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> the right to "freedom from harm" immediately conflicts with speech, gun ownership You don't have a right to "freedom from harm" if that means not hearing any

by pdonis 2y ago

> the right to "freedom from harm" immediately conflicts with speech, gun ownership You don't have a right to "freedom from harm" if that means not hearing any speech you don't like. You do have a right not to be shot, but "gun ownership" by itself does not conflict with that right. Being shot by someone who owns a gun does, but then the rights violation is the shooting, not the gun ownership. > If you don't think there's a right to freedom from harm that competes with those other rights, I don't know what to tell you. Your position, that all rights are inherently in conflict with each other, means nobody really has rights; what you call "rights" are really just at the mercy of the legislature: > The real work of governance and legislation requires carefully negotiating trade-offs between competing priorities in an ever-changing world. No, the real work of governance and legislation requires protecting the basic rights that everyone has to have to have a free, civil society, and stopping there. A government that has more power than that has too much power. Your position reminds me of the old saying: no one's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session. > The fact that positive rights are "leftist" in some parts of the world reflects a degree of deep ideological incoherence and immaturity in those parts, more than anything, I think. It reflects a degree of deep ideological incoherence and immaturity on the part of leftists who advocate for such "positive rights", yes. That's a recipe for eternal conflict. Which is indeed what leftism of that variety leads to.

jknoepfler 2y ago
If you think there's an inviolable set of Ur rights that aren't intrinsically in conflict, then articulate them. Your inability to articulate them cogently suggests that they don't exist... not that every argument to the contrary is false because they must exist. Refusing to think critically and insisting "muh absolute rights must be real" isn't an argument, it's a (peculiarly male, American, sad) fantasy. Yeehaw, cowboy fantasy land.
- pdonis 2y ago
  > If you think there's an inviolable set of Ur rights I made no such claim. Of course any right can be violated, since rights aren't laws of physics, they're agreements that citizens of a civil society make with each other in order to be able to build wealth through cooperation, specialization, and trade. And people always have the ability to violate agreements. That doesn't mean they should, it just means they can. And of course there are always people who do. But that doesn't mean there has to be conflict between the rights themselves. It just means there are always at least some people who refuse to respect other people's rights, and we have to have some kind of plan for dealing with them. > Your inability to articulate them cogently I don't know where you're getting that from, since the old saying I mentioned already contains the basic answer: life, liberty, property. (I might also add the pursuit of happiness, from the Declaration of Independence.) But it's true that it's easy to misunderstand what those rights mean, particularly "liberty", and to think that they must be in conflict because, for example, my "liberty" has to include the right to take your life if I feel like it. But that's nonsense, and there is plenty of literature in philosophy, ethics, and political science expounding a proper concept of "liberty" that includes the obvious point that your right to liberty does not include violating the rights of others. > Refusing to think critically Is exactly the problem with people who can't understand how there can be a set of basic rights that aren't in conflict, because they can't, for example, imagine any concept of "liberty" that isn't "I can do whatever I feel like".
  - sprucevoid 2y ago
    > a set of basic rights that aren't in conflict Do you have a reply to the arguments in these linked texts that property is inherently coercive? https://mattbruenig.com/2015/10/01/capitalism-is-coercive-and-creates-patterns-of-deprivation-as-explained-by-libertarian-blockquotes/ https://mattbruenig.com/2015/10/01/capitalism-is-coercive-an... https://mattbruenig.com/2014/05/07/property-and-conflict/ https://mattbruenig.com/2014/05/07/property-and-conflict/
    - pdonis 2y ago
      Yes: the definition of "coercive" used in those texts is an example of what I described at the end of my post, the inability to imagine any concept of "liberty" that is not "do whatever I feel like"--or in this case, "grab whatever external resource I feel like".
sprucevoid 2y ago
> protecting the basic rights that everyone has to have to have a free, civil society, and stopping there. A government that has more power than that has too much power. What's your empirical evidence for thinking that such a setup is better and that going further than that brings "eternal conflict"? Since all prosperous democratic countries in e.g. north america and europe combine private property with taxation for public provision that goes beyond what you desire. Furthermore in empirical studies of life satisfaction and happiness the top of the list is consistently held by countries with extensive welfare states funded by taxes[0]. How does that square with your claim? [0] https://happiness-report.s3.amazonaws.com/2024/WHR+24.pdf#page=17 https://happiness-report.s3.amazonaws.com/2024/WHR+24.pdf#pa...
- pdonis 2y ago
  > What's your empirical evidence What if you gave the same happiness survey to people in Saga period Iceland, which had no government at all? Or to people in some of the American colonies in the late 1600s and early 1700s, such as Pennsylvania, which had governments, but those governments did virtually nothing? The fact that all first world countries today have governments with vastly more power is no evidence at all that such a system is the best. All it means is that that's the only kind of system that's being evaluated for first world countries. It's easy to place first if you're the only one in the race.
  - sprucevoid 2y ago
    Hard to tell what those people would report if we had a time machine and could go and ask them. I sure as hell wouldn't want to switch position with them. Would you? On objective measures of health, nutrition, longevity and prevalence of violence they would score much worse. > The fact that all first world countries today have governments with vastly more power is no evidence at all that such a system is the best. It is some evidence. Since if a system with a less extensive state that offers less of public services like schooling, infrastructure and health care is what is really better for people, why haven't people made it happen already? See here also my previous point that gradual steps towards such system should, if they are really an improvement for people, show up as higher scores in happiness surveys. Absence of that trend is some evidence against your claim.

