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TwoQuestions posted:And if so, why? What policies and costs are justified to keep people alive (housed, fed, free from pollution)? 
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Feb 25, 2015 11:39
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TwoQuestions posted:And if so, why? What policies and costs are justified to keep people alive (housed, fed, free from pollution)? 
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Feb 25, 2015 11:40
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TwoQuestions posted:And if so, why? What policies and costs are justified to keep people alive (housed, fed, free from pollution)? 
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Feb 25, 2015 11:40
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Heavy neutrino posted:Where does the concept of deprivation begin or end? If a society distributes wealth in a way that leaves a group of people starving, unable to combat disease, or vulnerable to exposure, are these people being deprived of life? That would be a positive right to life - others are obligated to act in such a way that keeps you alive by providing you food, shelter, their kidney (they only need one after all.), etc. A right not to be deprived of life would mean that others are obligated not to murder you, kill you through gross negligence, etc.
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Feb 25, 2015 12:44
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I would advise you ask this question to your parents, what with them ensuring your right to live with their resources, care and affection. That is of course assuming you have parents and are not some Nietzschean ubermensch who conquered adversary from birth and lived with wolves. They would probably say yes. At which case you should probably contemplate rethinking your position, or taking your philosophy to its logical conclusion and rescinding your life, that has been earned through parasitism.
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Feb 25, 2015 13:25
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go kill you are selves, full nihilism now.
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Feb 25, 2015 15:59
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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icantfindaname posted:yes of course they do you dumbshit sociopath no they don't the absence of inherent rights doesn't mean you should go kill people, hth
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Feb 25, 2015 16:02
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I believe in the laws of the Wild op. Just as the coyote circles the deer and takes it down, some men are coyotes and others are deer. If we create a world for the deer we do a disservice to all. Only a world for the predator among us can and should survive. Look at the societies that cater to the lowest common denominator with re-distributive policies. Often they have their hats in their hands hoping for charity. The best charity we can give them is a merciful death.
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Feb 25, 2015 16:35
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TwoQuestions posted:And if so, why? What policies and costs are justified to keep people alive (housed, fed, free from pollution)? Utilitarian take on: all living things, in general, try to preserve their life (or, at least, their genetic material). It takes a lot of psychological trauma to make someone voluntary choose death. This means people fearing for their lives will be compelled to try to deal with the threat. Faced with violence, they will fight back. Faced with starvation, they will try to procure food in various legal or illegal means. Faced with disease, they will try to flee the affected area, potentially spreading the infection. A society that doesn't guarantee a right to live and doesn't act to enforce this right becomes an unstable society, because its members have no reason to cooperate except fear and maybe ideology. Both of these motivations are not enough for an average man when their life (or lives of their friends or families) is at stake.
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Feb 25, 2015 17:18
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blowfish posted:no they don't Exactly. Rights are good but they only exist because people believe in them. A lot like santa but instead of presents you get to not quarter soldiers in your house Grand Prize Winner fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Feb 25, 2015 |
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Feb 25, 2015 17:26
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As with all things metaphysical in this world, George Carlin covers it perfectly well.
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Feb 26, 2015 00:17
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I don't think anything is gained by asking whether people have an inherent right to life, since the ordinary right to life functions just fine. In particular, the ordinary right to life imposes precisely the same duties on others in the relevant circumstances. In any case, the answer why people have certain rights is a large question in normative ethics. One answer to the question, which if successful would enumerate the rights, is that people have precisely those rights which rational individuals would agree to from an original position of fairness, where the notion of fairness is captured by the condition that parties to such a negotiation be ignorant of the morally irrelevant features of themselves, others, and their societies. According to Rawls, such individuals would accept inequalities in the distribution of goods only if such inequalities benefit the least advantaged members of society, subject to the condition that every individual shares the same scheme of maximally compatible rights, including the right to life. This is an extremely oversimplified account of justice as fairness, but one reason to prefer something like Rawls' view is that it accounts for rational self-interest while preserving a strong sense of social justice: we wouldn't choose to "live in a barbaric anarchy where the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must" from a position of ignorance about ourselves and others, if we are self-interested, because we might end up on the weaker end of things. For similar reasons, we would include strong - probably positive - rights to life, liberty, and the material and social conditions of human dignity and self-respect. quickly fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Feb 26, 2015 |
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Feb 26, 2015 01:15
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I believe all life has value, and I'll kill anyone who says otherwise.
