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Imran Siddiqui
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The Potterverse
Jan 1970
time: 00:34
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quote:
I said many found it immoral, but didn't oppose it because it was seen as a "necessary evil." That's an important distinction. |
See, I don't think so. They believed that people didn't have a right to not be enslaved because it was a 'necessary evil'. They get to the same end point but by different means.
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certainly societal opinion of the West as a whole was anti-slavery. |
That is another question. What is our society? How do we decided which 'society' decides our 'rights'? When I'm in Georgia am I in another society and thus have different rights than when I am in New Jersey? And how is it divided? Not by state, right?
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So there has yet to be a societal consensus on the right to an abortion, at least in any circumstance. |
Over 60% believe that abortion should be leagal, at least, in the 1st trimester. It was closer to 40% in 1973. Society shifted after the granting of a new government right.
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But you yourself have argued that Roe v. Wade was a horrible decision, so why would you use it now as an example of law making? |
Horrible decisions or not, doesn't change the fact that it was law making and right making.
Even you have to admit that the 'right to abortion' was something created by the government and not by society, because a majority of society did not agree with it and, as you said, a large portion doesn't agree with it now. So is there NO right to an abortion even though the government has said there is and enforces it?
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Boris Godunov
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Portland, OR
Aug 2001
time: 00:34
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quote:
Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
See, I don't think so. They believed that people didn't have a right to not be enslaved because it was a 'necessary evil'. They get to the same end point but by different means. |
This is a bizarre way of looking at it, and defies reality, IMO. In fact, I'm not even sure what this means...
quote:
That is another question. What is our society? How do we decided which 'society' decides our 'rights'? When I'm in Georgia am I in another society and thus have different rights than when I am in New Jersey? And how is it divided? Not by state, right? |
There are no hard boundaries on any society, and they flow from region to region, jump across areas, etc. But in general, it has to do with mutual interests, participation in characteristic relationships, shared institutions, and a common culture.
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Over 60% believe that abortion should be leagal, at least, in the 1st trimester. It was closer to 40% in 1973. Society shifted after the granting of a new government right. |
Society shifted after the law was changed, but that doesn't refute my points, because there's no reason that a law can't influence the way society thinks about something, certainly. But had the law NOT done so, had public opinion not changed, I guarantee you the law would not have stood for long, because it is ultimately the will of society that maintains the law, not vice-versa. So you will, on occasion, find a law that influences society, but that doesn't change the fundamental point that the law's legitimacy is entirely predicated on the society's acceptance of the law. If society collectively decided to ignore the law, it would cease to have any effect. This can be seen with any number of laws to date.
Look at Alabama's ban on interracial marriage, which wasn't stricken officially until a few years ago. The law was ignored, and interracial couples married in the state with impunity. Ergo they excercized a right to get married that, while technically illegal, they had because the majority of society said it was okay.
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Even you have to admit that the 'right to abortion' was something created by the government and not by society, because a majority of society did not agree with it and, as you said, a large portion doesn't agree with it now. So is there NO right to an abortion even though the government has said there is and enforces it? |
No, the government created a legal ability to have an abortion, but the concept that it is a right has yet to be fully accepted by society--that's why there's such a conflict over it. Since there is a real possibility Roe v. Wade might be overturned, the jury is very much still out on this issue.
Without popular mandate and/or acceptance, laws simply won't last. Look at prohibition. A minority of moralists passed a law that society as a whole did not agree with. So society circumvented it, rendering the law inoperable. Government was forced to respond to society and return to the status quo. If government determines rights, why doesn't prohibition stand today?
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GePap
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of the Big Apple
Nov 2001
time: 23:34
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On slavery: How deepfelt Northern opposition to slavery was in 1860, I do not know. At most you can claim 40% of the total populace, or maybe 55% of the North, thought voting for a party that stood against expansion of savery, thought not its abolition, was worth electing.
IF by 1865 opinions had changed radically, it was due to the war that happened to occur in the middle there, and government actions taken during that time-you say most people in the north thought slavery immoral-yet there was no widespread public pressure on Lincoln to pass the Emancipation proclamation- people lauded it AFTER the fact, not before. Thinking slavery immoral, and putting pressure to ake steps to end the insitution against entrenched sectors who demand its conitnuation are not the same thing. HOw do we measure a "societal value?" HOw do you even know what the boundaries of the society were? In the entire US, maybe in 1865 a large majority saw slavery as immoral. IN a large portion of the US slavery was illegal already anyways. BUT in the areas were it was legal, there certainy was no majority opinion to remove it.
