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Lawrence of Arabia
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of the Gulag Archipelago
Apr 2001
time: 06:37
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quote:
Your being silly here, your basicaly saying that every person is born with some mystical Aura or "rights" which ofcorse exist purely as moral constructs and which are completly intangeble and unknow untill such time as Civilazation becomes aware of and desides that indeed a select group of people under particular surcumstances will actualy have the "right" to do something or Not have something done too them.
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thats right - rights exist even before you or i had knowledge of them. thats actually quite cool if you think about it - makes it kinda like the law of gravity: exists even before you or i knew about it.
quote:
Laurence's position is basicaly the "our rights come from God" stance but you havent actualy mentioned God yet but your aluding to a basicaly super-natural basis for rights. That logic has been used repetedly to deny emerging rights, the athority figures say "yes your rights come from God but you already have all of them so shut up and get back to work". Implicit in the supernatural bequithing of rights is that the populus can never achieve any NEW rights. Time and time again this argument is used to maintain the current inequities and stiffle social change. Conservatism at its Core is the maintance of the status quo. It always amazes me that looking back in history and seeing the same arguments made to deny the rights that we all now universaly agree are undeniable so many people (hint: Conservatives) fall for the tired old argument again when its taking place in THEIR time as people to get a new right added to the social contract.
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well no, because i dont believe in god or any other higher being for that matter. so there is no supernatural basis for rights that i am alluding to. and of course, the basis of rights is not selective implementation as in your example. furthermore, you are also correct in saying that the populus cannot achieve any new rights. why? because there are no new rights to achieve without violating the rights already given. the right to free healthcare? nope, because it coerces others into paying for you.
good thing im not a conservative, who, like liberals, define rights as it suits them, but a libertarian, who applies the same definition of rights to the entire populus, regardless of the issue.
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molly bloom
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Lundenwic
Oct 2001
time: 15:37
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quote:
Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
thats right - rights exist even before you or i had knowledge of them. thats actually quite cool if you think about it - makes it kinda like the law of gravity: exists even before you or i knew about it.
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Gravity has this habit of not disappearing under despotic regimes. Or requiring human acknowledgment.
Human rights aren't like magnetism, or gravity- the only reason people spoke of 'natural rights' and 'natural justice' is they needed something to replace 'god given' rights.
William Blackstone:
"For the principal aim of society is to protect in the enjoyment of those absolute rights, which were vested in them by the immutable laws of nature; but which could not be preserved in peace without that mutual assistance and intercourse, which is gained by the institution of friendly and social communities. Hence it follows that the first and primary end of human law is to maintain and regulate these absolute rights of individuals.... "
Rights vested in people by immutable laws of nature?
I'll have whatever you're on, Bill.
I prefer Jeremy Bentham:
“Right...is the child of law: from real laws come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from laws of nature, fancied and invented by poets, rhetoricians, and dealers in moral and intellectual poisons, come imaginary rights, a bastard brood of monsters.”
“Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.”
Jeremy Bentham
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Berzerker
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topeka, kansas,USA
May 1999
time: 23:37
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Kucinich - quote:
Spain did that, and it was a military vessel in the United States Navy. |
Where is the evidence Spain did that? Historians generally accept a boiler blew up and that people like William Randolph Hearst promoted a war with Spain to take Spanish holdings and used the Maine to get their war. According to what I've heard, Hearst sent a "reporter" down there to get the skinny on the Maine and he told Hearst there was nothing to indict Spain and Hearst told him to just get the pictures and he'd produce the war. Hearst was scum and he was largely responsible for whipping up the frenzy for war.
quote:
That doesn't make it a terrorist state now. |
That's true, but it was within our lifetime. So O'Reilly's argument still matters for people who thought the US was a terrorist state then.
quote:
the KKK isn't the United States government, dumbass. Hell, the FBI prosecuted them! |
Only after a century of Jim Crow and the enforcement of those laws by groups like the KKK. To say that wasn't terrorism because the Feds decided to finally crack down on the KKK after ~100 years of tacit state approval and support ignores what happened before the FBI got some balls. The KKK was essentially an arm of the state during most of that era...
