Setting aside for a moment the fact that a more accurate characterization is that we have chosen to enshrine those rights as acknowledged, the assertion that none of us inherently HAS those rights is also an assertion that we all have them (or fail to have them) EQUALLY, regardless of birth status or economic holdings.
I’m still pretty thrown by the OP’s rather blithe assertion that for a large chunk of the populous, the female half of that chunk are mindless rape-dolls who put up with it for the sake of popularity (or something) and the male half of that chunk are equally mindless predatory frat-bro rapists whose main motivation is…rape, I guess?
I mean, it’s so absurd on the face of it that it really obscures the actual problem statement for me, which I think is something along the lines of “how to craft society better for people who go through life with little or no direction or intent?”
And for that, I think it comes down to Maslow’s pyramid. Intent and direction in life are luxuries afforded only to people who can worry about “self actualization.”
You can’t really worry much about where you want to be in 5 years or whether you’re really happy with your career or just think you are if you have a hodgepodge of multiple part-time jobs instead of a career and no savings and any little thing like a serious medical problem or accident could tip you over the edge into bankruptcy, homelessness, or whatever.
So I’d say a more robust welfare state would be the primary thing society could do about it - I wonder if the OP has lived in any EU countries with more robust safety nets, (or conversely, has lived in any developing countries) and whether they see a different incidence of the directionless there versus the US.
Because in my experience, people living with intent and direction DO occur at much higher rates in developed nations, and it gets higher the farther everyday people are from ruin and penury (ie with better social safety nets, either personal or societal). And so, if that were the thing we wanted to maximize (which I’d agree is an admirable goal), we should strive to increase more of the population’s access to all the layers of Maslow’s pyramid below “self actualization.”
Yes, and in previous discussions of safety nets, I pointed that in developed nations people have more freedom to reach the upper levels of the society. Nations with less safety nets have to rely on propaganda to convince people that they have more freedom.
It would be more accurate to say that many/most people are herd animals and go where the herd goes, regardless of logic, safety, or morality.
While this can include “rape culture”, it also includes, say, the Salem Witch Trials, the Jonestown mass suicide, populist autocrats, etc.
A pliable group is the toy thing of whoever chooses to wield the reins. Whether “rape culture” is what the hard core segment of that group looks like when free of reins or not, I could not say. Possibly yes, possibly no. But certainly there has never been a shortage, in human history, of men wanting to have sex with hot young women, and there has always seemed to be a madame willing to institute a pyramid scheme to keep pulling women in and prostitute them for the men.
I’ll grant that I don’t see the benefit of such a scheme at the high school/college level, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t reflect at that level.
I noted the average age of respondents as being strange if compared solely of college students and decided it did not, and there’s no reason to believe that it is just of students from the text. But that aside, I fail to see how any of the points raised change the data provided in the research. I do not see an accusation of data falsification, playing around with numbers, etc. It may well be that the man who wrote the report used it for political purposes that were not justified, but that seems to come down on his not making it clear that x% of respondents were related to the college and not themselves college students. But that’s a reasonable distinction to not make in speech, since x is probably a distinct minority of the respondents, it’s unlikely that people associated with a college and are not students is likely to be somehow more prone to sexual attacks than your average college student - one might suppose for example that your average person associated with a college was once himself a college student and, likely, committed most of his offenses during that time of his life - and so far as campus safety is concerned, it is all of the people on the campus who are the concern - including the x% - and not just the students.
I don’t see how it’s relevant at all that the original questions were not his. So what? People are convicted in trials based on questions asked by police who are not present and asked those questions months ago, in a different place it doesn’t change the questions nor the answers.
And I can see not answering about anonymous people, because it’s meant to be anonymous. If someone volunteers information to you, that was probably with the expectation of continued anonymity beyond you.
Again, if everyone is just a meat robot obeying their instincts and the commands of the puppet masters, then how in the world can society exist?