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Feb 26, 2015 03:19
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rudatron posted:I believe all life has value, and I'll kill anyone who says otherwise. the belief in an inherent right to life leads to that right's defense what'd i say
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Feb 26, 2015 07:57
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wateroverfire posted:That would be a positive right to life - others are obligated to act in such a way that keeps you alive by providing you food, shelter, their kidney (they only need one after all.), etc. Yes, it's well documented that countries with welfare systems routinely slide down the slippery slope of positive rights and are soon harvesting the surplus organs of their populations so they can be redistributed. 
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Feb 26, 2015 18:43
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wateroverfire posted:That would be a positive right to life - others are obligated to act in such a way that keeps you alive by providing you food, shelter, their kidney (they only need one after all.), etc. I agree you have a negative right to not be killed, but not a positive right to be protected by police while alive or to have your murderer investigated or prosecuted or convicted or jailed if you are killed.
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Feb 26, 2015 21:47
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:I agree you have a negative right to not be killed, but not a positive right to be protected by police while alive or to have your murderer investigated or prosecuted or convicted or jailed if you are killed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLfghLQE3F4
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Feb 27, 2015 10:26
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Helsing posted:Yes, it's well documented that countries with welfare systems routinely slide down the slippery slope of positive rights and are soon harvesting the surplus organs of their populations so they can be redistributed. Welfare is not inconsistent with someone not having a positive right to the thing they're getting from the government. The government can provide benefits out of a sense of charity, or because it seems pragmatic, without the recipient being entitled to the benefit as a matter of principal. DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:I agree you have a negative right to not be killed, but not a positive right to be protected by police while alive or to have your murderer investigated or prosecuted or convicted or jailed if you are killed. Regardless how we morally justify it, obligating the police to investigate murders seems like a good idea.
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Feb 27, 2015 12:59
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:I agree you have a negative right to not be killed, but not a positive right to be protected by police while alive or to have your murderer investigated or prosecuted or convicted or jailed if you are killed. There's a question of degree: how much obligation can a right impose on another person? If you have the right to bear arms, that does not mean that someone has to give you a gun, only that they cannot take it. If you had a positive right to be protected by police, how protected should you be and how much time and money are the rest of us meant to spend to provide you that right?. That's the problem with positive rights and why they don't exist. A negative right doesn't force anyone else to do anything, just tells them not to go out of their way to take your life. A true right cannot impose obligations.
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Feb 27, 2015 17:18
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Even if they don't, it seems socially important that we act like they do in most situations. Don't really see the problem, this is hardly the most important thing you'll find that isn't really logical.
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Feb 27, 2015 17:28
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OwlBot 2000 posted:There's a question of degree: how much obligation can a right impose on another person? If you have the right to bear arms, that does not mean that someone has to give you a gun, only that they cannot take it. If you had a positive right to be protected by police, how protected should you be and how much time and money are the rest of us meant to spend to provide you that right?. That's the problem with positive rights and why they don't exist. A negative right doesn't force anyone else to do anything, just tells them not to go out of their way to take your life. A true right cannot impose obligations. Maybe there aren't "true rights" at all and negative rights are just the easiest to defend because they present fewer problems than positive rights? Even so you can still believe in rights as non-arbitrary without the need for some objective absolute.
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Feb 27, 2015 19:01
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Why shouldn't you believe rights are arbitrary if they're just what people want at a given moment?
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Feb 27, 2015 19:39
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Soonmot posted:No, the rich must constantly show they give more real value and assistance to society than they leech from the workers. Otherwise it's time for the guillotine Yeah sorry this doesnt work either because if you're a billionaire and decide to give a fraction of your fortune you're automatically ond of the biggest philantropists ever ( ef. Bill Gates) even tho the mere fact of your existence is a testament to the power of capital to oppress.
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Feb 27, 2015 19:50
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What about dolphins? What about condors?