Imran - quote:
I really don't recall us doing genocide against the Native Americans anytime in the last 100+ years (not that it was terrorism anyway). |
Genocide isn't terrorism?
Impaler - quote:
Lawrance of Arabia:
Your being silly here, your basicaly saying that every person is born with some mystical Aura or "rights" which ofcorse exist purely as moral constructs and which are completly intangeble and unknow untill such time as Civilazation becomes aware of and desides that indeed a select group of people under particular surcumstances will actualy have the "right" to do something or Not have something done too them. |
Yes to their pre-existence, no to the part about civilisation becoming aware. A right is a moral claim to act on one's behalf - a right to be free from others directing our decisions. We didn't need civilisation to tell us we have a moral claim to exist, i.e., a right to life.
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Rights are created by the Society as a whole and work into the "Social Contract" between citizens and goverment (often a very nasty and violent process). |
Then according to your definition, the people slaughtered by the Nazis had no right to live. That's the problem with the argument that "society" creates rights and the Founding Fathers of this country believed rights came from another, pre-existing source, not society or the state.
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Its more acurate to say that the Populus TAKES its rights away from what would otherwise be a Despotic (total power) goverment. |
If the populous doesn't have the pre-existing moral authority to have rights on it's own, then it's stealing from the despot.
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Laurence's position is basicaly the "our rights come from God" stance but you havent actualy mentioned God yet but your aluding to a basicaly super-natural basis for rights. |
For religious folk, yes, for non-religious, no. It doesn't matter who or what is responsible for our existence, only that we exist.
quote:
That logic has been used repetedly to deny emerging rights, the athority figures say "yes your rights come from God but you already have all of them so shut up and get back to work". |
The fact some people refuse to recognise and respect the rights of others is irrelevant. Rights are moral claims to act... The fact someone may murder you doesn't mean you have no right - no moral claim - to live.
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Implicit in the supernatural bequithing of rights is that the populus can never achieve any NEW rights. |
That's true with or without the supernatural.
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Berzerker
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topeka, kansas,USA
May 1999
time: 23:37
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Kucinich - quote:
All beside the point, because an accidental boiler explosion is ALSO not terrorism. I was just pointing out that the US wasn't responsible for it in the first place. |
Nor was Spain, you said Spain blew up the Maine.
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Nope. They ought to have, but didn't. |
But that "ought" is a recognition of a moral claim - the moral claim or "right" to live. You just said they should have had a right to live inspite of what "society" said, therefore, this right to live derives from a source other than society. And you're wrong, they did have a right to live, that's why the Nazis are condemned - human rights violations on a massive scale. Remember, a right is a moral claim to act, the fact someone out there may murder you does not mean you never had a right to live, it only means the murderer violated your right to live.
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David Floyd
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The bottom of a large bottle of beer
Jan 1970
time: 05:37
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quote:
Doesn't make it wrong for us to drop the A-bomb, though, because causally we prevented those deaths. |
How? We didn't decide to end the war - the Japanese did. Well, the Emperor of Japan did, and the War Cabinet made the decision to obey. Those were the same people who would have decided to continue or end the war in the absence of the atomic bomb. The bomb may have influenced their decision - and in fact did influence it - but ultimately it was their decision.
The decision could very well have been made to continue the war, even in light of the atomic bomb, which would have resulted in the effects listed previously plus the effects of the atomic bomb. Obviously you couldn't hold the US responsible for the Japanese decision to coninue the war in this scenario, so why should the US be responsible for the Japanese decision to continue the war if we DIDN'T drop the bomb?
But even more to the point, you say that it was OK for us to drop the A-bomb because it prevented more, future deaths. It is likely true that more people would have died in the absence of an atomic bomb, but the argument you are using is the same as the argument that says it's OK for me to murder 10 people today in the hopes that 30 will survive tomorrow, and then when I do it and those 30 survive (even those their survival wasn't my decision or a direct result of my action), you look back and say that my decision was morally correct.
