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Agathon
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Leafs 4TW!! - CPA
Dec 2002
time: 00:29
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Well, this thread seems to have gone down the toilet.
Why are people still confusing the question of moral realism with the question of the existence of rights? They are separate questions.
Anyway, it's quite easy to show that rights based theory is religious rubbish. All one need do is pick on the fact that rights based theories really worry more about the purity of an individual's behaviour than the consequences of their decisions.
Take the simple case where there is a stark decision between killing one person in order to save 100 others from being killed by someone else. Putting aside for the moment attempts to change the case (which miss the point of the argument) it follows that if someone endorses a rights based theory, they can interpret it in two different ways.
1) Allow that the killing of one person in this case is morally justifiable because 100 violations of the right to life are worse than only one.
or
2) Allow the 100 people to be killed since rights based theories prohibit each individual from performing certain actions no matter what the consequences. In other words, what matters is that I don't break the rule, what other people do is their own business.
Libertarians don't like (1) since, among other things, when applied to property it justifies welfare and more generally it justifies the sacrifice of individuals for a common good (in this case that = the sum total of rights violations prevented by a lesser number of violations).
But disagreeing with (1) is stupid since you are effectively saying that 100 murders are better than one, as long as you don't do any of them. That would be enough for most people to reject (1) as hopelessly evil. Nevertheless, Libertarians are nothing if not pig headed so more is required.
This can be achieved by posing a simple question. What's makes violating the right to life bad? Is it the effect on the victim or something about the person who does it? It's obvious that (1) chooses the former and (2) the latter (with the proviso that the offender is me - I don't have to care about others or I would be back to an aggregation view). So for (2) the effects on the victims are completely irrelevant, the only thing of moral import is that I don't break the rule. This is so selfish that it can hardly be called "morality" - it basically asserts that my moral purity matters more than the suffering of others.
It's also senseless. What's the point of obeying the rule if it isn't to prevent suffering? Is it to preserve my own subjective feeling of moral purity? If it is, then it has nothing to do with morality.
What the Libertarian needs is some means of showing why the rule breaking of individuals matters irrespective of its consequences. And here we get to see what it's really about. A world in which following the rules is the only thing of moral import is a world in which the consequences are morally irrelevant - that is they don't have real value. So any suffering caused by someone following the rules has no real disvalue. We've heard this before in the idea that the things of this world are of no value and all that matters is that we follow God's instructions, which aren't designed to make our lives here better, but to test our moral purity for the admission to Paradise. In fact this is the only sort of account that can make sense of the idea that the moral value of rule breaking is entirely independent of its consequences.
And that is what Libertarianism is really about. It's religious morality and the people who endorse it are either religious fanatics trying to force Christianity on everyone else, or dupes who don't realise they've been had.
That's why natural rights don't make sense without God, and that's also why sane (i.e. non-religious) people should treat them like the crap they are.
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Lorizael
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The Cult Wins
Sep 2001
time: 00:29
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quote:
Originally posted by Berzerker
As Loinburger points out, property (land) is a mess because of all the stealing that has gone on for millennia. But that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't try to respect property rights in the future just because of what has happened in the past.
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This isn't really my argument, so I'm not gonna say anything more than, "This isn't really my argument."
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I don't need to, you're assuming this creator is some old guy with a flowing white beard sitting on some heavenly throne who comes down once in a while to dictate policy to human secretaries. The universe exists and we didn't create it, therefore we can only look at creation to see evidence of a design.
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First of all, don't make any assumptions about my assumptions. I was careful to say Creator and not God, unlike some others in this thread.
Your problem seems to be that you think there must be some purpose or intent to the universe. You say that in creation, there was a design (is that creation with a lower case c, btw, or is that the Bible's Creation?).
This is not a logical premise. It has no basis whatsoever. It's something you want to be true because you believe that there must be a creator in order for the universe to exist, and that, even if there is a creator, that creator didn't just expel the universe from his ass after a rather large portion of heavenly beans.
The universe was not created. Currently, science seems to indicate that it has always existed, and therefore it does not need an origin.
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The evidence I can accept are the universal desires we share, that, to me, is the best evidence we can gather at this point in time...
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This is circular reasoning here. You say that there is a Creator who made the universe. You say that this creator made natural rights. You say that the Creator shows evidence of natural rights in the universal desires of humankind. Then you say that the evidence of this Creator is in the universal desires of humankind.
That doesn't work. You prove the existence of a Creator by citing the existence of a part of the Creator's creation, but without actually presenting any hard evidence that the Creator had anything to do with that creation.
Edit: Spelling error and noticing the fact that, for some reason, it didn't bleep out ass. Was that taken off the censor list?
