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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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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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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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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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