Here is the crux. Bricker, John: I do not believe for one minute that if either of you, were watching a woman being stoned to death because she had been raped, and you were in a position to do something about it, that you would stand there mumbling some platitudes about rights not existing respect for the laws as they stand. (Damn that was an awkward sentence)
Sure there is no scientifically discoverable list written in the stars that says “These Are Your Rights” but I think we can all agree that their should be certain standards of human decency although we are not be able to agree on what those standards are.
Sure, but that wouldn’t change what the people doing the stoning thought. Tell them she has the right not to be stoned.
Actually, I think we can, to a large degree, agree on what those standards are. We put them in a document called the constitution and we vote on them. But until we do, they’re just ideas in peoples’ heads.
And keep in mind that those standards will vary over time. A hundred years ago, almost no one considered it reasonable that homosexuals should be allowed to marry. That’s not because people were “bad” back in the day, they just didn’t know any better. At this point, it would be foolish to imagine that we have finally figured it all out.
No, HERE is the crux: because we cannot agree on what they are, it seems futile to insist on using them as a basic for legislation or policy. Sure, I agree there are natural laws, but I’m a Catholic; I suspect you don’t want me in charge of basing our secular laws on what I believe natural law to be.
Do you?
If we don’t, then they are simply ideas, as John Mace says, a beginning of a discussion point. But you can’t point to them with authority and say, THESE ARE THE WAY THINGS MUST BE. Right?
In primitive* hunter/gatherer societies, it is common to kill deformed infants. It is reasonable to assume that that practice was quite common in most human societies at some time in the past. That was considered a morally good thing to do, and maybe it was-- because the group couldn’t survive if they had to feed those types of infants. We, OTOH, recoil in horror at the practice because we can afford to feed and care for disabled people. What once was good (in the sense that it was necessary for survival) is now bad (because it is no longer necessary for survival). But it wasn’t pre-ordained that we would become technologically capable of creating conditions that would allow these children to not be a burden on the group, and therefore it can’t have been pre-ordained that killing deformed infants was bad.
Good and bad moral choices only exist in so much as they can be weighed against some standard. Whether that standard is “pleasing God” or “fulfilling God’s plan” or “making me rich” or “survival of the species” is largely a matter of personal choice. Or if you don’t want to say we choose our beliefs, then it’s a matter of what our beliefs turn out to be. Either way, it means people do have different beliefs, and I can’t see a way of pulling “truth” out of those beliefs. They just are.
*I only mean that in the scientific sense-- ie, reflecting an earlier condition.
I’m nitpicking, but that actually happened back in December, and was the reason the original thread was started. There was a link to the old thread in a new pit thread (now closed) about a recent news article about the Baiji, which resulted in the old thread getting bumped.
I thought that, as of December, 2006, there were 17 known individuals, none of which has been documented since, and that the declaration that they were extinct came recently.
Nitpick: with a few minor exceptions, it’s something of a myth that the Revolutionaries used guerilla tactics against the British. By and large, it was a straight conventional force on conventional force conflict. You probably already knew that, but some people who wouldn’t reading “hiding behind trees” would probably get the wrong idea.
I’m not completely without standards. I know that for myself, I experience the fulfillment of my desires as good and the thwarting of my desires as bad. I have no reason to believe that my own desires are unique in this respect. In general, when desires exist, the fulfillment of them is good and the thwarting of them is bad. When desires come into conflict, you get into complex decisions–but that’s not the basis of the morality.
God doesn’t enter into it; human sentience doesn’t enter into it. As long as desires exist in any universe, this morality applies. If God’s plan involves the thwarting of most desires without fulfilling very many, then God’s plan is bad.
Yeah, so? It’s still a right according to one of the definitions of the word. Even the dictionary says so. Per Dictionary.Com:
a moral, ethical, or legal principle considered as an underlying cause of truth, justice, morality, or ethics.
You whining about it doesn’t stop it from being a commonly accepted use of the word. Why have any discussions of morals at all, Bricker? Just because you view everything through a legal lens doesn’t mean all of us here have to as well.
I agree it’s an accepted definition. I contend, however, that it’s essentially a meaningless claim, a claim that lacks any rigor, to use that definition of the word. You say a college education is a right, I say it isn’t… we’re neither of us using the word wrongly, and yet we’re asserting completely opposite cases. When a word’s proper use results in such a lack of common understanding and ground, I contend it’s not a very useful model.
The thing is, you’re intentionally misrepresenting the utility of the word. I recognize that the way I’m using the word “right” has no coercive power in the world. Its power, inasmuch as it exists, is persuasive: it shows us how to behave, it doesn’t force us to behave a certain way.
You can throw up your objection about its lack of coercive power as much as you want, but every time you do, it’ll remain a straw man objection, because I’ve never claimed it has coercive power.