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contractualist OP t1_j76mx2z wrote

If they come from our imagination, they have no moral weight. Your imagination can't make anyone else do anything, like respecting your entitlements. The rebuttal (the answer to the specification, prioritization, and genealogy problems) is provided in the last section.

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Trubadidudei t1_j776ciu wrote

> If they come from our imagination, they have no moral weight

All moral concept comes from our imagination. It is a purely inter-imaginary concept. Are you saying that morality itself has no moral weight, because it does not exist outside of the mind? Morality has consequence in reality because we act upon it, but that does not make it any less imaginary than Harry Potter.

> Your imagination can't make anyone else do anything, like respecting your entitlements.

This is simply wrong, especially when you consider that I said "our imagination" and not "my imagination". I was specifically referring to inter-imaginatory concepts, and in this sense you are replying to a strawman. However, let met offer two rebuttals, one to the straw man argument you are making(1), and another as if you had dealt with my actual argument(2).

1 - I imagine myself entitled to own a pet cat, and I have this pet cat in my posession. You pick up the pet cat that I imagine myself owning, and start to leave. Imagining my entitlements to be disrespected, I act upon those imaginary concepts by yelling "Drop the cat or I will punch you in the face". You, imagining that being punched in the face is something you do not want, proceed to drop the cat.

There, my imagination just made someone else respect my entitlement. Yes, my imagination did not act directly as if by some form of telepathy, but it imagined a set of noises that did pretty much the same thing. The only physically observable phenomenon were a set of vibrations in the air, and yet by medium of those vibrations my imagination found a way to make the other person imagination imagine a set of very unpleasant consequences to their actions, and made them do something else.

Yes, technically it was my voice - a physical thing - that made someone else do something, but the words to say came from my imagination. If you want to say that the fact that any physical action happened at all disqualifies this argument, I'd liken that a bit to saying that the triceps muscle cannot affect anything because it is in fact my hand that hits you when I punch. Yet, I can concede the fact that this is a semi-valid rebuttal, and to that I'd like to remind you of the fact that it is a rebuttal to a strawman argument that I never made in the first place.

2 - I imagine myself entitled to own a pet cat, and I do have this pet cat in my posession. You also imagine me entitled to own the cat that is currently in my possesion. Both of our imaginations share an acceptance to numerous imaginary concepts, such as ownership, entitlements and so on. In addition, we both imagine that punching someone in the face is an acceptable and likely response to trying to steal someones pet cat. Since we both imagine myself as the owner of the cat in currently in front of us, you imagine that you will be punched in the face if you take it, and so you do not do this.

In this scenario "our" imagination, the imaginary concepts that we both share or our inter-imagination, guided both our actions. You might have wanted to have the cat, but you accepted the inter-imaginary concept of "pet owner" and the consequences of violating certain entitlements that come with that role. Incidentally the cat, a third part in this scenario, almost certainly would not accept being "owned" by anybody, had it understood what this meant. It did not share our inter-imaginary reality, and would have happily gone with anyone that would have fed and petted it.

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contractualist OP t1_j778j3f wrote

>I was specifically referring to inter-imaginatory concepts, and in this sense you are replying to a strawman.

So all one has to do is imagine a different set of rights (say the right to do wrong) and then you have no rights. All this is is "what if we both happened to imagine the same rights?" But what if we don't? What if we had the conflict of John and Bill as discussed in the piece? Do we then not have rights?

I argue that we still do, regardless of our imaginations, that we have rights based on the principles of the social contract. I argue for its meta-ethical basis and its moral authority here and here.

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get_it_together1 t1_j77ksvr wrote

It seems clear that we only have rights that our society agrees to maintain, both positive and negative rights. This is most obvious with women in the modern era, but certainly throughout history there are numerous examples of people being denied what you might consider to be a right. What then is a right if it is so easily violated and if entire societies can deny their existence?

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contractualist OP t1_j77liom wrote

This is a descriptive account of rights, not a normative one that philosophy focuses on. Rights exist regardless of their violation or their declared non-existence or someone's imagination.

