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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)? Eh. Positive rights become problematic really fast. I'd say people have a right not to be deprived of life, but not per se an inherent right to live.
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Feb 24, 2015 21:33
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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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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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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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Heavy neutrino posted: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. Consider for instance a hypothetical right to live. If it's phrased as a negative right it is, straight-forwardly, the right of a person to not have their life taken. To respect that right people don't have to do anything. They merely have the obligation to refrain from killing someone, which presumaby is not an undue burden, and a person's right not to be killed generally doesn't interfere with another person's right not to be killed. If it's phrased as a positive right it's very different - it's the right to be kept alive. But to respect that right means what? Others have the obligation to keep the person alive? There are over 7 billion people on the planet - do they have an equal obligation to each person alive? Are they obligated to donate all their resources above subsistance level to terminal cancer patients who can't afford treatment? What if there are also burn victims who need funding? What if it's unclear that an act of support is actually going to keep someone alive - if for instance it might just make their lives a little more pleasant or permit them to hustle less to provide for themselves - are they violating someone's right to be kept alive if they decide to devote resources to bettering themselves and their family? The positive right is a mess. Morally, and legally, it puts people and society in an impossible situation. It puts you personally in an impossible situation. Do you lead a non-subsistence existence? Why are YOU ignoring that underfunded homeless shelter? For that matter why are YOU ignoring the millions of people out of your sight who will legit die of starvation while you dine on Hot Pockets and Mountain Dew? If people have a positive right to life surely the obligation to support that doesn't fall only on the people you've decided are rich enough to have to bear it. That would really be some arbitrary poo poo. Word play can't alleviate the problems with positive rights. Heavy neutrino posted: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 That is the difference. If not for your negligent action upon that person, that person would not have died. You drove the car. You hit the person. You violated their right not to be deprived of life. In the case of you being pretty well off and some unspecified person starving somewhere else, you had no relation to that person or interaction with that person, they weren't in your care, and they died of something unrelated to anything you did, just like the millions of other people whose deaths you had no hand in whatsoever.
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Mar 2, 2015 15:56
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Helsing posted: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. Dude it's like you're having a conversation with yourself. =/
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Mar 2, 2015 16:02
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:What does a "right" mean if there is not a corresponding obligation? I reiterate my previous example - if you have a negative right to not be killed but there is no obligation on anyone to enforce or honor that right (by the way this more or less accurately reflects your rights in the United States), what good is it to say you have such a right? How does it differ from a world where such right does not exist? You are right back to the strong doing as they please and the weak accepting what they must. The corresponding obligation would be "Don't kill people", right? In a world without a negative right not to be killed presumably that obligation wouldn't exist? Hieronymous Alloy posted:For this conversation you have to define "right," and that's .. . not easy. I think it's not that defining "right" is hard. It's more that "right" has several meanings (go English!) and we have to pin down the context to avoid getting lost in semantics. One meaning of right is in the sense of "the right thing to do". Another is "a legal or moral entitlement". There are probably others. Your examples are of legal entitlements people have for various reasons - a musician has copyright, a homeowner has a right to their home, your grandfather has a right to his social security check, etc. Those are legal claims to well defined things. A "right" to health care, for instance, is a different beast. How much health care? Who is obligated to provide it? At whose expense? Everything about it is indeterminate. We might state as a matter of principle that everyone should have access to healthcare, and that would be a "right" in the sense of "the right thing to do". But that's very different from saying people have a specific legal or moral entitlement to healthcare in general. It's the difference between Ernest Hemmingway writing poeticly about the human condition that we are all connected and violence against one diminishes us all and Ernest Hemmingway suggesting he should be held personally, legally responsible for civilian deaths during WWI.
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Mar 2, 2015 19:03
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Effectronica posted:How about negligence? Doesn't the "negative right" imply an obligation to avoid killing people through negligent behavior, and if not, why? "Don't do things you should reasonably expect will get somebody killed" seems like an obligation that would fall under a negative right not to be killed. "things you reasonably expect will get somebody killed" probably doesn't encompass "being too rich" or "not giving your money away to more needy people" or etc, though. What did you have in mind when mentioning negligence?