I just finished watching “Person of Interest”. Fun show. But on their planet, every other person is a terrorist. Every other business person murders his rivals for advantage. And I can’t understand how crime works on that planet, because the first thing a criminal does after committing a crime is to shoot all their accomplices to tie up loose ends. At some point don’t the thousands of mercenaries and hitmen wise up to the idea that the second they shoot all the other members of the team to tie up loose ends, the boss is gonna shoot them too?
On our planet, criminals are much more pro-social. Criminal gangs work together peacefully, sometimes for years or decades, preying on the rest of us. That’s how crime families work. Yes, there’s betrayal, but it’s not every five minutes, because if people betray each other every five minutes then they couldn’t get together to form a criminal conspiracy in the first place, and also the society they prey on couldn’t exist in the first place. Because the first time an employer paid a guy to work at a factory, at the end of the shift they’d say, “You’ve outlived your usefulness” and shoot all their workers, and then wonder why no one showed up to work at the factory the next day.
In the same way that if everyone is an arsonist, how do buildings still exist?
No one said everyone. (Or, at least, I did not.)
My expectation would be that it follows a curve with everyone having a slightly different tipping point, as regards their ability to resist pressure.
But you did suggest that the *majority *of people may be operating under no more than “pack instincts”. Where’s the support for this?
Or you could flip it the other way, and consider what humans’ potential is with the right set of circumstances.
Also, it depends what thing we’re talking about tipping towards…I would not concede that everyone is capable of everything.
The Asch conformity tests seemed to show that there’s a strong conformist need for about 37% of people, but at least 75% choose to conform at least once, and that’s under a fairly light level of pressure.
It looks like, among those who claim to be Christian, about 25% don’t believe in God. I would say that this is an example of people under fairly strong pressure going against the grain.
About 25-30% of people are immune or mostly immune to hypnosis.
I could probably find more things be that could plausibly count as a metric, but it looks like at least 75% of everyone is at least minimally susceptible. And, somewhere between 20-35% is extremely susceptible.
I take the optimistic view: that it’s a good, positive, thing that we grant each other those rights.
Being susceptible to hypnosis defends the sentence “I am not strongly convinced that even a majority of people are operating at much above pure pack instincts”?
The goalposts just moved out of my light cone.
Accurate, though. What sense does it make to say I have the right to do something if I cannot do it due to outside intervention? It’s all well and good to say I have the inalienable right to free assembly, but if I can’t exercise that right without men with guns taking me away and killing me, what sense does it make?
I think that I can agree that without an extra-natural explanation, ‘rights’ aren’t anything more than agreed upon standards. If a culture or individual chooses not to agree with them, then we can either go to the trenches or throw up our hands. ‘Rights’ only exist as much as the powerful permit them to exist. If the powerful choose not to permit them, then we can argue about them rhetorically and try to convince them that they exist, but that’s a cold comfort when they hand you the blindfold and cigarette.
We can see this most clearly in the case of controversial ‘rights.’ Does for instance, a fetus have a ‘right’ to live? Right now in the US, the answer is ‘No.’ The reason being is that the people with the guns have said so. People who disagree with this stance have been working really hard to be the people with the guns and maybe one day, they will control enough power that the answer will magically be ‘Yes.’ Barring an extra-natural arbiter of rights though, neither answer is right or wrong. When the Taliban decided that Hindus had to wear badges and convert or die, then there was no ‘right’ to freedom of religion or when they said that clapping at soccer games was punishable by beatings, then there was no ‘right’ to expression and if the Taliban took over the world, then no one would have that right.
One could postulate a variety of extra-natural systems which lend objectivity to rights, but those tend to get into the realm of religion. You can be a ‘natural rights’ proponent, but those tend to either be Hobbesian in nature (“You have a right to do whatever is in your power to continue living how you want to live.”, but I’m not sure that ‘a right to shoot back when they come for you.’ is what we typically think of when we think of rights.) or they just get vague and say ‘Nature demands this.’ (Why nature demands this is always slushy though. Nature tends not to give a rip about individual lives. Ants don’t have a right to be safe from the anteater.) Erich Fromm probably argued it best when he basically said that some powers over men should only be wielded by God and since there is no God, then no one should wield them. (Of course, this lends itself to the criticism of “Why is that exactly?”)