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get_it_together1 t1_j78dcwx wrote

Philosophy focuses on all types of rights and philosophers debate both which sort of foundation is best for supporting rights and which specific rights should be derived from a given foundation. Given this diversity of thought it seems a bit odd to simply proclaim a particular right to exist regardless of circumstance. I agree that in general in every society some rights exist but this is a very different claim.

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VitriolicViolet t1_j792izx wrote

no they dont.

what you are claiming is that all societies in the past were immoral and that any future societies will also likely be immoral (our conception of rights was different in the past and will be different again in the future).

if we all decided tomorrow that all current rights were in fact incorrect then they would be incorrect by definition.

rights and morals are literally determined by popularity and force.

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Trubadidudei t1_j78149q wrote

There seems to be some kind of disconnect here, as if we are discussing two completely separate matters. You seem to not accept, one some fundamental level, the actual fact that morality, rights, or what have you, is not real, in the sense that it is only happening in our heads. The only reality of these concepts is the one our actions make of them.

> So all one has to do is imagine a different set of rights (say the right to do wrong) and then you have no rights

Well yes, this is kind of the reality of the human condition, see Ukraine for real life examples. Okay, this is kind of a snarky response, as I get the point you're truly trying to make. The problem is that this rebuttal is a non sequitur to the argument I have made. You speak of what rights are, where they come from, and you ask me to answer what happens if they conflict. All of this language implies that you truly do not accept the fundamental reality of the situation we're in, the true fact that rights do not exist outside of our minds. No matter how much you say "unalienable" and argue about social contracts will change this fact. It almost seems silly to point this out, it is such an obvious premise to any moral discussion. But the language that you are using gives the impression that you think the word "rights" refers to some fundamental law in the universe that you can discover if you argue well enough. You speak of rights as if you adhere to Platos theory of form, as if having a really good definition of the word will somehow make it reality. All I can do is to read the words that you write, and this is the impression that they give me.

Look, I think we can all agree that morality is pretty great. And I think we can all agree that moral systems are a necessary keystone in the creation of well functioning groups of human beings. I'm personally a big fan of rights! I think they are a good basis for a lot of good things.

But even the most basic tenets that underpin moral systems get pretty murky when you start to take them too seriously. "Suffering is bad" might seem like a no-brainer until you find EAs arguing about what to do about the "wild animal problem". What you are doing is taking much hazier concepts like "social contract" and "legitimacy", and saying ipso facto rights exist. I guess your argument is logically constructed, but I am not arguing against it's internal logic, I am saying that its fundamental underpinnings hold no basis in reality.

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VitriolicViolet t1_j7923da wrote

>So all one has to do is imagine a different set of rights (say the right to do wrong) and then you have no rights. All this is is "what if we both happened to imagine the same rights?" But what if we don't? What if we had the conflict of John and Bill as discussed in the piece? Do we then not have rights?

yes?

how do you think morals are defined and chosen by societies? through popularity and force.

ie if socialist authoritarism had successfully beaten and replaced capitalist democracy across the globe then it would be considered moral by the majority.

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get_it_together1 t1_j7756zu wrote

The final section doesn’t say much except that the state doesn’t create rights and the US founding fathers considered rights. Leaving aside that the Bill of Rights was literally and amendment to the Constitution and that several key rights were left out, this doesn’t really answer the question at all, it just asserts that some other people considered the question.

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contractualist OP t1_j777h34 wrote

I'd recommend re-reading. I argue that we develop reasonable principles and apply them to specific facts create rights. Their application specifies what these rights are (I provide this linked articleas an example, to show how constitutional principles applied based on reason, create rights). This resolves the specification problem.

And the prioritization problem can be resolved by examining the meta-principles of certain rights (this linked article is provided as an example of how our moral/legal rules of consent are based on meta-ethical principles).

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get_it_together1 t1_j77i9k5 wrote

Yes, but that ignores that our legal system wasn’t simply rationally designed but instead evolved over many centuries. The US inherited English common law which traces back past the Magna Carta. Other societies develop other legal systems and sets of rights.

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contractualist OP t1_j77j444 wrote

It doesn't. I discuss this in the piece as well: "[our laws] weren’t created from scratch out of someone’s rational intuition. Rather, they evolved as legal scholars and authorities developed and discussed broad legal principles and applied them to ever-changing circumstances."

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