No. Essence is not a concrete entity; it is a metaphysical abstraction, much like existence.
Bwah ha ha ha ha!
Do you mean?
No, I do not. I meant what I wrote. What, exactly, is your problem? No one has said that essence makes choices or writes laws or is purple or weighs eight pounds.
You’re conflating consensual “slavery” with nonconsensual slavery. No one is maintaining that all the slavegirls and slaveboys who populate the BDSM universe have a right to kill their masters/mistresses, because when they say, “I’m tired of being a slave” that’s the end of it.
But what if your hypothetical Roman owner took a dislike to his self-enslaved Greek and then sold him to a salt mine before he could buy his freedom? Wouldn’t he then have a right to kill his master, to preserve the chance at freedom his master would deny him?
The morality of resisting slavery rests on its nonconsensual nature. Basically, you are depriving a person of their life, in the sense that they no longer get to make choices about where they live, how they live, or even if they live at all. The Greek pedagogue may have been looking forward to a good life as a slave, but for most slaves life was mostly hard labor and not much food. I think it’s fair to subject people who would impose such lives on others to the death penalty.
It’s the nonconsensuality of the thing that bothers me. Take the case of one of those guys in Texas who got sentenced to twenty years in prison for a half-ounce baggie of pot by the government in ol’ coke snortin’ Dubya’s state. He has truly been shat upon by our society. If he decides to escape the deprivation of twenty years of his life for what is truly unjust cause, and he kills a guard or three while doing so, I’d understand it as a tragedy. My anger on behalf of the guards would be levelled, not at the perp, but at the damn fools who put him in prison for no good reason.
Or take another example. Suppose you were a slave in modern day america…someone captures you and forces you to work for them. However, in modern day America that slavery is illegal. All you have to do is escape and you are freed from slavery. You have the same right to self defense that anyone else does, but your right to self defense is not dependent on the fact that you are a slave, but rather that you are under the immanent threat of physical violence. If your master falls asleep and you have an opportunity to escape without killing your master you would be commiting a crime if you killed them, just like everyone else who is confronted with deadly force but has an opportunity to withdraw.
You have an obligation to retreat from deadly force, you can only match deadly force with deadly force if you have no opportunity to retreat. The same obligation applies to slaves.
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Correct me, but I thought I read somewhere that some particular essence could cause its own existence.
If being killed, against one’s will, was not a concept separate from concrete reality, then no one could argue with you. However, since there are some things that do not go away, no matter your world view, then it seems comical and odd to claim that existence is an abstraction. That is, in my opinion, why people are laughing.
I should perhaps more properly have said “the essence of some particular thing could cause the existence of that thing.” And Scott, I’m not laughing.
I know, but
But here’s the thing, Lib. You propose some axiomatic rights. But those rights will only supported by the rest of us if we agree to your axioms. And it turns out that most of the time we do, or at least we agree to axioms close enough to your axioms that our assertions don’t conflict with your assertions.
But what happens when we don’t? Suppose it’s 20,005 BCE and we’re on what will become the Ukrainian steppes? Your rights to property are pretty much meaningless unless you convince the rest of us hunter-gatherers to agree to your conception of rights. You assert that whether we agree to your rights or not, your rights still exist even as they are being violated. And I’m fine with you believing that. But whether your rights exist but won’t be enforced unless we agree, or whether your rights exist because everyone agrees that your rights exist, we still must have agreement on what those rights are or we get nowhere.
MUST we have agreement on the source of our rights before we can have a fruitful discussion on what those rights should be? Sure, a discussion on the source of our rights could be fun…but suppose we’re sitting down in 1789 trying to draft a constitution…do we require unanimous assent to identical fundamental ethical axioms before we can do such a thing, or is it enough that everyone agrees with the end product? If we require unanimous agreement on the source of our rights, then surely you recognize then that government is impossible and we are thrown back to the war of all against all.
Even if you wish that everyone would agree with your premises, and even as you attempt to convince the rest of us to agree with your premises, surely you won’t begrudge the rest of us our attempt to lay out some sort of imperfect social order in the meantime? I agree not to punch you and Malacandra in the face in return for you and Malacandra not punching me in the face. You argue in the meantime that your right not to be punched in the face doesn’t depend on me and Malacandra agreeing not to punch you in the face, but for now isn’t it good enough that we agree not to punch you in the face?
