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BrickHorn

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Everything posted by BrickHorn

  1. A utilitarian approach is more likely to convince the CCP than is “the creator said so” or “Mother Nature decrees.”
  2. “I have a natural right to life,” insists person doomed to die in accordance with natural law.
  3. I bet all those Chinese kids who got steamrolled to death in Tiananmen Square are relieved to hear they have the right of free speech.
  4. Right. I will never dispute that the state should be structure such that free speech is a protected right. But this hocus-pocus about deriving it from natural law or a divine creator is a distraction. And deferring to the whims of a make-believe deity or subjective notions about what nature decrees is dangerous, because those concepts are untethered to reality. It’s much safer to advocate for rights on the basis of the good outcomes they generate and the bad outcomes they avoid in the real world.
  5. Yeah, I should have been asking more questions all along rather than explaining why the idea of natural rights is absurd. The answers from proponents of natural rights make the absurdity of their concept clearer than I ever could. It’s a natural right because we (read: I) say it is! What do a billion Chinese know? Or Russians? Or anyone who lived before 1783? The right to free speech was enshrined in the fabric of the universe at the very moment of creation. You won’t find it everywhere, or even in the vast majority of times and places. But the right to free speech is absolutely fundamental and universal and cannot possibly be denied any living human.* * Except in 99.99999999999999999% of circumstances.
  6. “Can be done” is doing a lot of work. Who decides what you can or can’t do? Who clears the way when there is disagreement? Consider the example of free speech. In China, the government does not protect such a right. If you were to attempt to exercise that right without seeking approval to do so, you might find yourself censored, arrested, or even executed. Do you have a right to free speech in China? Why or why not?
  7. It’s not circular. The authority that enforces a right need not be legal (although I listed many examples related to legal authority for the sake of illustration). It can be cultural or supernatural or natural, to give a few examples. The point is that the word “right” has meaning. It conveys an entitlement. It’s something more than just an aspiration about how things should be or a judgment about what is or is not moral. And the term “natural right” implies that a particular right somehow derives its authority from nature (which the Enlightenment thinkers who advocated this concept attributed ultimately to a supernatural source). My question is: in what sense does nature enforce any natural rights? If anything, nature seems hellbent on violating them. We all die, for example. As it pertains to life, the only inviolable law of nature is that it will inevitably be taken away from you. So how is the right to life in any sense protected by nature? From the time we’re born, nature is out to kill us. But maybe I’m assuming too much. Maybe those who claim natural rights exist merely mean something like: there are certain moral principles that seem obviously correct. Okay. If that’s your view, fine. But you’re talking about something else entirely and the word “right” is just misleading propaganda. That something is morally correct is insufficient to give anyone an entitlement to the morally correct outcome. Which makes labeling these concepts as “rights” misleading or at the very least confusing.
  8. The announcers are openly calling out VAR for stealing the game. This season has been outrageous for just corrupt officiating. Unreal.
  9. The record speaks for itself, no matter how badly you wish to put words in its mouth after the fact. Regardless, I’ll make it crystal clear: my point is not limited to nation states. Any societal authority that has ever existed, down to mutual agreement and respect for custom, will suffice. Now please tell us how it’s important to note that 99.9% of modern political entities are nation states, for some weird reason.
  10. Good lord what a pile of nonsense. You stated that my point only existed in the present, given a relatively recent political development. That is a fucking temporal distinction, and it’s entirely irrelevant as I noted. Have fun continuing to confuse yourself. I appreciate your posts on other threads, so I’m going to politely withdraw from this weird Who’s on First? routine I seem to be in with you here.
  11. Why not? Who says so? What law of nature draws that line? And the serial etceteras are doing some work there…
  12. It’s an irrelevant point anyway. Every society has some authority, even if it’s merely mutual agreement between equal members.
  13. Can you please pay attention to what you post? What you wrote was: Emphasis mine. Your point was that my argument only applies since nation states emerged. And when I rebutted that, you got confused about what your original point was. But it’s there in black and white for everyone to see, so I don’t see the sense in debating it further.
  14. Right but your point was that my argument didn’t apply until nation states emerged. In other words, you argued that my argument did not apply in the past because there were no nation states at that time. When I noted that nation states were not necessary to the point and thus it still held in the past, you retorted with “yeah but it’s all nation states now.” Are you acting confused on purpose?
  15. Why do you assume a nation state is the only authority that can enforce a right? It could be tribe or clan or family or whatever. The point is that a right is some behavioral limitation on members of a society, which is enforced by the authority that presides over that society. And mankind has lived in societies from the outset. /Costanza
  16. The version of rights you and troph advocate is useless crap. They can be trampled. No one has to respect them. No one is punished then they violate them. They might not even know about them. But you have them and no one can ever take them away (except all the times they do so without consequence of even knowledge)!!! Magical little elves was an unfair comparison. Elves have more relevance to our lives than this impotent concept of rights.
  17. If you posted them, I missed it. Even after a quick read back through the thread, I didn’t see any specific list of natural rights from you. Link?
  18. You’re confusing two different issues. Human behavior and morality is gray. Whether natural rights exist is a black and white question. And the grayness of human morality resolves the question cleanly: because natural rights require a black and white morality independent of time and place, the grayness of human morality in fact demonstrates that natural rights do not exist. Well I’m sure Navalny and his surviving family will be relieved to hear that.
  19. No. I have the right to free speech. That is a right that exists, because it is enforceable by the relevant authority that applies to me. Russian citizens do not. The point you make actually shows that free speech is not a natural right, because its existence is jurisdiction-dependent.
  20. Okay. To be clear: what you’re talking about is not a “right;” it’s a moral principle. A right is a very specific thing. It must be enforceable and recognized by the relevant authority (whatever form that may take). And to address your substantive point: I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the moral principles you listed are universally respected. For each, there are examples of time periods and societies in which that was not true. For some, it may not even be true today in our own society (e.g., the right to live is not recognized in all cases, as there are many, many exceptions).
  21. Thanks for being the first participant in this thread to attempt to list the natural rights. Kudos. But now let’s examine the claim. Many of the alleged natural rights you listed have not been recognized or respected as rights at all in various cultures and periods throughout history. For example, human sacrifice (a common facet of life most recently in Mesoamerica) rejects living as a right. Even in the modern era, we deny the alleged “right” to life during wartime. There is no recourse for killing enemy combatants or inadvertently killing civilians in a conflict. Many societies throughout history have castrated slaves, reflecting a rejection of the supposed natural right to procreate. So what makes any of these things a natural right? I would argue it’s clear that they have at many points not been rights at all; that is, there was no authority protecting them or punishing their infringement. You might argue that murder and castration were always immoral. But even granting that premise for sake of argument, these moral principles do not amount to a right because there was no enforcement recourse. The idea of a “natural right” is defensible, at most, as a shorthand for certain moral principles that seem obvious to most people. But even then, their inviolability quickly crumbles on close inspection. What you end up with is a series of nuanced, context-dependent guidelines. Our shared moral instincts developed through evolutionary processes and are almost never as simple and idealistic as we would like to believe. The world is gray. If you wish it were not and invoking the magical little elves of naturalism help you sleep at night, so be it. But you’ll forever be fighting paradoxes of your own making. It’s more useful to recognize human behavior for what it is and understand morality and legal regimes as tools for guiding that behavior in the most positive direction possible.
  22. No. I’m asking you what, specifically, are these natural rights that totally exist but nobody knows about or respects and we probably wouldn’t know them because they live in Canada.
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