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Mar 2, 2015 19:12
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:What is an obligation with no way to "oblige" it? We call those "suggestions". I'm kind of confused. We're discussing the philosophical question of whether people have an inherent right to life, right? I'm not getting how "how we enforce a right not to get killed / right to life" is within the scope of that discussion.
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Mar 2, 2015 19:14
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Effectronica posted:Okay. So let's say, for example, that you have a pool. Does the right to life imply an obligation to keep your pool secure against children drowning in it? Why would the right not to be killed imply that? I mean, I'm not saying it's not a good thing to do or that other obligations wouldn't carry a person in that direction, but I'm not seeing how someone's right not to have their life taken would get invoked unless, idk, your pool is actually in the middle of the street and camoflaged to look like solid pavement. Then it would imply an obligation not to do things you reasonably think are going to get someone killed.
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Mar 2, 2015 19:17
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:If you have a "negative right" not to be killed but there are no corresponding "positive rights" enforcing it, it's meaningless. Can you explain that? I'm not following you. What would the positive right be and why is it necessary?
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Mar 2, 2015 19:19
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Effectronica posted:Okay. So the right to life does not imply taking actions to ensure that people won't be killed unintentionally. Is it okay to seed the sidewalk up to my door with poisoned caltrops? It's not like people have to walk up there... wateroverfire posted:Why would the right not to be killed imply that?
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Mar 2, 2015 19:22
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:To be meaningful a negative right creates a corresponding positive right: the enforcement of that negative right from infringement. Otherwise the negative right could be infringed by anyone at any time. So something like "You have a right to have your death investigated?"
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Mar 2, 2015 19:25
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Effectronica posted:Reasonably, if I have a pool, and no way to isolate it, and there are small children who live nearby, the chances that one of them is going to die are unacceptable. Therefore, if I am a decent human being, unlike yourself, I have an obligation to fence off and lock my pool, or put a firm cover on it, or in some way make sure that someone doesn't drown because of my pool. Meh?
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Mar 2, 2015 19:28
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:That would be a positive right, wouldn't it? It would! I'm not sure in what sense a dead person would have rights in that sense. I mean, you're dead. Nothing that happens after that can really be for your benefit, can it?
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Mar 2, 2015 19:42
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Fojar38 posted:So since you've outed yourself as a supporter of eugenics what makes you think that you have good DNA that someone won't decide needs to be cleared from the gene pool? Someone dying by falling into a pool with no assistance whatsoever - eugenics. I haven't fallen in a pool and died so idk I guess that makes me some kind of superman.
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Mar 2, 2015 19:50
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:You're the one telling me rights exist independent of their enforcement or recognition, so it's up to you to decide. But I don't get the feeling you're engaging my argument very seriously. That is: any allegedly "negative" right necessarily contains a corresponding positive right in order to have any effect on society. To directly engage with that point - no, I don't think that's right. As a practical matter there is far less enforcement capacity than you'd need to enforce, for instance, a right not to be killed, if people weren't morally wired not to kill to begin with. How many cops are there in a city like New York? If people were mostly down with killing other people the whole system would collapse. Clearly our moral framework - that is, things we consider basic rights - influences society independant of how those rights are enforced. Society can also have an interest in enforcement that is independant of the rights of the victim, so enforcement can happen absent a person's formal right to enforcement. That's how it can happen that two parties to a fist fight can get charged in some juristictions whether they want to press charges or not, for instance.
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Mar 2, 2015 20:01
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Fojar38 posted:You responded to a question about whose responsibility it was if a toddler drowns in an unprotected pool by linking to the Darwin Awards, carrying the implication that the toddler drowned because it had bad genes and therefore its a good thing it died. Meh, again? When I commented that you should probably secure your pool for other reasons but right to not be killed doesn't really enter into it Effectronica started talking about scattering poisoned caltrops on the sidewalk. At that point there didn't seem to be a reason to keep being serious.
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Mar 2, 2015 20:05
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Effectronica posted:A toddler drinking bleach in your presence would merit only a laugh, wouldn't it? It's okay. This is a safe space here. IDK. Whose child is it? That's an important question.