Personally, I believe that ethics are created by human beings. You believe differently (or so I imagine). But will all our discussions on ethics be sterile until we agree on the source of ethics?
Scott, Askia ain’t people. And is he laughin’, or cryin’, or laughin’ just to keep from cryin’?
Perhaps you were distracted at the time. Goodness — as an aesthetic, not as an ethic — compels the existence of God because the essence of goodness is edification. It is a matter of cause, not of volition, just as when we speak of the attraction of gravity, we do not mean it is handsome. Moreover, in an objective context, God and Its attributes are all that are real. The universe is an abstraction, specifically, a probability distribution.
I laughed at the idea that “existence is an abstraction,” and I laughed 'cuz it’s funny. It sounds like you’re one of those people who are convinced that YOU’RE real but the rest of everything outside yourself is an intricate hallucination you’re experiencing.
I know some mathematicians and a couple of physicists far cleverer than me who’d have a field day with Liberal’s notions of a ‘probablity distribution.’
I don’t think it’s a matter of axioms in my discussions with Malacandra; rather, it is a matter of definition. We cannot agree on axioms because we cannot agree on what rights are. He seems to define them as some sort of license — i.e., governments allow you to do this or that, thereby proscribing what he calls rights. That is probably why he attaches a need to defend rights to what rights are essentially to him. In other words, if you cannot hold onto your rights, then they are not intrinsic to you. But I define rights differently. What he calls a right, I call a permission. I define rights as the authority that accrues to propriety. In other words, you have a right to liberty even if you are a slave. The fact that a man has kidnapped you and holds a gun to your head does not transfer your rights to him. I say that you are still a rights bearing entity, and that the slaver is a usurper, nothing more.
Sorry for the hijack, guys. ** Lib**, thanks for clearing that up for me.
You’re welcome.
But surely what gives the slave the right to use deadly force isn’t that the master-slave relationship is nonconsensual, but rather that the master enforces the relationship through the threat of deadly force. If I rob your house while you are away, I took your property without your consent. But that doesn’t give you the right to kill me. If I point a gun at you and demand your property, THEN you have a right to use deadly force against me.
We can call that pointing of a gun mugging, or slaveowning, or whatever, but the nub of what gives the slave the right to use deadly force against his so-called owner is the initial threat from the owner. This is why I brought up different forms of slavery. Of course chattel slavery as usually practiced in the American south would be grounds for a slave to use deadly force. But it isn’t because it was named “slavery”, or that the person was designated a “slave”, but rather that there was someone with a whip and a shotgun willing to enforce that designation. Without the whip and shotgun threatening the slave, or reasonably threatening the slave (or other slaves) in the future, then the right to deadly force goes away.
Of course I’ll agree that 99% of the time “master” and “slave” are relationships backed by the threat of deadly force. In those cases the slave is entitled to use deadly force. But in the rare cases where no threat of deadly force exists, then a slave is not justified in using deadly force. Of course we could have an argument that absent that deadly threat, said person is not really a slave. Could be, but surely there are people like those greek pedagogue slaves or ottoman jannisaries who were “really” slaves, but weren’t “really” under such a threat.
Of course, this brings in military conscripts and prisoners. Do draftees have the right to use deadly force against their drill seargeant, their draft board, or the MPs? Do prisoners have the right to use deadly force against the guards? Of course in some situations prisoners absolutely do have the right to deadly force against the guards. Prisoners still retain their human rights even though they have lost their civil rights.
But you don’t always have the right to use deadly force to save your life or your freedom. You don’t have the right to kill guards to escape unless they are directly threatening your life. If you are faced with the choice of being recaptured, or killing a guard, ethically you cannot kill the guard, you must allow yourself to be recaptured. If the only way to save your life is a heart transplant, you can’t grab a random person off the street, cut out their heart, and take the heart to the doctors for transplant. You’d be arrested for murder, and rightly so. Killing an innocent person to escape from slavery or unjust incarceration is strictly analgous.