I think that what it really comes down to is that in order to have ‘rights’ as we generally conceive of them, we need something extra-natural that objectively defines those rights. It doesn’t have to be a god, but it probably has to be something. I don’t think that reason alone can cut it, despite what Hobbes or Locke might say (although Locke was largely religious in nature and his appeals to nature are really appeals to God. When he talks about the inherent equality of humans as his basis for rights, he explicitly refers to Biblical evidence.)
I think that points to your conception of rights as flawed. If you need something that probably doesn’t exist to make the concept coherent, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
I see rights differently - as codified moral heuristics where we recognize that something is usually good or bad, and go from there. They’re the conclusion rather than the premise of our moral arguments.
Give section 13 there a look.
Of course, if you look at rights simply as maxims, I don’t think that most people would recognize those as ‘rights’ The heuristic model that you’re proposing basically means ‘rights’ are general guidelines that could be violated if there’s a reasonable certainty that the consequences would be ‘good’ in whatever way you define ‘good.’ I’m not sure that most people would say that what you’re proposing are actually ‘rights’ at all.
Two things.
First, built into that heuristic (see point 13.2) is the fact that most times when people thought violating those heuristics was a good idea, they were wrong.
So another way to put it is that rights don’t just say “Doing X has been observed to have bad consequences”, but also “Doing X has been observed to have bad consequences, even when smart people are quite certain it will have good consequences.”
Secondly, we do that all the time! (See point 13.3.1 and 13.3.2) Rights are routinely violated or compromised when they butt up against each other, in situations where the greater good firmly outweighs the value of the right (prisons, for example, or taxes).
Their ‘wrongness’ is simply a matter of opinion. Not to Godwin, but the Holocaust worked out pretty well for the Nazis (invading the USSR not so much) So by your heuristic model, the Nazi’s would be justified in saying ‘Killing minorities is now a ‘right’ because it has worked so well for us.’ Geeze, the Romans built a thousand year empire founded on oppression. The shogun period of Japan was founded on strict class divides where you could kill peasants at will who disrespected you. These workable systems that brought ‘good’ outcomes I don’t think most of us would say are foundational to rights, despite their ‘goodness’ from a certain subjective view.
As for competing ‘rights’ those certainly exist, but no one says that those rights are abrogated due to the conflict. We would still say there is an inherent objectively ‘correct’ way to adjudicate those conflicts and that those rights still exist, but are simply defined in a way that isn’t convenient to say. So we would say ‘You have a right to practice your religion’ we don’t say ‘providing that your religion does not involve kidnapping and sacrificing your enemies via decapitation at Chichen Itza.’ Recognizing a limitation on a right is not the same thing as saying ‘The right is really just a generally good idea.’
The ideology of the NSDAP is the most widely-despised in the world. Their nation and national identity were destroyed and rebuilt by those who conquered them, to the point where German nationalism exists almost exclusively on the context of football. The Nazis lasted 12 years. That “worked well”?
Of course, this commits the same fallacy as appealing to how much a rapist enjoys raping without considering the victim’s wellbeing. I don’t think you really understand my position and I’d implore you to read at least all of subheading 13 in that essay linked above. We don’t mean “good” in the sense of “it lead to the goals of a few psychopaths”.
It did work well. It stabilized the economy and united the German people. If Germany hadn’t launched Operation Barbarossa, it’s entirely possible that the EU would be the Reich right now. The Holocaust had very little to do with Germany’s losing the war. Shoot, the US government was trying to suppress information about concentration camps.
Your second point actually ignores your own link. The author is a consequentialist and in section 12.4.1 and 12.4.2 he specifically argues that the consequences are the prerogative of the individual. Your decisions should be based upon what is best according to you. It’s basically moral relativism that he’s advocating. When we apply this moral relativism to his theory on rights, then we can say ‘Oppressing people who aren’t me has traditionally brought good consequences to many cultures over long periods of time. I have a right to oppress people.’ It’s obviously ludicrous.