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Mar 2, 2015 20:07
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Effectronica posted:There's really no difference between the two from the standpoint you're using. If people aren't willing to look where they're walking, well, gently caress 'em, just like anybody who falls into a pool and drowns can get hosed. The formulation of "Well you have no obligations to do things" falls apart when we prod it and look at, well, externalities. There's a world of difference between intentionally spreading deadly hazards on the sidewalk, where people are expected to be walking and unaware of the danger of poisoned loving caltrops, and having a pool on your property, where people are not expected to be walking and further where they are expected to be aware of the big rear end pool.
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Mar 2, 2015 20:13
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Effectronica posted:Actually, I was talking about spreading them on MY PROPERTY, so I'm glad that you agree it's okay. Cheerio! Why are you spreading poisoned caltrops to begin with? Maybe work from there.
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Mar 2, 2015 20:20
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Effectronica posted:Okay, for the sake of this hypothetical, I am doing it for no reason at all. You're spreading poisoned caltrops - lethal weapons designed to kill the unwary - for no reason at all? edit: Is that what you'd plan to tell the judge?
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Mar 2, 2015 20:26
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Effectronica posted:Yes, for no reason at all. What's wrong with it, ethically, since I'm doing it on my property? I guess it depends on how far you place them from your unmarked mine field.
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Mar 2, 2015 20:31
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:This doesn't address my point, which is that from a purely logical perspective there is no distinction between a negative and a positive right. All negative rights contain positive rights, and vice-versa. Some rights may be more or less expensive for a government to enforce, or a better or worse idea from one perspective or another, but the distinction between a positive and negative right is a rhetorical flourish without logical support. Can you lay that argument out, because it doesn't seem to follow. Just by the definitions of the terms, there is a distinction between negative and positive rights right off the bat. Whether some rights imply other rights - and I don't see how you evaulate that on anything other than a case by case basis - doesn't impact whether there's a distinction.
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Mar 2, 2015 20:49
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Effectronica posted:In order to have, say, freedom of speech, people must not be able to suppress speech. Therefore, positive action is necessary to defend the negative right, meaning there is a positive right, an obligation to defend free speech in order to have the negative right to speak freely. What people can and can't get away with is a different sort of question from this one. A right to, say, not have your speech curtailed implies that others have an obligation not to do that. A campaign of terrorism against dissidents would breach that obligation and curtail their speech. In what way do you have to appeal to an obligation to defend free speech to get to that result?
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Mar 2, 2015 20:58
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Any 'negative' or 'positive' right you can state will necessarily imply a converse obligation. It's just a rhetorical framing trick. In one case it's an obligation to refrain from doing something and in the other it's an obligation to do something. That's what the distinction is about. ie: You're obligated to not kill me vs. you're obligated to support me because otherwise I will die. The implications are not the same. DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:Because its worthless to have a "right" if it can be controverted at a moments notice with no recourse to the victim or punishment for the violator. A purely negative right is meaningless without any way to defend it - but that defense constitutes a positive right or obligation on some other person. Defense of a negative right needn't constitute a positive right, though. For instance, your right not to be killed does not obligate the police, or anyone else, anyone to protect your life. They may investigate after the fact but they're looking after society's interest rather than yours.
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Mar 2, 2015 21:09
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:If your negative rights are not protected then what happens when they are challenged? They disappear. They go away. They do not exist. They were an illusion all along. Alternately, whether you have a right or not does not impact whether that can sometimes be violated. Having a right not to be murdered doesn't mean that as a practical matter you can't be murdered, but having that right does mean that you aren't murdered by people who recognize it a lot more than you are by people who don't. It's social convention and deep wired moral reasoning that keep you from getting killed, mostly, and not the police - who are not around to prevent it most of the time.