Sure, that’s what I understood you to believe. But how important is this discussion about whether your rights still exist even if no one agrees they exist? I can’t speak for Malacandra, but I imagine he might disagree with you about whether you have “natural rights”, but he might argue that whether you have natural rights or not is irrelevant except as a method for convincing other people to help you enforce those rights.
Sure, the slaveholder is a usurper. You still have your rights even though the slaveholder calls you a slave. But what makes those rights important is that the rest of use are willing to recognize your rights for various reasons which don’t have to be the same as your reasons, and are willing to use force against the person who pretends to be your owner in order to free you.
If we aren’t willing to free you, and you aren’t able to free yourself, then your reserved rights are moot, you’ll remain a slave to the end of your days, just as so many others remained slaves. The point is that protection of human rights requires enforcement by human beings, it doesn’t drop down from heaven. Whether we are enforcing pre-existing rights or enforcing rights created by human beings might be an interesting discussion, but it is less important than actually enforcing the exercise of those rights. I don’t think we have to agree as to where rights come from before we exercize those rights.
Whether or not you help the slave become free, he still has the right to freedom. Both a free man and a slave have exactly that same right. They merely have a different status. Therefore, my comments are not moot. Your rescue of the slave has no bearing on his ethical rights, but only on his metaphysical status. In other words, I’m not condemning force to secure rights — in fact, that is exactly what I, as a liberal, advocate. I’m just saying that rights inhere to you whether they’re secured or not. And it certainly makes a big difference if we are to discuss the role of government in the security of rights. It matters whether it is protecting something it gave you because whatever it has given, it may take away. It is possible for slavery to be legal, but it can never be ethical.
Hi. I see the debate’s not been standing still, but I got here as quick as I could, and I’ll post what I’ve written for now. Btw Lib I should add that I’m enjoying the discussion very much. A good argument sharpens the wits, and I’m sure you’ll not deny that I can use the exercise. 
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Lib, I don’t believe I did perpetrate an ad hominem argument. I said only that I found an argument of yours to be tiresome nitpickery. You, on the other hand, implied that I was incapable of a high-quality intellectual argument. Perhaps that is not an ad hom but only an insult pure and simple. Still, I’m fairly clear on what an ad hom is; and had I said “I choose to ignore your argument, as it has been advanced by a pretentious fathead”, you’d have a case. (Of course, I would also be in violation of the rules of this forum; you have the right not to be called a pretentious fathead in GD, as you do not in the Pit – thanks not to anything accruing to propriety but to how the keepers of order hereabouts mandate that the place shall be run.) You can easily look back and see that I did nothing of the sort.
I disagree with your intepretation of the location of the line between where a nation may be considered an active agent and where it may not. Would you respond to Isaiah’s famous prophecy “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation” by harrumphing crustily and saying “What nonsense! A nation cannot lift up a sword nor have one lifted up against it. The logical fallacy makes a mockery of the whole statement”? I doubt it. (Though if you would, you are at least consistent.) But I think that when you say
you are arguing from consequences.
Pace von Mises, if “The worst enemy of clear thinking is the propensity to hypostatize”, I should say it had a close contender in the propensity to drag in over-analysis of simple and rather incidental points. As long as I was discussing the consequences of certain aspects of human rights either being framed or not being framed in the laws of a nation, we might as well have passed over the angel-on-a-pinhead point about whether the nation, or only the nation’s lawmakers, were responsible for the law. This is what I find tiresome and why I protest.
Thus for a right that guarantees nothing.
And as to property, we’re agreed that I have the right to enjoy possession of and title to my wristwatch, and he who takes it from me is a common thief. Or a duly authorised bailiff seizing it from me in payment of debt. Or an agent of the rightful owner restoring it to him after I have (let us hope, in good faith) purchased stolen property. Or a warder relieving me of my personal possessions on my admission to gaol. The rights that accrue to propriety do not trump the right of the State to deprive me of my property under certain circumstances defined by the proper legislative bodies; and the State is also able to do some things with my body, without my leave or even against my will.
It seems to me therefore that we have decided what kind of girl we are, and we’re only arguing about the price (or possibly about what kind of girl we should have been).
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A couple of convivial beers with a good neighbour precludes further cogitation for now…