Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

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

some gods, a few masters

The IRL debates on rights mostly seem to be about who gets what, like we're up against the limits of how much egalitarianism people can tolerate, but I guess that's also always been true

i would guess - don't really know the debates - that people are 'wary of rights talk' because they push the concept of rights either in the direction of groundless constructions out of a state of nature or otherwise rightsless regime, or the direction of systematic and universally binding timeless norms. but i don't see why we can't say, NV, for example, that perhaps the core conception of rights which are natural is small, and that a broader range of rights growing out of the idea of a protectable right is not necessarily to be grounded in what is natural any longer. and on the opposite side, euler and mordy, i don't know that a rights proponent has to be committed to any and all future acceptability of a given society's or group of society's conceptions of rights, their adoptability by other existing societies, etc. say that rights (such as 'our' liberal-democratic-capitalist ones) may have a limited universality the appreciation of which is conditional upon participation in a society whose project has partly been the extension and observance of such rights. that leaves room for saying that, when we look at how the khmer rouge operates, we're just not going to admit that they did not violate rights they should not have violated, no matter what they might say about rights; but that we do not necessarily have high expectations of talking them into recognizing rights as we conceive them, absent genuine involvement in the kind of social arrangements and political and legal institutions that have accompanied our own rights project.

in other words, going back to mordy's point about the courts, there is an underacknowledged practical (practice-al) thickness to the whole idea of a right, absent which of course it will be easier to construe rights as fictions or universalist fantasies

and ppl can say what they will about rights in the abstract, but if it comes to them needing to claim their rights upon injury, they will be sure to acknowledge the same practical factors (institutions, procedures, imaginative presentations) in an attempt to see satisfaction

i agree with the practical element, my objections are mostly aimed at situations where legality can't intervene. that might include relations between nation states tho - there's something about the language of rights which can't help but appeal to universalism and is frequently used as an ideological weapon by liberal-democratic capitalism. against the Khmer Rouge that's unobjectionable, but against (potential) non-malign states that emphasize a different set of human values i'm less convinced. the right to private property, for example, feels pretty contestible in a way that the right to life doesn't.

"i don't know that a rights proponent has to be committed to any and all future acceptability of a given society's or group of society's conceptions of rights"

I can't parse this, can you rephrase it?

"rights...may have a limited universality"

what is limited universality?

xp sorry, should have said, group of societies': idea being, we uphold what we take to be (the) rights, but that doesn't commit us in any determinate way to thinking that everyone will come around to agreeing with us in the end.

universal 'for us' ?

Rights are inalienable for most of us, as long as certain things aren't happening.

The concept of rights only makes sense to me as description of a government's most fundamental relationship to its citizens. The assertion that a right is inalienable or God-given strikes me as an assertion about where a given society locates the boundary between legitimate governance and illegitimate governance.

If one goes Kantian and says that the deeming of rights is a consequence of rationality, then one can evade rights by choosing irrationality

I am one of those, like Nietzsche I suppose, who thinks the theistic position is as good as it gets, for anything like an "objective" conception of rights. What to conclude from thatree,, should one agree, is rather open, of course.

Reading my blogs today I came across the following article https://nyupress.org/webchapters/Knight&Schwartzberg_intro.pdf by Ingrid Robbins. She defends the following view:

limitarianism advocates that it is not morally permissible to have more resources than are needed to fully flourish in life

She distinguishes between intrinsic limitarianism, which says it's morally wrong in itself to have too much, and non-intrinsic limitarianism, which says it's morally wrong to have too much because having too much has bad consequences. She defends in this article a version of non-intrinsic limitarianism, on which having too much violates political equality (since the rich can dominate the public sphere where democratic deliberation is supposed to take place, e.g.).

I think that I am a limitarianism! My breed is intrinsic, and I wonder how the policy differences between intrinsic and non-intrinsic versions would shake out.

what should society do with surplus?

how deep does your intrinsicness go?

it's morally wrong in itself to have too much, and non-intrinsic limitarianism, which says it's morally wrong to have too much because having too much has bad consequences

you don't need having too much to have a bad consequence to dislike it, fine, but what if limitarianism has bad consequences? what if there were a class of peasants who only produced a luxury good, that society bans under limitarianism, and the class of peasants wages fall below subsistence. still good?

Surplus should be redistributed.

The small group of workers you mention will have to change work. Luxury good here might include hedge fund secretaries.

you're being non-intrinsic by attributing some negative connotation to the luxury good (hedge fund, something bad rich people do that has bad consequences) it could be something banal. if the people go work in something else they drive down the wages of the other people doing it, below the level of 'what's needed to flourish in life'

but what if the surplus brings us over the threshold in 'what's needed to flourish in life'? then everyone is in sin. seems the limitarian thing to do is burn it

isn't it more important that everyone should have the 'what's needed to flourish in life' minimum, rather than no one should have more? would you prefer a society where everyone is at or above the 'what's needed to flourish in life' threshold, or a society where no one is above but some are below? limitarianism seems to put hatred of the rich before love of the poor

There's already lots of work on sufficientarianism, making sure everyone gets the minimal to flourish. This is a different concern. For the author, the claim is that political inequality is a consequence of some having too much, and that political inequality is a moral wrong.

to fully flourish

i mean

sufficientarianism + limitarianism is absolute egalitarianism: no one can be above and nor below the 'minimum amount needed to fully flourish' (accounting for compensating differentials)

there could still be political inequality in a materially egalitarian society

another thing is invention. we are fortunate to live after the invention of many wonderful products. but let's say you invented Limitarianism before the printing press (spread by word of mouth), or the development of film or recorded music. surely people were able to live 'fully flourished' lives before these inventions, and many inventions would be initially costly, so it seems the limitarian thing to do would be to discourage invention. doesn't that much us all much poorer in the long run?