. Like math.
There's a lot to unpack there. I guess I'd start by saying you could still burn down your house negligently.
Who are you talking to? I'm not aware of any anarchists in this thread. We have had some anarcho-capitalists here on GTPlanet in the past, but I'm not aware of any currently active ones.
Nope. You either don't understand open borders, anarchy, or both.
Rights don't come from government. (legitimate) Government comes from rights.
Nope. Non-sequitur.
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Bigger isn't always quicker.
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Mmm, yes and no. There are a number of ways to envision a stable society where rules and agreements are enforced, and government enforcement/police is just one of them. In other situations you'll see things like gangs emerge, where peer pressure and the threat of exclusion enforces rules inside the gang and collectively the gang poses enough of a threat to other gangs to encourage mutual cooperation.
Structure is sort of inevitable in a human society (because humans like to optimise and no structure is just repeatedly hitting the worst outcome in the Prisoner's Dilemma), but the specific structure of a government that enforces rights doesn't seem mandatory. It does seem to be popular, but I think that there are more reasons to that than just "the government is needed to protect rights".
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You know how sometimes you have a thought and don't realise how much of it's working on unexpressed assumptions within your own head? Let me have another go.
It starts from the assumption that without structure it's a pure might-makes-right free for all; everyone is an individual and is entitled to what they can hold through force. Basically extreme anarchy. I don't think that such a system is stable for long, humans are too risk-averse to put up with the idea that they're constantly one unlucky bullet/spear/knife away from losing it all. And so they'll try and optimise their relationships such that that's not the case.
The other option is cooperation with at least some number of other humans. This is assumed to give generally better outcomes overall than might makes right. And in a lot of basic situations it can be gamed out as a kind of prisoners dilemma. I have excess oranges that you want, you have excess apples that I want. Either of us could attack the other, and perhaps get what we want at limited personal cost. If we both attack each other, we probably both get injuries and damage. However we could just trade, and both get what we want at no risk and no real cost.
That this works in just about any single simple scenario means that people will then look to continue these sorts of engagements, because agreeing to also cooperate in the future works to everyone's benefit. And they'll look to generalise to other similar areas to form things like trade and monetary systems, because that's useful.
This is now becoming structure; people have taken a one-off scenario where better outcomes result for all parties and started to behave in such a way that certain behaviours are expected in the future. There are reasonable expectations that other people will behave in ways other than "he'll shoot me if he wants my stuff", and as lots of individual expectations combine there arises the complexity that constitutes a society. This is now a large group of people with established conventional modes of behaviour that are mostly not violence.
As far as the government stuff, it seems natural to me that as a society grows in complexity it gives generally better outcomes to have people specialise to a certain degree. As a kitchen in a restaurant grows bigger, it becomes beneficial to have a butcher chef, a pastry chef, a saucier, a kitchenhand, a dish pig, and so on. Similarly, a society ends up with a guy whose job it is to mediate disagreements, or to manage resources, or to plan development.
These sort of middle management roles could be considered a sort of government; they're ultimately responsible for things that affect all or a large portion of the society. Depending on the structures that put them in place, they may be little dictators doing whatever they want, or they may be unable to act unless their proposals meet with majority or even universal acceptance. These are the differences in all the political systems that we see; how are the actions of people who may affect large segments of the population restricted or controlled?
But I don't think that there's any particular roles that are "required" here, a society could choose not to have a certain specialist. An internal military like a police or a sheriff is a specialist; they use force where not doing so would cause greater harm to the wider community. A society could choose to have it's citizens be personally responsible for the use of force (something I think the US tends to lean towards at least in principle), and such a specialist role would then be largely redundant.
Yes.
That's what rights are, logical statements that lead to stable systems of entities interacting with each other because everyone chooses to recognise them. If you're not cooperating and just doing whatever you feel like, then rights don't come into it. That's might makes right.
Just like numbers and basic arithmetic are something that people can objectively agree on to form math, the axioms of rights are something that people can objectively agree on to form stable and useful systems of interaction.
This doesn't mean that people have to agree, I can assert till I'm blue in the face that 2+2 makes 117, or 43, or both 117 and 43, and that just makes it impossible for you to have a mathematical conversation with me. But if we do choose to agree, then we can work together in ways that would not have been possible while I was being a mathematical imbecile.
