LHoD, if I understand your objection, it’s that even unenforced rights are useful because people may voluntarily choose to follow them even if there’s no actual punishment in play. People may just choose to follow them anyway.
To an extent, I agree. The problem as I see it is that someone isn’t acknowledging those rights because it’s a guideline and they like guidelines, they follow them because they match up with their inner sense of rights. As you say, even if it were not a recognised right, you would not harangue me on my walk. But it isn’t because that’s a right written down somewhere; it’s because you think it’s a good idea. Yes, it provides a guideline, but it’s not one people will be motivated to follow at the expense of their own guidelines in the absence of enforcement. IOW, you aren’t following that guideline, you’re following your own one - and the two just happen to coincide in this particlar case. It existing as an unenforced right has no effect on whether you choose to follow it, and thus it means nothing.
I guess I didn’t think you were the religious type.
Well, mainly because murder is at the extreme end of the scale. But we can keep looking at you if you want. From an evolutionary standpoint, a moral code comes about to benefit our species, not any given individual. The benefit of having murder be immoral and illegal is that the murderer is (or can be) then removed from society to prevent him from repeating his crime.
If you’re not interested in understanding my position, I guess that’s your prerogative.
This is something I struggle with, believe me. It is part of the reason I say that people cannot choose their beliefs. Even though I can’t really formulate my reasons for believing in an objective morality, even though I recognize that my belief in one may be a product of my brain’s hard-wiring, I still believe in it.
Okay, that’s fine. I’d rephrase the third sentence as, “From an evolutionary standpoint, a recognition of a moral code comes about to benefit our species, not any given individual.” That is, I see our recognition of objective morality as a tool of reasoning. Things are right or wrong regardless of whether we evolved to believe them.
I disagree. The fact that I believe in the right protects you. If I can persuade others to believe in the right, you’re protected from more folks. Yes, it’s my belief in the right that protects you, not the right itself–but that’s precisely equivalent to how your legal right not to be murdered protects you.
I think the problem is one of levels of rights. You don’t believe in the legal right, other than that it exists. Your motivation for following that rule isn’t because it’s a legal right, but because your own idea of moral rights coincide with it. When such rights are enforced, we have plenty of motivation other than (and as well as) our own inner sense of rights to follow them; that they are enforced, for one; social stigmatization, which is itself a form of enforcement; and so on. When rights are unenforced, though, you are left only with your inner sense.
Go back to the raving loony example. You see a person walking along, and are struck by the urge to shout abuse. In one scenario, there is a legal right that protects the person from your abuse, but it is not enforced. In another, there is no such right at all.
Will you behave differently in those two scenarios?
.
OK. I just thought if you were interesting in presenting a position you’d’ve posted more than “I don’t”.
I can accept that you believe that, but I can’t see why anyone else would. Basically, it sounds like you’re saying: Just take my word for it. I don’t mean that to be snarky, it’s just exactly what it sounds like to me.
That’s what I can’t get my mind around. Was this objective morality in existence before the earth came into being? If we had evolved differently, and that’s entirely possible, then the morality we would have would be different. For example, If social insects were to evolve into a sentient species, their morality would be quite different from ours.
amrussell, we would really prefer that old threads (known as zombies) not be re-opened. There is a good likelihood that posters who participated in the thread when it first was posted are no longer members and arguments directed against them are going to be wasted. There is also the possibility that posters who once had feuds and resolved them are liable to encounter language rekindling the feud, not realizing that the language predates the truce.
I certainly don’t expect you to take my word for it. At this point, I’m talking about my own position, not trying to convince you of it.
In the same way that, before aything existed in the universe, 1+1=2 was a true statement, yes. Morality is descriptive of what is right and wrong to do. It does not, I believe, depend upon evolution.
Any reading of that must conclude that unalienable rights are self-evidently inherent in creation, not derived from government. Life (the right not to be stoned to death) is listed. From this, it would seem that your best argument is that the women involved did not have rights because they were not men, but let’s not get sidetracked.
For those among us who might be lawyers, and thus may require additional help understanding straightforward concepts,* I present the following:
So the rights, which clearly exist regardless of government/law, are merely secured by government (yes, I recognize that’s a hell of a “merely”). Furthermore, when any form of government (presumably including the Taliban) is destructive of these ends, another right comes into play.
I’d say it’s abundantly clear to an American that the women did indeed have an actual right not to be stoned to death…even if it was not one they themselves could effectively assert.
See post number twenty eight here. The moderator took the newest posts and split them from that topic to make a new (non-zombie) topic in which we could continue the discussion. The post I mentioned explains this, and gives a link to the previous thread.
Why is the Declaration of Independence considered an authoritative document? It’s interesting, of course, but has no legal standing in the sense that the Constitution does. In fact, if a US state decided to do same, the federal government would not look too kindly on it (witness the Confederacy).
Beyond that, though, 18th century thinkers were locked into a religious, or at least a theistic, view of the world. I don’t accept that there even is a “Creator”. So where do we go from there?
The Declaration of Independence has no standing in law at all, and is not the “founding document of American law” by any means. Where did you get that idea?
The Declaration makes certain claims, yes, but those claims were unpersuasive to George III. You may recall that there was actually a war for independence; we didn’t deliver the Declaration of Independence to George and hear, “Right, well, good show, Yankees. Off you go to be free, then!” What persuaded his royal self was the guys with muskets hiding behind trees and shooting the guys with red coats. They asserted a right, and enforced their own remedy.
If you assert a right, you need to be able to assert a remedy. The legal system is not the only remedy. Guys with guns ready to impose their own legal system if they win is ALSO a remedy. In fact, at heart our legal system IS guys with guns ready to enforce the rules upon you.
Mere words, no matter how eloquent, are alone never enough. They have to convince large numbers of people to make sacrifices to establish the remedy you want.
Therefore: there is no right without a remedy.
ADDENDUM A: Are you seriously premising your claim for rights on those granted by a Creator?
I guess we better forget about that whole Separation of Church and State thingy, then. Perhaps we should teach something about this “Creator” in our public schools, too, so our kids don’t grow up ignorant about what the source of their rights are.
In legal theory terms, we have people in this thread taking:
(1) the “Positive Law” position: there is no universal law–law is only what a society decides law will be; and
(2) the “Natural Law” posistion: there is a basic set of rules written in the hearts of men that is always law no matter what society decides or enforces.
The problem with (1) is that Hitler made laws that everyone outside Germany thought were bad–but these laws still should have the name “laws” because they functioned as such. The laws of the Taliban are wrong but still should be called laws.
The problem with (2) is that no one agrees on exactly what laws are written in men’s hearts.
Number (3) is an uneasy compromise where laws are laws only if they are based on a generally acceptable “moral code,” which may not be written in all men’s hearts everywhere at all times but is generally accepted by a particular society. This position suffers the faults of both (1) and (2) in an intermediate way.
We certainly should give some thought to public mention of the Creator at governmental functions and events, given his role in the very underpinnings of our government.