So is that it? Are you, ultimately, arguing that it is OK to kill x number of people today in the hopes that your murders will prevent the deaths of a larger number of people in the future?
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Imran Siddiqui
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The Potterverse
Jan 1970
time: 00:37
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quote:
Genocide isn't terrorism? |
No, not usually. Genocide is meant to kill off everyone, not to scare the society you are killing into agreeing to your political demands. You don't care if that society agrees with your political goals, you just want them dead.
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The Saddam example is actually perfect. The purpose wasn't only to prevent free speakers by killing them, but by scaring them. |
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The US is responsible for spreading fear to get people to support a war. That is terrorism. |
Dude, you have a ****ed up view of 'terrorism'. Saddam's actions aren't terrorism because they weren't meant to make the people of Iraq change their position on an issue of politics, which would change the policies of the state. Saddam was the state, so the people of his country wouldn't be able to change the law... hence, no terrorism.
Let's take the classic case of terrorism, Palestinian bombings. The motive for Palestinians bombing Israelis is to get the Israeli people afraid, so they will change the policy of the Israeli government and kowtow to some Palestinian demands.
Your definition is foolish and makes everything terrorism. Terrorism is a very narrow thing.
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Berzerker
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topeka, kansas,USA
May 1999
time: 23:37
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Aggie - quote:
Natural rights are hocus pocus. There probably is a natural basis for our moral beliefs, but thinking of these in terms of rights produces counterintuitive results. |
A right is a moral claim to act... So, from where does this moral claim to act derive? The state? Society? Then you have to defend all the crimes committed by states and societies. You can't, and that's when you rely on natural rights but you just call it something else. Even when Kucinich said the victims of the Nazis had no rights not granted by German society, he concluded they "ought" to have those rights. That is a recognition of natural rights even if he doesn't want to admit it since he acknowledged that rights should have a different source if society fails to create them...
quote:
A moral theory where real world consequences don't fundamentally count (which is what a rights based theory is) only makes sense in terms of some kind of religious belief where God only cares that you follow the rules. |
Why invoke some deity that may or may not exist? Do you need the existence of a deity to believe in morality? If not, why can't morality be the basis for rights?
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Moreover, you don't have to believe in natural rights to believe that morality is objectively binding on people. |
Natural rights derive from morality - a right is a moral claim to act. "Rights" are an expression of this binding morality... So, what happens when society or the state violates or ignores this objectively binding morality? Do you believe this morality doesn't exist if the state cannot or does not recognise it? If not, you're stuck explaining from where this morality derives without using a natural or inherent source, i.e., a morality that exists regardless of what any state says.
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Almost all of us accept moral constraints and we can distill these down into a few fundamental principles (some of which don't fit well with others). |
And these few fundamental principles are the basis for rights.
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Any normal person can tell you that what the Nazis did was evil, but they probably can't explain why it is, just as any person can tell you about what he is seeing right now, but can't explain the mechanism of sight or justify his belief. |
For starters, the Nazis took what did not belong to them. I understand commies have difficulty grasping that  given their belief everything belongs to the state.  But for those of us who do believe that ownership starts with the individual, their evil is easily quantified.
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Jaguar
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Montgomery County, MD
Apr 2000
time: 00:37
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quote:
Originally posted by Berzerker
You think the US is a terrorist country...
Aside from the question as to whether or not it is and assuming O'Reilly thinks patriotism is good, I have a couple questions:
1) Does this mean the Afghans, Iraqis and Germans who supported the Taliban, Saddam and Hitler were patriots?
2) If so, doesn't this make O'Reilly's definition ridiculous from a moral point of view?
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1. No. This means that you´re putting words in his mouth. He didn´t say that supporting the government makes you a patriot. He talked about one quality that makes you not be a patriot. There could easily be others: for example, if you support the mass-murdering of fellow citizens, you are also not a patriot.
Also, he never discussed other countries.
I don´t necessarily think his definition is good, but, as I have clearly demonstrated, you are using flawed logic.
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