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Feb 27, 2015 20:48
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wateroverfire posted:Welfare is not inconsistent with someone not having a positive right to the thing they're getting from the government. The government can provide benefits out of a sense of charity, or because it seems pragmatic, without the recipient being entitled to the benefit as a matter of principal. And yet you're doing that bizarre conservative thing where you imply that the philosophy of redistribution is inherently totalitarian and logically culminates in people being forced to donate their organs. It's a mildly more sophisticated variation on the idea that Obamacare means soon the government will force you to eat broccoli but you're trying to make it sound like an actual philosophy by sprinkling in some largely meaningless talk about negative vs. positive rights.
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Feb 27, 2015 21:01
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wateroverfire posted:Welfare is not inconsistent with someone not having a positive right to the thing they're getting from the government. The government can provide benefits out of a sense of charity, or because it seems pragmatic, without the recipient being entitled to the benefit as a matter of principal. That's actually one of the cases where rights can become problematic and conflicting. I think we'd all agree that we all have a right to attempt to survive. As in, work, gather food and resources, secure a place to live, etc. One of the biggest issues with the world as is is that the main way to survive is by selling your time to somebody wealthier. Currently the most wealthy are hoarding a gently caress load of the world's resources and money while saying "nope, you can't have any" to a gently caress load of people. Do the people that control everything that matters have a right to hold the lives of those poorer than they hostage? That's what effectively happens if welfare and social safety nets go away. A person who owns no land and doesn't have enough resources to produce anything themselves then suddenly has no choice but to work for somebody else.
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Feb 27, 2015 21:46
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Helsing posted:Yes, it's well documented that countries with welfare systems routinely slide down the slippery slope of positive rights and are soon harvesting the surplus organs of their populations so they can be redistributed. Separate point: No system of negative rights can be maintained without positive rights to enforce them. America Inc. fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Feb 27, 2015 |
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Feb 27, 2015 22:36
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LookingGodIntheEye posted:If a dead person stated that their organs should not be reused for science or to help the living, do the negative rights of a dead person to not have their organs reused trump the positive rights of a living person to stay alive, or to make scientific advancements which keep people alive? I'm not trying to bait or anything here. I don't find the 'human rights' discourse to be particularly helpful except as a way to broadly organize our intuitions about our social obligations to each other. When it comes to actually determining policy outcomes I think it helps to be pragmatic. I mostly posted here to mock wateroverfire for trying to simultaneously assert that we should respect his negative rights while arbitrarily dismissing any positive rights, not to mention his invocation of what essentially amounts to a "fwd:fwd:fwd:fwd:fwd: government healthcare will lead to death panels!!!" argument. As for the specific situation you outlined I think the simplest solution would be to make organ donation the default option for someone who is deceased, with an option for people with strong religious or moral objections to opt out. I assume that public apathy would mean that if the default was to donate your organs then most people would go with the flow and that would probably take care of the organ supply problem without ruffling people's feathers. However, if we were in some super specific situation where a living person could be saved with a dead person's organ then I would probably be inclined to say we should side with the living person because as far as I can tell the dead are beyond all earthly concerns. To form an actual opinion I would need to see a specific scenario though because I feel like morality and ethics tend to be very contextual.
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Feb 27, 2015 22:51
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It doesn't seem that organ donation is a problem of rights, though, unless you believe that individuals possess rights after death or families possess collective rights in deceased individuals. Really, it seems it's a second-order problem about expectations or stability or virtue or something of that sort, and so probably subject to a utilitarian calculus. So you might argue that respect for deceased persons bodies, or respecting deceased persons wishes about their bodies, is conducive to cultivating a sense of dignity or justice or empathy. I suppose someone could try to lump organ donation together with the problem of inheritance, but then you'd need a sound argument that others have obligations towards non-living persons that isn't based on the usual logic of savings or community. This also seems distinct from related issues, such as whether people have moral obligations not to mutilate or desecrate the bodies of deceased persons.
