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BwanaAzungu t1_j75qv9g wrote

Reply to comment by LargeWeinerDog in There Are No Natural Rights (without Natural Law): Addressing what rights are, how we create rights, and where rights come from by contractualist

>In order to live, we need to breathe. So we have the right to breathe anywhere, anytime, and anyway we want.

The ocean would like a word.

Also Pompeii.

People die of suffocation all the time.

If these are "natural rights", then why doesn't nature respect them?

If nature doesn't respect them, then how are they "natural rights"?

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FinancialDesign2 t1_j75spez wrote

I agree with what you’re saying. Most people who make arguments about natural rights have not clearly defined what a right even is. Most take it to mean this right which is conferred to you by the laws of nature, or of some spiritual or natural moral obligation that is correct just because the morality of the universe deems it so. It’s a self referencing argument that has no basis. It’s true because it is.

The only logically consistent way you can define a right is that which is based on what you personally value. A personal value is an axiom because it is a self evident phenomenon, and natural rights are corollaries that stem from that axiom. As a social species, we value certain things such as cooperation, compassion, and mutually beneficial behaviors because that is what we evolved to do. This is why people generally agree on what a right should be but aren’t able to describe a logically consistent basis for why they feel that way. They are afraid to admit their values have no logical basis outside of biology.

Many other species of animals don’t have the same values as us. Many female spiders will cannibalize their mates after breeding. Hyenas will brutally murder their prey. Lions will murder the offspring of their competitors. We would say that no human has the right to act this way, but why do we then apply a different standard to animals? They certainly don’t feel guilt about their ways. It is because their values are different from ours. This also why some will disagree on whether or not a particular “right” should even exist in the first place. Should I have a right to own a gun? What about a tank? What about a nuclear bomb? At what point does owning an increasingly deadly weapon no longer become a right? The answer depends entirely on your values and what you deem appropriate. So it is with rights themselves.

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nightraven900 t1_j76fpxp wrote

Another logically consistent way you can define a right is that a right is something a person has intrinsically. Something they are born with and that cant be taken away in a vacuum. So something like the right to say what ever you want would be consistent in that as in a vacuum no one would be able to stop you from saying certain things. A right to weapons can be seen as the adaptation of the natural right a person has to protect themselves via what ever means they see fit. Its just been adapted to fit a society and the technology of modern times.

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Gooberpf t1_j77f9cl wrote

No human has ever or will ever exist in a vacuum. The tabula rasa foundational approach to ethics is fatally flawed, in that these presuppositions of "well if I were a singular person I would want XYZ" are 1. skewed by the value system you actually developed by whatever point in your life you're currently at and 2. literal impossibilities and not only do not but cannot reflect humanity.

Every person at minimum has one parent, and humans evolved to exist in communal groups. Any approach to ethics that starts with "in a vacuum" and ignores the simple fact that all persons have social connections from the instant they're born is starting from the wrong place.

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nightraven900 t1_j77vjlw wrote

In a vacuum more so means not in collaboration with other humans ie not part of a society or family which has happened very frequently. And while yes currently people do not live in a vacuum it is a very good starting point as humans are naturally selfish. Thus why I said those rights are adapted to fit society and technology levels. Rights like certain personal freedoms.

People arent always going have parent and it is still possible for a person to become completely isolated from other people even in first world countries.

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FinancialDesign2 t1_j784enc wrote

> And while yes currently people do not live in a vacuum it is a very good starting point as humans are naturally selfish.

Humans are not naturally selfish. Snakes are naturally selfish. Most reptiles are naturally selfish. Humans are intrinsically social animals that rely on group coherence to survive. If humans were naturally selfish then basically all of society would not exist. American culture may reward selfishness, but that does not mean that we are naturally so.

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nightraven900 t1_j78ibpc wrote

I think you are confusing social with generous. It is the goal of every person to focus on themselves more than others as it should be. Society exist because it is benificial for individuals to participate with each other to benifit themselves. They dont participate for altruistic reasons, they are being rewarded for their participation.

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Gooberpf t1_j783g2i wrote

Imagine that honeybees had philosophers and ethicists. Would it make sense for a worker bee philosopher to start her examination of morality based on herself and herself alone? Her whole concept of survival is intrinsically dependent on the queen and on other workers; she also can't breed. Before even discussing her concept of ethics, all of her core values are inseparable from her position in her hive society.