Danoff
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That's perfect, thank you.
If you haven't read The Selfish Gene (I know, I push that book a lot), you really need to. Dawkins explains how your reciprocal behavior arises in animals. Humans aren't needed to see this cooperative behavior take place. Monkeys pick ticks off of the backs of other monkeys. Birds warn each other of incoming predators, even at the increased risk of getting snatched up by themselves. He has a entire chapters dedicated to game theory and discussing the prisoner's dilemma and how nature solves it at the genetic level. He also explains how that results in a small but stable population of "cheats".
The cheats naturally gravitate to any positions of power, and you end up with a cheat as a dictator (that's my own jump skip to the end
).
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Wondering on people's thoughts on this Chappelle piece:
LANGUAGE WARNING:
Basically the joke comes down to the "hypocrisy" in giving the right to women to abortion yet saying men have to provide financially for a child even if they don't want to. For me that raises an interesting point:
Should men be absolved of having to provide for a child if they don't want the child to be born, i.e. want the partner to have an abortion?
LANGUAGE WARNING:
Basically the joke comes down to the "hypocrisy" in giving the right to women to abortion yet saying men have to provide financially for a child even if they don't want to. For me that raises an interesting point:
Should men be absolved of having to provide for a child if they don't want the child to be born, i.e. want the partner to have an abortion?
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Maybe, but I don't think so. You can't say that kids need fathers as well as mothers and then absolve the dads of any responsibility should their children be born.
Personally I think if a dad volunteers for deadbeathood and that child somehow makes through to adulthood they should be given the right to track that dad down and punch him the 🤬 out for being a failure as a human being. How's that for controversy?
Danoff
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Part of me wants to say it depends. If it's a couple, they go in on the idea of having a kid, then the dad flakes out mid pregnancy, or even after the birth, 100% they have equal responsibility for the child. However, in cases where due diligence was followed in having protected sex/ using birth control, then no. If during that somehow the female gets pregnant and decides she would like to keep the child, the male should be absolved. However, I think there may be a lot of grey area with that that I don't have answers for.
However the other part of me thinks that since pregnancy is a very real consequence of sex, even protected, you sign the waver when you take the ride... if you will. Nothing in life aught to make you free and clear from the consequences of your actions.
DesertPenguin
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How does this apply to cases of accidental death of another person? Unintentional murder, if you will. What happens there?
For example, gun misfires and a part flies off into your friend's head, killing him instantly. Clearly no intent to kill that man. Is the person guilty of murder?
Danoff
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I'm not sure it's "for the child" if it's mid pregnancy. I could see a lawsuit on the part of the pregnant would-be mother over pain and suffering caused by the father reneging on his previous promise. But consider this...
Parents can put a child up for adoption after the child is born. That's both parents wanting out of the parental responsibility after birth. And no child support is required from them to the adoptive parents. Under the law right now it looks like if one parent wants out and the other doesn't (and retains custody), the law requires child support to the other parent. But this is basically taking action on an implied contract, which it may not be fair to imply. It would really clean things up legally if both parties simply signed a contract at some point during the pregnancy. Then damages could be clear and intent could be clear. I'll have to think about the implications of a government requirement of that.
So we let both parents out of their parenting duties if they agree on it, but if either one disagrees, the other one is not allowed out. This is super weird in my view.
Sex is not consent to procreate. Pregnancy is not consent to procreate. Having custody of a child is not a necessary requirement from either of those acts, and coupling them unfairly stigmatizes sex and pregnancy.
Edit:
Think of it this way. Abortion is a possible consequence of pregnancy. So someone having an abortion is fully accepting the consequences of pregnancy.
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That's highly dependant on the case. If one person's negligence is the reason for death, even if they didn't intend on killing them, then they can be charged with involuntary manslaughter.
I'm not really interested in getting all wrapped up in the legalities of it. I was just throwing out my thoughts on it.
However, I do wonder, would it perhaps be smart that if you were looking for a one night stand or a casual fling, might it be a good idea to have a contract or waver? Something saying that all parties consent, are of age and will not hold the other responsible for anything conceived?