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Feb 28, 2015 00:15
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Helsing posted:And yet you're doing that bizarre conservative thing where you imply that the philosophy of redistribution is inherently totalitarian and logically culminates in people being forced to donate their organs. It's a mildly more sophisticated variation on the idea that Obamacare means soon the government will force you to eat broccoli Dude what are you even on about? ToxicSlurpee posted:That's actually one of the cases where rights can become problematic and conflicting. I think we'd all agree that we all have a right to attempt to survive. As in, work, gather food and resources, secure a place to live, etc. One of the biggest issues with the world as is is that the main way to survive is by selling your time to somebody wealthier. Currently the most wealthy are hoarding a gently caress load of the world's resources and money while saying "nope, you can't have any" to a gently caress load of people. Do the people that control everything that matters have a right to hold the lives of those poorer than they hostage? That's what effectively happens if welfare and social safety nets go away. A person who owns no land and doesn't have enough resources to produce anything themselves then suddenly has no choice but to work for somebody else. IDK man. Who are "the people who control everything that matters"? If you hire someone to clean your house do you become one of those people? Maybe just to the person you hired? What about to the people you turn down? If you're NOT hiring a person to do that are you holding the life of someone poorer than you hostage? That's the problem with positive rights - they lead to really weird results like you personally doing something morally wrong by not hiring someone to do something you don't need done because they have a positive right to a job. A job from who? What if that person doesn't need them? Do you have an obligation to work to support them, while they don't have an obligation to work to support you? Weird results.
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Feb 28, 2015 00:32
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wateroverfire posted:Dude what are you even on about? I was referring to the top 20% of Americans that hold drat near all of the wealth. It's like 85% in their hands alone. 1% own 40% and these people aren't keen on sharing. If you are desperate and say go cut down a tree to make some wood stuff to sell it's highly likely you just broke several laws. You can't just plant some cash crops on your land if you need money or plant more food crops if you need more food if you don't own land. 97% of privately owned land is owned by a single-digit percentage of Americans. I was not referring to the comfortable who can afford to hire some help. That's dramatically different from the multi-billionaire that actively destroys the social safety net, unions, and minimum wage laws because it means cheaper labor. Me hiring a cleaning lady is dramatically different from the Koch brothers intentionally changing our social system in a way that makes it harder for the poor to get by. This is why I was talking about rights conflicting. Yes, people have a right to their property, but where do you put the limits on what they can do with it and how do you decide if the property was acquired morally? This is where the whole "it is not OK to exploit workers" side of it comes in. Do the Koch brothers have a right to game the system with their obscene amounts of wealth? It's complex stuff but the end result is a system where a worker must make somebody else richer to just survive. Which is why I am asking the question I am; which person's rights are more important?
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Feb 28, 2015 00:41
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Wait is he claiming bloods or bgd?
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Feb 28, 2015 01:04
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ToxicSlurpee posted:which person's rights are more important?
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Feb 28, 2015 01:45
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LookingGodIntheEye posted:Why is anyone's rights more important than anyone else's? We can argue all day about who is more deserving than anyone else, but it doesn't matter. What matters is the power to create reality as we see fit. Then what is the justification for having a tiny elite who can lord their wealth over everybody else and use it to control them?
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Feb 28, 2015 01:46
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wateroverfire posted:Dude what are you even on about? If you want to argue for the rule of the strong then just come out and say it instead of trying to re-litigate these tired old arguments about positive vs. negative rights. If you have extra food but don't have any kind of positive obligation feed a starving person then I don't see how you can actually believe that they have any kind of meaningful obligation to not take food from you. I am 100% that if you were being denied food that you needed to live then you'd take whatever necessary steps to gain that food regardless of the negative or positive rights you had to violate, so as far as I can tell you're advocating a system of rights that you would not actually follow when push came to shove.
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Feb 28, 2015 01:51
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Then what is the justification for having a tiny elite who can lord their wealth over everybody else and use it to control them? Right and wrong are illusory products of the human mind, and your wrong is my right. The only thing that really matters is the ability to force your perception of wrong and right upon reality.
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Feb 28, 2015 02:02
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LookingGodIntheEye posted:There is no justification, just as there is no justification for overthrowing them outside those we have constructed within our own societal context and biology. Remove those foundations, and there is no basis. Look at the revolutions of history, done by people who thought they were right, and what damage they caused due to their own ignorance created from the narrow mental box from which they draw their perceptions and solutions to problems. It doesn't follow from rightness or wrongness being "products of the human mind" or "constructed within our societal context and biology," at least without further argument, that they are (a) illusory, (b) relative to individuals, or (c) reduce to power relations. Both the realist and anti-realist traditions in ethics are replete with theories under which rightness or wrongness are (partially) determined by human cognition or biology, yet statements containing them are genuinely true or false, for starters.