Last edited by Lorizael on 09-07-2003 at 20:08
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GePap
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of the Big Apple
Nov 2001
time: 23:29
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quote:
Originally posted by loinburger
Oh Gepap, no they're not. My cat is perfectly capable of distinguishing between "more food" and "less food" -- ordinal mathematics are certainly much simpler than, say, calculus, but they're mathematics nonetheless. (Unless my cat is only capable of distinguishing between "more" and "less" because I'm such an excellent tutor, but somehow I doubt that this is the case.) |
You are mixing up the idea that becuase it can be represented mathematically, it is mathematics itself. BUt the symbol is not the thing in itsef. A cats ability to recognize between more and less does not mean the cat recognizes even arithmatic. Can you cat add? subtract? (subtracting being different from digesting)
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So because I'm not omniscient and cannot always correctly apply my definition for the term murder, my definition has been somehow invalidated?  This of course invalidates all definitions for the term "murder" (except perhaps God's, or Snoggo's...) |
Actually, no, this does not invalidate the definitions that defines it as illegal, since the legality of the act would be determined by the authorities: that being the point. Without some authority to judge the act, the term of murder is meanigless: might as well just stick to kill.
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You give one contrived example in which the "killing with premeditated malice" definition cannot be perfectly applied due to incomplete knowledge, and suddenly the entire definition must be thrown out? So, if I come up with one contrived example in which the US legal system cannot perfectly determine whether, say, a murder is 1st degree or 2nd degree due to incomplete knowledge, then do I get to ignore the US courts' definition of the term "murder"? Clearly without Magical Mind-Reading Devices (or something along those lines) our notion of murder has no practicality. |
See above. The must be a reason for the term muder to exist, seperate from the term execution, assasination, manslaughter, and the old fashioned kill. Only in a system of courts, or at least, of judges, can what is murder be separated from that which is not murder: without judges of some type there is no use for the term murder, since no one individual has the legitimacy and authority to declare any specific act of killing as just that, murder (unless you introduce non-human judges)
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Hardy har har. When you find a single non-human creature who is capable of writing mathematical equations, then I won't dismiss your demands as being mere flippancy. |
It is not flippancy: you are substituting the symbol for the thing as is: just becuase it can be modelled mathematicaly does not make it mathematics.
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The point being that you cannot arbitrarily redefine what is "justice" for a given group. |
My point was that if "justice" can be redefined arbitrarilly by different groups, you can not claim there to be one absolute universal concept of it, unless you deny the ability of different groups to redefine justice for their own use.
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Which presupposes that all concepts of justice are equally valid. Who cares if two concepts of justice are different, if one is inferior to another? |
You have to explain how "inferior" justice is not still "justice", and thus able to justify something: after you explain how one arbitrary system of justice can be better than another.
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The "tip of the tongue" phenomenon -- you know that you have a concept for "something," but the word escapes you at the moment. Or you know that you know the answer to "something," but the answer eludes you. In both cases you know of a concept (and can probably describe the concept in vague terms), but you do not know the word that accompanies the concept. Then, when the word is supplied, you smack yourself on the forehead and say "That's the word I was looking for!" The phenomenon has been studied in many psychological studies -- f'rinstance, it was found that (good) gameshow contestants are able to press down their buzzers well before they even know the answer to a question, because they know that they know the answer -- they know of the concept in question, without actually knowing the name of the concept (until their brain is able to dig up the answer).
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Ah, but from the beginning you know there IS a word for it: the problem here is not recaling a word that exists in your memory, just not being recalled at the moment. Is this thing you point out the same as "knowing" the concept and knowing there IS no word for it?
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loinburger
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Sweet Sauce Jones
Jul 1999
time: 00:29
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quote:
Originally posted by GePap
A cats ability to recognize between more and less does not mean the cat recognizes even arithmatic. Can you cat add? subtract? |
You're still hung up on this idea that arithmetic is the simplest form of mathematics. My cat can clearly add and subtract in an ordinal system: if my cat adds things to her food bowl, then she understands that she has "more" in her dish (and alters her behavior accordingly). If she takes things out of her food bowl, then she understands that she has "less" (and alters her behavior accordingly). Whether or not she understands the concept of "removing exactly one paperclip from my food dish in order to have three paperclips therein instead of four" is not relevant, since my cat could not communicate such an equation to me even if she did understand it (and since you have absolutely no way of providing evidence that she doesn't understand this equation) -- you're begging the question by defining the standard of proof such that the only possible way to prove that mathematics is not a human creation is through another species using human language.
