Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

xp the first book of leviathan, with the epistemological stuff in it, is pretty amazing

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/opinion/the-intellectual-life-of-violence.html

interview w/ richard bernstein on fanon, arendt, and benjamin

cc Mordy: Scott Alexander on moldbug

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/

yeah i've read that a few times before. it's a good rejoinder. did u see bannon listed moldbug as one of his favorite writers?

ya that's where i saw this linked

what do people really mean when they say 'i'm wary of rights talk'?

― j., Thursday, January 12, 2017 4:51 AM (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I say that I'm wary of rights talk! What do I mean? well, start here: if I'm to accept such talk, I want to understand the genesis of rights. How to make sense of rights talk without there being a giver of that right? Consider the claim that "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." From what comes that right? One can offer theistic answers, of course, but a) what force would this have for non-theists b) how to resolve differences between theisms? If one goes Kantian and says that the deeming of rights is a consequence of rationality, then one can evade rights by choosing irrationality (if irrationality can't be chosen, then the Kantian move explains nothing: why do we have rights: because we do).

I realize that this is all quite naive but it's why I'm wary of rights talk.

surely it's a matter of mutual recognition rather than anything transcendent. your self-conception is as one among a community/world of a baseline of equal status. it is clearly negotiable in the long term at least and not absolutist

xp yet how often are there people who are wary of rights talk who are also willing to say 'also i don't think anyone has any rights' (or equivalently expressed)? i mean we ain't talkin nietzscheans here

yeah I don't know, I read your post in my usual philosophical vacuum, I have no idea who says "I'm wary of rights talk" outside of the ivory tower

yeah they're the only ones afaik

for the same kinds of reasons that people have, i dunno, problems with chapter IV of utilitarianism or meditation 3 - it repeats some dumb objection they picked up somewhere so that they know how to make the next move in the schtick

One can offer theistic answers, of course

i find these satisfactory and actually feel like if there is no god then there are certainly no natural rights. normative rights or pragmatic rights maybe (something like 'these rights are necessary to posit in order to have a society that is somewhat nice to live' seems like a practical argument to me) but certainly no natural rights since the only natural right in the absence of god is the right to kill or be killed.

You don't need a god to have a concept of "natural rights". Human beings are animals with, generally speaking, shared instincts, attitudes, attributes, etc. We can create natural rights out of our shared nature as a species, and for the most part, that involves being both cooperative and individualistic, valuing life and relationships, that sort-of thing. There are statistical outliers like psychopaths out there, but that's why they're called "psychopaths".

You don't need a god to know what love, beauty, and connectedness feel like, and to understand that most other people feel those things, too, and to accept that as a natural right to respect.

It's not for the sake of god, but for the sake of the person. So the only way to have a true natural right is without a god.

how is the material possibility of killing or being killed a right?

haven't you ever seen james bond

a natural right to sell alcohol for consumption on or off the premises

it's not really a right - it's bellum omnium contra omnes

the natural state of life is one of chaos + war + brutality. you can invent a social contract to make life more pleasant but i don't see how it becomes natural just bc it's nice. larry, you seem to be arguing that it's natural to honor each other's rights to love beauty and connectedness. i'm surprised to hear you of all ppl assert this. you must be much more optimistic about the nature of humanity than you let you.

than you let on*

i think i'm one of the "wary of rights talk" people. i don't see much value in a concept of rights that isn't backed up by a legal system with power to enforce them, so i think talk of human rights beyond the specific rights people are granted within the constitutions of specific states is pretty meaningless. maybe as a notion to aspire to but i can't see any important difference between saying "i believe in the right to life" and a statement of personal values that doesn't drag universalist notions in as collateral

xp

We're talking about creating normative standards, which is a willed creation the same as any other tool out there. What I'm saying is that god is an unnecessary intermediary between people when we're dealing with relationships between people as individuals and as a society. It can be used for good or bad So, why not cut out the excess fat and get straight to the point to make things as realistic and efficient as possible with minimized ability to fuck with things.

Basically, take as much abstraction out of it as possible, and as much power out of the hands of people to create standards using concepts like gods -- from god to a shared nature as a species, which belongs to us rather than whomever is creating the god. It lets us see the standards for ourselves in us and most of the people in the world, so we have a reality check right in our own pocket.

It's not necessarily optimism, it's just observation ... not just from empathy, but culture. In my experience most people are pretty OK, the ones who cause the real problems are the outliers, and they're excellent at having their will forced on the rest of us. My own bizarro moldbug type belief is that we should do a total genocide on psychopaths and sociopaths. As if such a thing were even possible.

We're talking about creating normative standards

no we aren't - we're talking about natural rights

"Natural right" is a human-created concept. What was the natural right for human beings in the last universe where human beings, and in this iteration, no intelligent life existed? For the moment just imagine you're an atheist, because that's a requirement to think along these lines.

NV I agree with you

i don't see much value in a concept of rights that isn't backed up by a legal system with power to enforce them

i'm not sure why this would be a defect. you could think that the rights that are enshrined in a legal system have their grounding in something that's not part of the legal system, and for their part, the rights that are enshrined don't seem to be any less legitimately rights because it takes powers of punishment and deterrence and procedures for adjudication of claims to see them realized.

larry, i wrote above: "normative rights or pragmatic rights maybe (something like 'these rights are necessary to posit in order to have a society that is somewhat nice to live' seems like a practical argument to me)" which you apparently agree w/. you can't have it both ways - it can't both be a natural right and a human construct. if it's a construct it's not natural. if it's natural it's not a construct. this seems obvious to me.