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Feb 28, 2015 04:38
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quickly posted:It doesn't follow from rightness or wrongness being "products of the human mind" or "constructed within our societal context and biology," at least without further argument, that they are (a) illusory, (b) relative to individuals, or (c) reduce to power relations. Both the realist and anti-realist traditions in ethics are replete with theories under which rightness or wrongness are (partially) determined by human cognition or biology, yet statements containing them are genuinely true or false, for starters. You could make a bulletproof case that a certain set of ethical principles are as "genuine" as 1+1=2, but it doesn't matter if I can shoot you and make 2+2=5. The world doesn't care what you think unless you can make it happen. E: Note that this isn't a might-makes-right argument. It's more pragmatic. America Inc. fucked around with this message at 05:23 on Feb 28, 2015 |
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Feb 28, 2015 05:08
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wateroverfire posted:That would be a positive right to life - others are obligated to act in such a way that keeps you alive by providing you food, shelter, their kidney (they only need one after all.), etc. How do you make that distinction? Why is it not deprivation to arrogate to yourself more wealth than you need for a decent existence while others starve on the streets? Why is it not gross negligence? If you run someone over because you're late to a meeting and are speeding out of concerns of personal wealth (missing out on a contract, losing your job, etc.), I figure you'll call that gross negligence -- but why is it that a wealthy person who ignores the under-funded homeless shelter in the city out of the same concerns of personal wealth not committing the same kind of negligence? The discussion about positive and negative rights doesn't make much sense to me -- all I see is people arbitrarily deciding what forms of forbearance from acting in one's self-interest are and aren't acceptable, and applying some fraudulent intellectual framework to it. Positive rights can be turned into negative ones by the simple sleight of hand that I just made: welfare doesn't act on a positive right to necessities; it acts on a negative right whereby rich people can't absorb so much production that those at bottom are deprived of necessities.
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Feb 28, 2015 05:46
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LookingGodIntheEye posted:What are you defining as "genuine"? What are your underlying premises? Because there are a whole litany of schools of ethical thought which all operate off of different underlying premises and argue against one another. I mean true or false in the ordinary sense by "genuinely true or false." I meant to distinguish this sense - the sense in which cesium is a metal and one should stop at traffic lights - from some other notion of truth and someone might want to introduce. In any case, that different ethical theories make incompatible demands doesn't have much to do with my argument. My argument was that one can consistently maintain that normative ethical notions are products of human cognition or biology, yet statements containing them are true or false in the sense given above - i.e., that they aren't illusory, relative to individuals, or reducible to power relations. LookingGodIntheEye posted:Unless you're starting from empirical observations, you're operating off faith to some extent. Everybody has a different idea of what is right and what is wrong from their own experience, societal background, and teaching. Even if we were to say one school of ethical thought was the Only Right Form of Thought, as humans, it's worthless without some form of enforcement. You could make a bulletproof case that a certain set of ethical principles are as "genuine" as 1+1=2, but it doesn't matter if I can shoot you and make 2+2=5. I guess we're lucky that shooting people doesn't change the laws of arithmetic, then. More seriously, the criticism that one is "operating off faith to some extent" if one doesn't begin from empirical observation is ridiculous: how are empirical observations evaluated with respect to broader theories? Which observations constitute evidence for or against those theories? When should observations be consider illicit or unreliable? These are normative questions, the answers to which aren't given by empirical observations. On the other hand, they aren't a matter of groundless belief. LookingGodIntheEye posted:The world doesn't care what you think unless you can make it happen. It sounds like a might-makes-right argument, though. At least, I don't see how that isn't the logical conclusion of this view. It seems obvious that ethics relates to human concerns, and has the form it does because of our psychology and biology. But so do many other things, about which questions of implementation are largely irrelevant. EDIT: I should revise that last paragraph. I don't mean that questions of implementation are irrelevant. I just meant that questions about enforcement are irrelevant. An alternative would be to discuss something like the stability of ethical systems over time. quickly fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Feb 28, 2015 |
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Feb 28, 2015 06:47
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