This is a major problem with "society" being the driving force behind rights. HOw do you define the borders of this society? Maybe most people in Mass. saw slaery as evil-and you can even say that the proof of this was that in 1860 slavery was illegal in Mass. But in Miss. in 1860 slavery was most certainly popular and legal- I would say in 1866 slavery was still popular in Miss. , though now illegal. So why did Mass. society get to talk for Miss. society? The reason why the opinions of someone in Mas.. might have bearing on the lagl rights of someone in Miss. is that both happened to be included within the same POLITICAL STRUCTURE, a singular state, with a set of laws and regulations that set the rules by which legitimate actions could be taken. ONLY becuase the US GOVERNMENT had the legitimate right in both Mass. and Miss. to set down the law, and delianite rights, did somoene in Mass. have the right to have a say in the rights of human beings in Miss. In fact the whole point of the Civil War was southern society, seeing its values threatened slowly by a changing NOrth, trying to separte and create a new sovereign independent goverment. The route towards the south keeping slavery was NOT convincing Northern society slavery should be kept, it was removing itself from the power of the Federal state, creating and independent sovereign and legitimate entity, and thus doing as they would.
This, to me, shows that in the end, when it comes to rights, it is GOVERNMENT, or again, the legitimate authority, whatever that authority claims legitmacy from, that deliniates rights, NOT some amorphous "society".
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loinburger
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Sweet Sauce Jones
Jul 1999
time: 00:34
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quote:
Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Just because our government can produce bad laws doesn't mean it cannot define what rights people have. Just because the government may be wrong, doesn't mean it hasn't declared a right. |
The government defines what legal rights people have, since laws are the only possible source of legal rights and you can't have laws without government. However, you admit that law and morality are not necessarily equivalent by stating that laws can be "bad" or "wrong" or whatever, and the primary definition of a "right" as given earlier was something along the lines of "That which is just, morally good, legal, proper, or fitting," that is, rights can be derived from morality or from law (ignoring the extraneous terms in the definition, though if anybody wants to split hairs then they're more than welcome to ***** me out for "so brazenly dismissing our rights that are derived from propriety and fittingnessnessness" or whatever), with the resulting non-disjoint sets of rights being, let's say, the set of "moral rights" and the set of "legal rights." The origin of legal rights is no great mystery, and the origin of moral rights isn't germane to the discussion.
Come to think of it, I'm not really sure what is germane to the discussion anymore. As far as I can tell the original thread topic was "Now that the mayor of San Francisco has broken the law, what's to stop other people from breaking the law?", but I'm just not seeing the slippery slope. Then there was some kind of bizarro Natural Rights tangent, which has nothing to do with anything, seeing as how marriage isn't "natural" by any reasonable definition of the word (though I suppose that Tass or another one of our forumgoers from Utah could possibly make the case that polygamy is "natural," if it came down to it). So, umm, I guess what I'm asking is, who won the debate, and what were you debating?
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loinburger
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Sweet Sauce Jones
Jul 1999
time: 00:34
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quote:
Originally posted by Ramo
In most contexts, the legal definition is appropriate, so that's what I generally associate with rights. |
As do I, but I don't go so far as to say that "legal rights" are the only kinds of rights, while at the same time dismissing the dictionary definition of the term "right" as well as many common useages of the term (e.g., "universal declaration of human rights") that have a tenuous-to-nonexistent legal basis. It's all well and good for someone to say that, e.g., the dictionary or the United Nations or whoever is using the term incorrectly, but I'm trying to figure out if that's what GePap is saying, or if he's saying that morality == legality, or what.
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Elok
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Land of Ramen Dragons
Mar 2003
time: 00:34
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Loin, you should debate more often. Anyway, the question at hand as I see it is, "if rights do not come from the law, or 'society' in the sense of an unofficial populist government whose penal system consists of throwing rocks and dirty looks, where do they come from?" "Rights" as an absolute truth without origin or need for justification is very close to how one might define God, and we all know how well that idea is received, here and elsewhere, as grounds for social policy.
To be honest, he did sorta answer the question, by saying that rights are only a manifestation of the gov't. He has to define it as something, and the bottom line is that we can't *know* for certain that anything we believe is true. To turn it around, what else might rights be?
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molly bloom
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Lundenwic
Oct 2001
time: 15:34
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quote:
Originally posted by GePap
Imran and I said that was nonsense-no natural rights period, only government can grant rights
boris stated no natural rights, but it is society, NOT government, that is the originator of rights-and since societal norms on marriage are changing or have changed, same sex marriage as a right has arrived.
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Yes, and if you look at Thomas Jefferson's correspondence on the origins of Anglo-Saxon Common Law (and thus the origins of English and American common law) he finds that they are rooted in the tribal customs and practices of the pagan Angles, Saxons and Jutes (with later additions from the pagan Vikings).
