We know what rights are. We know how people arrive at decisions about what they think are important rights. These are concepts that did not need to be explained here. Everyone involved in this conversation already understood the thing you tried to explain in post 49, and I venture to say, already agreed with it. That’s why it’s not relevant - it’s neither something that people in this thread misunderstood, nor is it something that anyone materially disagrees with.
To further Miller, your personal opinions about rights are not relevant to an argument about either whether natural rights exist or what makes them natural rights instead of man-made legal rights. You have steadfastly refused to engage in that discussion, which is the discussion that everybody else is trying to have, while insulting us for calling your irrelevancies irrelevant.
For the record, I’m not insulted by anything LHoD has posted.
So I’m not really clear on what you disagree with, then. It seems pretty likely to me that you’re ascribing a belief to me, based on how you’re defining rights, that I don’t actually hold. Do you mind explaining what you think I believe that you don’t?
FTR, Hamlet’s right. Your version of this conversation doesn’t particularly interest me. Miller is engaging in the conversation in a different way, and it’s a way that’s more interesting.
You stated that your problem is “And I think the bigger peril is forgetting that the rights we have are incredibly fragile, and can be taken away from us from us very, very easily, which is something the concept of “natural rights” elides.” I’d be interested if you have any evidence or examples of this, because I really haven’t seen it at all. To me, the world benefits much more by believing in natural rights (it helps expand them to other people and places that are not covered by codified protections), than it is harmed at all.
For the record, I find the entire discussion of whether natural rights exist or not to be extremely tedious anymore (a view I think this thread has more than adequately shown).
You aren’t forced to engage.
I think you are misinformed. An inalienable right cannot be dispossessed; it may and sometimes should be violated. Whether a right should be violated is a moral statement, but “inalienable” is not a moral descriptor.
On the contrary, if a man lives his entire life in isolation, is he not a man? If he is born by mechanical device, in vitro, in secret, of a long line of isolated men and women who have lived and died in separate rooms of a dungeon, who were themselves born by mechanical device, in vitro, in secret. Our man is the latest of this process, and never has he interacted with any sentient being. Does he have rights?
Let us place the isolated man among cruel and barbarous machines which inflict great pain. Perhaps the torture machines were built by sentient humans, but the inventors are long dead and the machines now conduct themselves. Is our isolated man still devoid of any rights? Can no rights-based moral system protect him from this torture?
But perhaps you will say, the torture machines being without operation and the man being isolated, there is no point in having morality any more as nothing could be done. Now consider if the entire situation occurs right here, right now, beneath a house somewhere in our society. We know it is happening by some accidental discovery of the inventor’s journals, but the man knows nothing yet of us, lest we storm the dungeon and dismantle the torture machines that lay there. To do so is extremely costly for society because the machines are well equipped to defend themselves with deadly force, despite not being sentient.
Suppose also that the machines are running low on fuel, and will eventually stop working on their own.
But tell me this: does society have any rational incentive under your supposed rights-based morality to intercede and save this man? Does this man have human rights, and if so, from where did they arise?
~Max
Thanks. I had no idea. Whatever would I do without you.
What’s weird was, reading the thread, I found myself interested in what you were saying, especially when you posted: “Now, I strongly believe that they are exceedingly important and I think that they should be advocated for even in unpopular cases. It’s in all of our self interests to promote the fiction of strong individual human rights.” I agreed with it, and was interested in teasing out a bit more discussion about why there seems to be a ramped up level of animosity in this thead when it seems to me the outcomes of believing or advocating for natural rights has mostly been positive.
But, thank heavens, you resorted to being you. Thanks for saving me time.
Yes, I have noticed that when one asks direct questions in GD they tend to be ignored.
If you are finding a discussion tedious I’m not sure how what I said was problematic. Why engage in needless tedium if you have a finite lifespan? For me, these sort of discussions are in the top 5-6 of interesting topics. If they weren’t I wouldn’t be in the thread much less be complaining about it.
That said, it is a bit of a digression from the OP’s question of Constitutional rights and non-citizens. I’m not sure if I weighed in an the the original question. In my opinion the Constitution being a product and not a guarantor or the originator of rights I don’t think we should work to exclude legal protections from inhabitants, legal or otherwise, of this nation unless there is great urgency or necessity.
“Problematic” isn’t the best word. It was much more “Why is he being a dick?”
I asked a question on one part of the discussion that was occurring (which, interestingly enough, was involving you), and find the rest of it tedious. I’m not sure why it’s difficult to understand that there are many different facets to a debate, some which I find interesting (the net effect of belief or advocating for natural rights), and some which are re-warmed, re-hashed arguments that apparently carry a high level of anger for how repetitive and talking past each other as they are.
Cool, I won’t bother you with a response, then, other than to note that it’s a big internet out there, and you should have little trouble finding something that entertains you.
On reread, I see what you’re saying. I should say that an inalienable right–or a natural right, or whatever we want to call a right that is observed rather than constructed–should not be, prima facie, violated. Fair correction.
Rights only exist as duties on other moral agents, whether those duties are positive or negative. As such, it doesn’t make sense to talk about how a person’s right to life was violated by a tumor, or how an screaming infant is violating your right to sanity.
Once you introduce society back into the equation, then yes: his human rights become relevant. Those rights are duties imposed on other moral agents.
Stipulate that there’s a right to freedom from torture. That doesn’t mean that a person dying of incurable bone cancer is having her rights violated. But it does mean that I have a duty not to kick her while she’s dying of cancer; and arguably if I can alleviate her pain at little cost to myself, I have a positive duty to do so.
And I’ve noticed that you’re super wrong and are confining yourself to making contemptuous declarations devoid of argument. Keen.
Cool, don’t bother yourself. As I said, I was just interested in one facet of what you and octopus had said and seeing if there was evidence support for your assertions. Feel free to go back to talking past each other, and I’ll have to live the rest of my life suffering in great pain never knowing what support you had for your position. How ever will I go on?
Ok, those conclusions you are coming to are the logical outcome of axioms. That’s what people in this thread are saying. The axioms you use are not universal truths or natural laws of the universe. They aren’t even inevitable in a society of so-called moral agents. Which is almost a hint of a tautology in your argument.
You could make a moral argument that a quick euthanization of someone who is suffering from a painful and debilitating disease is the right thing. You can make a moral argument for infanticide. You can make a moral argument for forcible eugenics. You can make a moral argument for forced conversions to a religion.
It ALL depends on what set of moral axioms are argued from.
You’re missing the level of my axioms. Specifically, they include:
-My experience of my own desires is an objective reality.
-Other beings are substantially similar to me in their own experiences of their own desires.
I know what an axiom is, octopus. What I reject is your labeling of my conclusions as axioms. You’re not following my argument well enough to refute it or even to label it.
I am following your argument. The fact that we have different sets of axioms that we are arguing from is refutation of your argument.
Hey, everybody, I’m not just wrong, I’m **super **wrong.
I suppose that’s appropriate for a forum that calls itself not just Debates but **Great **Debates.
But the accusation is not just blather. It’s **Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious **blather.
Your second sentence disproves the first :).