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Without some authority to judge the act, the term of murder is meanigless: might as well just stick to kill. |
Authority is completely unnecessary to simply apply a definition -- it is only necessary to apply a law. If you were to accidentally kill somebody, then I would alter my treatment of you differently than if you were to kill somebody with premeditated malice (e.g. in the former case I would be less prone to trusting you to handle heavy machinery or whatever, while in the latter case I would be less prone to trusting you in any way shape or form). This idea that the term is meaningless simply because I lack the authority to punish you for your crime is hogwash -- it behooves me to make the distinction between accidental killing and killing with premeditated malice, independently of any benefits that society as a whole may gain from making this distinction. You can certainly come up with a plethora of contrived examples in which it is not possible for me to correctly apply my pre-societal definitions of the term, but this simply limits their usefulness -- it does not negate their usefulness.
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...since no one individual has the legitimacy and authority to declare any specific act of killing as just that, murder |
See above. There are additional benefits to be gleaned by being capable of distinguishing between "murder" and "homicide" than just the ability to punish murderers. While it may be the case that no single individual has the legitimacy/authority to punish a murderer, everybody has the ability to e.g. distance himself from a murderer so as to avoid becoming the murderer's next victim.
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It is not flippancy: you are substituting the symbol for the thing as is: just becuase it can be modelled mathematicaly does not make it mathematics. |
I certainly hope that it's flippancy, unless of course you're capable of providing evidence that my cat does not understand simple arithmetic. (Unless you're simply holding me to a higher standard of proof than that to which you hold yourself.)
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My point was that if "justice" can be redefined arbitrarilly by different groups |
The concept of justice cannot be "arbitrarily" redefined by different groups. Language is not something that can be arbitrarily redefined to fit the whims of an individual or group. This is the point I've been making -- this isn't the world of 1984, and even Ingsoc (a group, not an individual) was finding that it was impossible to arbitrarily redefine a language.
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You have to explain how "inferior" justice is not still "justice", and thus able to justify something: after you explain how one arbitrary system of justice can be better than another. |
First off, you're mixing an arbitrary system of justice with an arbitrary concept of justice. The two are quite different -- a system of justice can be arbitrarily redefined by the ruling class, but a concept of justice is highly dependant on language (and hence cannot be arbitrarily redefined).
This should clear up the reasoning behind how one system of justice can be inferior to another: if one system deviates more from the concept than another system, then the deviant system is inferior. For example, the concept of justice involves equity/fairness, therefore if the US system of justice were to be arbitrarily redefined so as to be grossly unequal (or "more unequal" than it is at present) then that new system of justice would be inferior to the present system.
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Ah, but from the beginning you know there IS a word for it: the problem here is not recaling a word that exists in your memory, just not being recalled at the moment. |
Sometimes there are "false hits" to the meta-retrieval process, e.g. when you hit the buzzer thinking that you know the answer but then find that you do not actually know the answer. In this case you do not know the word, yet you still know "of" the concept and may even be capable of describing the concept using a conglomeration of words that you do know.
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Is this thing you point out the same as "knowing" the concept and knowing there IS no word for it? |
You're asking the impossible -- concepts that do not have words associated with them almost invariably acquire words by which to identify them (and/or they can be described by the conglomeration of other words). This is like saying "Name a concept that you can't name" -- how the hell am I supposed to name something that doesn't have a name?
Anyway, another example of a concept-without-word is that of simple ordinal mathematics performed by extremely young children. The basic experiment involves showing a baby a small puppet stage with a number of puppets visible. The curtains are then drawn on the stage, and re-opened -- sometimes puppets have been added or removed, other times the number of puppets remains the same. The baby shows considerable agitation in the cases when the number of puppets has changed, and shows no agitation when the number of puppets has not changed -- the baby is capable of understanding concepts such as "more" and "less," "equal" and "unequal." This experiment was originally performed with toddlers (who, it might be argued, had sufficient language knowledge to understand the words "more" and "less"), but since then it has been successfully performed on children as young as three days old (and the burden of proof rests firmly on the guy saying that a three-day-old has any understanding of language).