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Mar 2, 2015 21:19
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:No, that's not what I mean. What I mean is that for any given right, whether you state it as negative or positive is purely semantic. To take your example, your passive right to not be killed is also affirmatively your right to active self-defense. It's just a shift from passive to active voice, not a substantive logical difference. Ah, I see. We're talking about different distinctions. The negative / positive is about the type of duty your right imposes on others. For instance: A negative right to life imposes the obligation "Don't murder a person". A positive right to life imposes the obligation "Keep a person alive". A right to self defense allows that you can resist being murdered if you find yourself in that situation, but that's not the "active voice" restatement of the negative right to life. Not directed specifically at you - Someone, I think it was Cingulate, raised the following point in the Libertarian thread forever ago and I think it bears restating here. All of these concepts have been Things in philosophy for a long time, and they wouldn't be talked about today if they were merely semantic quibbles. =(
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Mar 3, 2015 12:35
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TwoQuestions posted:This question probably requires better phrasing, perhaps something like "Why should people care if other people get hurt?" If it's the case that you can somehow have better reaction speed than your self driving vehicle then you're still operating the car and if you hit someone you could have avoided because you decided "gently caress it, I don't have to swerve" you just committed vehicular homicide or whatever the charge is in your juristiction. OTOH if your autodriver is cruising along at 150mph with the rest of the traffic and someone jumps into the road leaving you no time for you or the machine to react then you haven't even though it's your car and you're behind the wheel. TwoQuestions posted:Also, since any right to life is a social construction, what if society decides you're some sort of nonperson, as in the case of genocide victims or certain types of criminals? What are they ethically permitted to do about their situation? ITT we seriously debate what potential genocide victims (the actual victims worked this problem and their answer apparantly was "nothing") can ethically do to prevent their genocide?
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Mar 3, 2015 12:47
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I'm aware of the history. I, too, have taken college philosophy courses! Just because something has "been a thing in philosophy for a long time" doesn't mean it isn't also fundamentally a semantic quibble :P You're right, I retract my absolute statement. Semantic quibbles are indeed like academic catnip! Hieronymous Alloy posted:Even imposing a "negative" obligation to "not murder" will in practical terms require people to take positive overt action to avoid murdering in some instances (for example, switching a trolley car onto a different track). It's fundamentally not possible to make that kind of distinction and have it remain valid in the real world. Ultimately, there's no positive right that can't be rephrased as a negative right (right to not be prevented from X) and vice versa. It's an ivory-tower distinction without practical validity. However the quibble is in your objection, not the positive/negative distinction! If rephrasing "the right to X" as "the right to not be prevented from X" doesn't change the obligation involved then you haven't semantically switched from positive to negative - the obligation is the same so you're playing word games while practically speaking the right is still positive or negative. For instance: A right to health care --> An obligation on others to provide you health care. A right not to be prevented from receiving health care --> An obligation on others to provide you health care (which is the same as an obligation not to refuse to provide you health care). It's the same positive right because it's imposing an obligation on others to do something for you. However, if rephrasing does change the obligation then you're actually talking about a different right and we're not in the realm of semantics at all. For instance: A right not to be killed --> An obligation on others to refrain from killing you. (negative right) A right to life --> An open ended obligation on others to keep you alive. (positive right) The implications of those two rights are very different and not merely word play. (I'm open to the idea that there's a better way to rewrite either right not to be killed or a right to life but I couldn't think how to do it). Hieronymous Alloy posted:The reason -- I believe, at least -- that positive/negative rights theory is so popular is not that it's valid; it's that it allows the the convenient, superficial rationalization and trivialization of what are actually very difficult moral dilemmas. It's easy for an ivory-tower philosopher -- or a wealthy man -- to say "you may have a right to life, but it's only negative, and I have a right to be free from theft, so you can't steal bread from me to eat, even though you're starving." This is a very convenient view for libertarians, wealthy people, and other folks who want to have clean consciences while also actively ignoring the plight of the less fortunate. It's not inconsistent to recognize that the positive / negative rights distinction is a valid thing and also hold the view that, for instance, the above situation is more complex than the facile analysis above. Or even that a rights analysis is not that useful in sorting the situation out because "not starving" is always