Everything is a human construct because human beings have to create and accept it. By "natural right" we can decide that it belongs to our shared nature as a species, as in, it has a place in reality, in our biology. Which is far more verifiable than placing it in a god.

So it's not just a social creation, it points back to something, but replace god with nature. Of course the problem then becomes how to define human nature, and that's a whole other thing. Everyone wants to control reality for their own benefit...

oy larry i'm getting a headache. you're using /natural right/ in a way different i think than how it's traditionally used in the literature. have u read leviathan? it's a good read - you'd probably find it interesting if you haven't.

~sovereign must control reality for benefit of all~

xp

I will have to check it out. What I'm saying is "natural right" is just a concept, and can be a pretty useful one, and so I'm trying to open up the machine and tinker around with it.

j what would rights be grounded in, beyond legal structures?

thinking along a bit, i think i mean maybe that rights specifically involve a legal relationship between individuals or individuals and the state. does it make sense to talk about murder for example as a breach of my rights? does that get to the heart of murder as a crime? i'm certainly unlikely to prevent my own murder by invoking my right to life to the person about to kill me.

rights seem like things that can be contested in court, and although that might involve reparation or punishment the important thing might be that contestation of my rights involves the possibility of their being acknowledged and granted to me? in a way that isn't possible for situations of extreme coercion like murder, by individual or state.

maybe in short to say that most crimes most of the times can be considered as such in simpler ways than breaches of my rights, natural or otherwise.

btw - if rights existed within our biology i would agree that they were natural - but if they were biologically determined then we wouldn't have to discuss them at all. we don't discuss the right to breath. that we can even argue about what they are or where they come from indicates that they are not biologically determined.

Yeah, things are complex, if it were simple I'm sure we would have perfected this stuff a long time ago.

think about it like this - we were endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights

we were endowed by our creator ???? with certain unalienable rights

you need some compelling things to fill in for ????. i'm not opposed to ???? = "normative practices that make life pleasant" but inherently that makes them not natural but a construct. afaic you need a god to get to natural rights. which i'm cool w/.

i'm largely with you Mordy, but i'm not sure the creator in any of the big theistic religion actually gives human beings any rights? wouldn't doing so set a boundary on the creator's omnipotence?

NV i don't know, but some minimal normative conception seems as fair as anything: 'stuff we think shouldn't be done'.

rights underlie claims individuals can make to society (represented by the state) to be protected from certain harms or injuries stemming from other individuals or society by society. there's no claim being made that rights would express the essence of some wrong things that you could suffer, just that they would mark out a domain of things which anyone could reasonably demand protection and redress for. in cases where a claimant cannot claim these things for herself, a society recognizing rights can still press claims on her behalf, for the sake of redress or just the general maintenance of the rights of others.

now maybe there's a problem articulating the contents of that domain, but if the mechanism for the observance of rights makes sense and there are some rights we are confident would be included in any such domain, then it's not clear why we should have to shy away from saying that there are rights.

i'm largely with you Mordy, but i'm not sure the creator in any of the big theistic religion actually gives human beings any rights? wouldn't doing so set a boundary on the creator's omnipotence?

i'm trying to think how to untangle what creator gives or doesn't give to humans in terms of rights but while i do - why would giving humans rights limit omnipotence? (which isn't to say that if it did it would be a problem - all of creation limits omnipotence, the whole thing is a project in limitation/contraction of infinity.)

ok j that makes sense and i don't object to most of it. it seems to me that this kind of notion of rights would necessarily reduce natural or human rights to quite a small scope - problem of general agreement, wherever we set the threshhold for "most people agree" or even "enough people agree" - and that this scope would be quite a lot smaller than the ideas expressed in, say, most historical declarations of human rights.

i guess the way i'd conceptualize it is like this. you write: "rights seem like things that can be contested in court, and although that might involve reparation or punishment the important thing might be that contestation of my rights involves the possibility of their being acknowledged and granted to me?" -- the creator has a code that is enforced from a divine level (either through intervention into the worldly realm or the spiritual one) and that guarantees my rights w/ the threat of retribution/punishment for infringement upon them. additionally he mandates* that we establish courts in order to serve as an earthly proxy to enforce these rights on his behalf. so these rights are natural acc to the definition that you find compelling. rights that can be contested in court, and that are guaranteed ultimately by a creator.

* interestingly one of the few laws that is mandated to both jews + gentiles alike -- acc to the OT the establishment of courts is truly one of the bedrocks of society.

"there are some rights we are confident would be included in any such domain"

Do you mean "should be included"? There've been some stingy states...

Mordy - actually ignore the "constraint on omnipotence" part because i guess if i accept omniscience along with omnipotence then there is no point at which God-given rights would create an unexpected boundary on God's power, it would look more like some kind of function of the universal laws God had already set in place maybe

xp, would, given time and appropriate procedure for the practical establishment of the rights : )

yeah and just generally speaking (tho we're in theological territory here not political philosophy) there are no limits on omnipotence including the limits of paradoxes/constraints etc. xp

hmm xp j so you think that e.g. the Khmer Rouge or the Taliban would eventually concede rights that they don't / didn't in their time, given enough time? isn't this just a Hegelian version of the theistic option?

if u give a thousand totalitarians a thousand years they'll eventually produce the code of hammurabi

There are no rights other than what we make for ourselves, just the same with gods. The rights we have are what we agree upon based on our circumstances. There tend to be fewer "natural rights" during famines IIRC.

Ugh I just contributed to this thread's descent into the undergrad dorm lounge didn't I

you will be stripped of further posting rights