If we accept that they had these customs and practices before they formed anything resembling a state, be it a kingdom, or republic, or despotism, then we must find that the tribal societies settled on certain ways to resolve disputes (over land, or honour, or property) that might otherwise have escalated into the kind of blood feuds that go on to the crack of doom in parts of the Balkans, Georgia and Southern Italy, which do not have the same sort of 'compensation for injured honour' approach.
These ways of circumventing intertribal violence then became enshrined as 'rights'- I believe a similar situation exists in the isolated societies of New Guinea, some of whom had/have social structures so basic that they had no collective noun for themselves, or their individual tribe.
Pigs are a sign of wealth and social status, the only domesticated creatures being dogs and pigs, their society being a mix of agrarian (taro and sweet potato farming, carried out by women) and hunting (male dominated).
These people still have 'rights' and 'laws' in the absence of a 'government'- rights to be compensated for a lost pig, or to defend oneself against accusations of witchcraft.
http://ethics.sandiego.edu/resource...etail.asp?ID=22
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loinburger
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Sweet Sauce Jones
Jul 1999
time: 00:34
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quote:
Originally posted by Elok
Anyway, the question at hand as I see it is, "if rights do not come from the law, or 'society' in the sense of an unofficial populist government whose penal system consists of throwing rocks and dirty looks, where do they come from?" "Rights" as an absolute truth without origin or need for justification is very close to how one might define God, and we all know how well that idea is received, here and elsewhere, as grounds for social policy. |
"Because God says so" isn't the only possible basis for morality, nor do all systems of morality claim to have a monopoly on some sort of "absolute truth" whichamajigger.
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To be honest, he did sorta answer the question, by saying that rights are only a manifestation of the gov't. |
He's made this claim, but the claim itself is not a basis for justifying said claim, unless "because I say so" is in fact the basis on which he justifies it.
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To turn it around, what else might rights be? |
I'm content to use the dictionary definition that GePap used earlier: a right is "That which is just, morally good, legal, proper, or fitting." Hence, rights derive from the law and/or from morality.
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loinburger
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Sweet Sauce Jones
Jul 1999
time: 00:34
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quote:
Originally posted by Elok
But where does morality derive from? |
I don't believe that the specific source of morality is relevant to the discussion, just as the specific source of laws (i.e., the specific form of government in use) is not relevant to the discussion. The exception would be if morality is equivalent to legality (such as in the case of a theocracy, perhaps), but GePap has already rejected this possibility.
Similarly, a claim along the lines of "different systems of morality determine moral rights differently from one another, therefore all moral rights are bogus" is no more valid than is the equivalent claim that "different legal systems determine legal rights differently from one another, therefore all legal rights are bogus."
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I think all morality is at least a little theistic, for assuming a world of rights and wrongs existing for their own sake. |
Moral systems do not exist for their own sake any more than legal systems exist for their own sake. (Even theistic morality exists for the sake of God or gods or ancestor ghosts or whatever.)
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And if a system of morality doesn't have absolute truth, how can it claim universally existing rights? |
Legal systems generally do not define universally existing rights, so I don't see why moral systems are constrained to only defining universally existing rights.
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Imran Siddiqui
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The Potterverse
Jan 1970
time: 00:34
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quote:
Society shifted after the law was changed, but that doesn't refute my points, because there's no reason that a law can't influence the way society thinks about something, certainly. But had the law NOT done so, had public opinion not changed, I guarantee you the law would not have stood for long, because it is ultimately the will of society that maintains the law, not vice-versa. |
Likewise, society influencing law doesn't refute my points. It simply isn't a right until the legal authority (government most often than not) puts society's choice into words.
Loin: Basically, Boris, GePap, and I all agree that natural rights are bunk (and therefore marriage being a natural right between man and woman is dumb), but we are fighting like Communist splinter groups over a minor point about whether society or government grants rights, which, in today's world, really doesn't change anything.
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GePap
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of the Big Apple
Nov 2001
time: 23:34
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quote:
Originally posted by loinburger
In that case, on what basis do you justify the claim that your use of the term is correct, and that the dictionary, the United Nations, Amnesty International, et al are using the term incorrectly? Because you say so? |
The dictionary gives 7 or 8 definitions of that word- and just like "cool" has come to signify something other than a gradiation of cold, the usage of words change slightly over time. The UN an AI may use the word differently-I would argue with them on their usage- just cause the UN and AI use it in some slightly different way does not make them right either.
Molly:
quote:
These ways of circumventing intertribal violence then became enshrined as 'rights'- I believe a similar situation exists in the isolated societies of New Guinea, some of whom had/have social structures so basic that they had no collective noun for themselves, or their individual tribe. |
So in other words, these groups created a method by which legitimacy could be granted to a set of action. Of course, without an authority to enforce any of this, any individual at any one time could break the norms, and either win due to force of personality and popularity, or lose due to lack of support.
And you are correct to put rights in """.
Bukharin was fat- Trotsky all the way.
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