going to take priority over "respecting X right" in the mind of the transgressor. Rights analysis is good for looking at some types of questions and not so great for others, and that's fine. Hieronymous Alloy posted:In practical terms though as a society we have to actually address the problem of the poor and starving with something more than negative rights theory; we have to actually look at the competing rights and weigh them against each other and find an optimal solution. This is why Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables is initially imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread to feed a starving child. Under the prevailing legal codes and legal system of the day, he was clearly in the wrong; but he had no other course of action and would otherwise have died, as would the child; the law expected him and his family to just passively accept starvation. This is why things like an actively redistributive public welfare system are a moral imperative. However, why is this a competing rights problem? If you have a need should it be permissible to steal from someone else you perceive has less of that need? What about assault them? Murder them? That way lies madness. I think everyone can understand why Jean Valjean stole a loaf of bread to feed a starving child, but he was still justly imprisioned. TwoQuestions posted:In my car example it's understood you gotta swerve if you can. Wateroverfire, if you're going to assert that only Negative Rights matter then carve out exemptions for Positive Rights in drat near every circumstance save rich/poor interactions, I fail to see how thinking of rights in terms of Negative and Positive has any meaning. In your car example, and in the streetcar thought experiment, you are literally making the choice right there in that moment whether to murder someone or not. There's no exception - your finger is on the trigger (lever, wheel, etc) and you are deciding if a person lives. Choosing not to murder that person is not inconsistent with that person having a right not to be murdered, or having an obligation not to murder people, clearly, once you're forced into a situation where those are your two options. TwoQuestions posted:Changing gears, how do you go about convincing someone without compassion of a compassionate solution to a problem? If crime in a nearby city you never visit can be reduced substantially by a $10 million investment in infastructure/law enforcement training/whatever, and this investment is proven to work, how do you convince someone who just says "gently caress those city people! If they can't solve their problems without State help they deserve to die!"? Dunno. Is there literally no benefit to helping out that other community other than the feels?
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Mar 3, 2015 16:05
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Condiv posted:I think his issue is that negative and positive rights have no actual distinction because there is no actual thing as negative rights. Just from the wikipedia definition of a negative right: The ethical rule that arise from people having for instance a right not to be killed would be something like "Can I reasonably assume doing X is going to kill someone? In that case don't do X." or "Can I reasonably assume by doing X I can prevent someone from being killed by something else I am contemplating doing? If so then do X.". The ethical rule arising from a right ot life is going to be different - something like "Can I reasonably assume that by doing X I can preserve someone's life whether or not I am the source of danger to them in the first place? In that case do X." Now I'm not saying it isn't praiseworthy to do what you can to preserve life whether or not you're threatening it in the first place. But as an obligation that is pretty open ended while the "Don't kill people" obligation is not. That's the practical distinction between positive and negative rights. Splitting hairs about whether with awkward phrasing we can turn an obligation to not murder someone into an obligation to act not to murder someone is the ivory tower bullshit. IMO, anyway. archangelwar posted:wateroverfire was insinuating that any obligation was problematic. There's no insinuation. I am stating that open ended obligations are problematic. If your moral code commits you to obligations you can't reasonably fulfill you've got a problem. Talmonis posted:My answer was to the question of "is there a reason I should help other than "The Feels"?". By which I think he means the entire concept of morality. I didn't declare theft moral, I simply stated the reasoning behind not wanting your neighbors to be poor and destitute. History bears out that people will in fact, kill you and take your stuff if they're hungry and angry enough. Which brings about bad times (as you mentioned, the Reign of Terror). Thus, it's in your interest to not be a selfish gently caress, and make sure that the people around you have enough too. I wanted to know if the OP had something in mind other than "How do I make this person share my compassion". Talmonis posted:The Golden Rule and compassion aren't difficult things to comprehend, and it's astonishing that some folks need to hash out some sort of ethical framework and ruleset to even consider them. There's a lot more to the question than that, though. Where does the money come from? If I take resources from my community to help yours, what are we not doing in my community in order to help you out? Am I ok making my literal neighbors worse off to send resources to another juristiction? Why are we the ones who have to make choices between competing priorities when the benefit is going to you?
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Mar 5, 2015 15:45
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