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GePap
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of the Big Apple
Nov 2001
time: 23:29
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quote:
Originally posted by loinburger
You're still hung up on this idea that arithmetic is the simplest form of mathematics. My cat can clearly add and subtract in an ordinal system: if my cat adds things to her food bowl, then she understands that she has "more" in her dish (and alters her behavior accordingly). If she takes things out of her food bowl, then she understands that she has "less" (and alters her behavior accordingly). Whether or not she understands the concept of "removing exactly one paperclip from my food dish in order to have three paperclips therein instead of four" is not relevant, since my cat could not communicate such an equation to me even if she did understand it (and since you have absolutely no way of providing evidence that she doesn't understand this equation) -- you're begging the question by defining the standard of proof such that the only possible way to prove that mathematics is not a human creation is through another species using human language. |
You can not know the exact mechanism of why your cat may chnage behavior: perheps the thinking is "enough to satisfy my hunger" vs. "not enough to do it". And I do question your use of "mathematics" in this sense. No, I do not think that a cat's possible understanding of quentity differences equates to "mathematics"
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Authority is completely unnecessary to simply apply a definition -- it is only necessary to apply a law. If you were to accidentally kill somebody, then I would alter my treatment of you differently than if you were to kill somebody with premeditated malice (e.g. in the former case I would be less prone to trusting you to handle heavy machinery or whatever, while in the latter case I would be less prone to trusting you in any way shape or form). This idea that the term is meaningless simply because I lack the authority to punish you for your crime is hogwash -- it behooves me to make the distinction between accidental killing and killing with premeditated malice, independently of any benefits that society as a whole may gain from making this distinction. You can certainly come up with a plethora of contrived examples in which it is not possible for me to correctly apply my pre-societal definitions of the term, but this simply limits their usefulness -- it does not negate their usefulness. |
It does not behoove you to prove anything, if there is no judge. The very concepts of guilt and innocnes require a method by which to judge them: a judge as it were. And it does your arguement no good to bring up examples of anything contemporary, or "real life", sicne you live in a world of laws, that is what the contemporary world is, and to use it for example is to use its assumptions, ones based on law. So thought examples are the only things we can use to test out the theory without interference from modern prejudices.
One does not need law to exist at oine time to define a lwa clerc: but without a concept of law, and courts, and thier function, there i no possiblity of the concept coming into being, which is the point! The very concept of murder can not exist free of the concepts of law, or at least norms, morality, guilt and innoncence, justice and judgement. You mayb e able to define it without those words, but as a concept it can not exist independent of them.
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The concept of justice cannot be "arbitrarily" redefined by different groups. Language is not something that can be arbitrarily redefined to fit the whims of an individual or group. This is the point I've been making -- this isn't the world of 1984, and even Ingsoc (a group, not an individual) was finding that it was impossible to arbitrarily redefine a language. |
Actually, language is, given all the different languages that exist, an arbitrary creation of man. There is a reason many languages borrow certain temrs, and that is ebcuase not all languages provide words for all terms that have come to the mid of man (like the singularity of Schadenfreude). But you still iss the point: the point is not than any indidivusal may be able to singularly redefine the languge they speak and other speak, but that there is no UNIVERSAL language that all humans use, just as there is no UNIVERSAL code of justice all humans use.
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First off, you're mixing an arbitrary system of justice with an arbitrary concept of justice. The two are quite different -- a system of justice can be arbitrarily redefined by the ruling class, but a concept of justice is highly dependant on language (and hence cannot be arbitrarily redefined). |
If different groups can have different languages, they can have different systems of justice.
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This should clear up the reasoning behind how one system of justice can be inferior to another: if one system deviates more from the concept than another system, then the deviant system is inferior. For example, the concept of justice involves equity/fairness, therefore if the US system of justice were to be arbitrarily redefined so as to be grossly unequal (or "more unequal" than it is at present) then that new system of justice would be inferior to the present system. |
You speak of internal consistency: any language without internal consistency is not as good as one with it: but if two languages have internal consistency, they are equaly valid.
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Sometimes there are "false hits" to the meta-retrieval process, e.g. when you hit the buzzer thinking that you know the answer but then find that you do not actually know the answer. In this case you do not know the word, yet you still know "of" the concept and may even be capable of describing the concept using a conglomeration of words that you do know. |
You know there is A word for it, even if you don;t kow it. The question is, can you know of a concept knowing there IS njo word for it, no word for it YOU could know.
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You're asking the impossible -- concepts that do not have words associated with them almost invariably acquire words by which to identify them (and/or they can be described by the conglomeration of other words). This is like saying "Name a concept that you can't name" -- how the hell am I supposed to name something that doesn't have a name? |
Exaclty my point! ICould we not then assume that prior to the existence of the word for it, the concept of it also did not exist?
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Anyway, another example of a concept-without-word is that of simple ordinal mathematics performed by extremely young children. The basic experiment involves showing a baby a small puppet stage with a number of puppets visible. The curtains are then drawn on the stage, and re-opened -- sometimes puppets have been added or removed, other times the number of puppets remains the same. The baby shows considerable agitation in the cases when the number of puppets has changed, and shows no agitation when the number of puppets has not changed -- the baby is capable of understanding concepts such as "more" and "less," "equal" and "unequal." This experiment was originally performed with toddlers (who, it might be argued, had sufficient language knowledge to understand the words "more" and "less"), but since then it has been successfully performed on children as young as three days old (and the burden of proof rests firmly on the guy saying that a three-day-old has any understanding of language). |
At best you can show me that al mammals have an innate sense of "more", "less", so forth and so on. I already said that I question how you call this "mathematics" (birds call to each other to communicate: is this langauge?).
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09-07-2003 15:11
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