I'm not even proposing moral relativism here, I'm saying that any human conception of morality is inextricably connected to humans as social creatures. Even a self-centered individual has to bear that in mind as well - if "building a legacy" is a valuable goal to some specific, fully selfish individual, it's important to note that there's no such thing as a legacy without other members of society to experience or remember it into the future.

Assumptions about philosophy that start and end with the individual consciousness are IMO not "more rational" but instead something inhuman. How can a fully isolated human even be considered the same kind of existence as someone in a collective?

This is an aspect of "natural law" and "social contract" discussions that I think gets buried when people start focusing on individual positive/negative rights. If you're the only conscious individual around, there is no value in a concept of "rights" to begin with - a "right" only even has meaning when it affects another conscious being. Conjuring up some idea of "rights" one has when fully isolated and then applying that as a foundation for rules in a group is nonsensical - a fully isolated human could never have the language to conceive of "rights" (or even language at all).

Accordingly, conceptualizing what, if any, natural rights exist necessarily must begin with people in a group, not in isolation. Putting a human in a vacuum and then considering how they would behave at that point in a thought experiment is creating a non-human and then trying to give it the same label.

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FinancialDesign2 t1_j77clx5 wrote

The problem with that argument is that it doesn’t account for the fact that there are differences in opinions on what rights even are. If rights simply existed in a cosmological sense then there should be concrete ways to prove that one right exists while another doesn’t. If it’s just “something you have” without further explanation, then the assertions you make about rights have no reason behind them. It’s just declaring by fiat that a right exists, without providing any argument for why it exists. Thus it’s an argument from opinion, not an argument from evidence. The argument is literally “it exists because it exists” which is woefully inadequate.

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nightraven900 t1_j77yx8f wrote

Rights may not be concrete but the argument isn't about about the REASON rights exist. The argument is about what they are and where they come from. And my example is a common view that is held as to the nature of certain rights that people believe are fundamental and how said rights are decided upon.

As for the REASON rights exist well... There is no reason, that's like asking the reason why gravity exist or the reason natural laws exist or reason people exist. The answer quite literally is just because they do. The reason is irrelevant. That's why this particular definition of a right is so wide spread. Any reason the right has to existing is purely philosophical and doesnt hold weight in the real world.

I was talking about these types of rights from the logical consistency standpoint. Said consistency is what often draws people to this definition of rights most often. It provides a logically consistent answer for what rights are and where they come from as you where critiquing rights not being logically consistent. If someone disagrees that these things should be rights then that's a matter of opinion but it doesn't change their logical consistency.

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FinancialDesign2 t1_j7841t0 wrote

> the argument isn't about about the REASON rights exist. The argument is about what they are and where they come from.

Tomato, tomahto. An argument about where rights come from is intrinsically an argument about why they exist. The definition of a right you're positing is that it's "something a person has intrinsically". While that may make your arguments that follow from that presupposition logically consistent, the presupposition itself has no merit, and therefore all of the arguments that follow from that definition rely on an unfounded assertion.

> As for the REASON rights exist well... There is no reason, that's like asking the reason why gravity exist or the reason natural laws exist or reason people exist. The answer quite literally is just because they do.

That's simply not true. You can look to the morality that other species have and you realize that what a particular animal deems as "moral" or not (which may stem from whatever their sense of a "right" is) relies entirely on the social structure of that animal, e.g. its sense of fairness, compassion, empathy, theory of mind.

> I was talking about these types of rights from the logical consistency standpoint. Said consistency is what often draws people to this definition of rights most often.

Fair point. However in my view, an argument's conclusions have no merits if the axiom itself is bad. Subscribing to an axiom because it gives you nice logical properties is a basically meaningless way to discover what our rights should be. My argument is that the entire position is flawed and anyone who uses the argument that rights exist because they're intrinsic are starting from a weak position, and thus all the conclusions that follow are weak. Using the logical consistency of the argument as a reason for using the original axiom is totally, fundamentally flawed because corollaries cannot be used to assert the axiom is true (it is a self-referencing logical loop). Using "intrinsic rights" as an argument means there is zero room for debate as everyone will then claim that their rights are true because they said so.

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