by pdonis 2y ago

jknoepfler 2y ago

If you think there's an inviolable set of Ur rights that aren't intrinsically in conflict, then articulate them. Your inability to articulate them cogently suggests that they don't exist... not that every argument to the contrary is false because they must exist. Refusing to think critically and insisting "muh absolute rights must be real" isn't an argument, it's a (peculiarly male, American, sad) fantasy. Yeehaw, cowboy fantasy land.

pdonis 2y ago
> If you think there's an inviolable set of Ur rights I made no such claim. Of course any right can be violated, since rights aren't laws of physics, they're agreements that citizens of a civil society make with each other in order to be able to build wealth through cooperation, specialization, and trade. And people always have the ability to violate agreements. That doesn't mean they should, it just means they can. And of course there are always people who do. But that doesn't mean there has to be conflict between the rights themselves. It just means there are always at least some people who refuse to respect other people's rights, and we have to have some kind of plan for dealing with them. > Your inability to articulate them cogently I don't know where you're getting that from, since the old saying I mentioned already contains the basic answer: life, liberty, property. (I might also add the pursuit of happiness, from the Declaration of Independence.) But it's true that it's easy to misunderstand what those rights mean, particularly "liberty", and to think that they must be in conflict because, for example, my "liberty" has to include the right to take your life if I feel like it. But that's nonsense, and there is plenty of literature in philosophy, ethics, and political science expounding a proper concept of "liberty" that includes the obvious point that your right to liberty does not include violating the rights of others. > Refusing to think critically Is exactly the problem with people who can't understand how there can be a set of basic rights that aren't in conflict, because they can't, for example, imagine any concept of "liberty" that isn't "I can do whatever I feel like".
- sprucevoid 2y ago
  > a set of basic rights that aren't in conflict Do you have a reply to the arguments in these linked texts that property is inherently coercive? https://mattbruenig.com/2015/10/01/capitalism-is-coercive-and-creates-patterns-of-deprivation-as-explained-by-libertarian-blockquotes/ https://mattbruenig.com/2015/10/01/capitalism-is-coercive-an... https://mattbruenig.com/2014/05/07/property-and-conflict/ https://mattbruenig.com/2014/05/07/property-and-conflict/
  - pdonis 2y ago
    Yes: the definition of "coercive" used in those texts is an example of what I described at the end of my post, the inability to imagine any concept of "liberty" that is not "do whatever I feel like"--or in this case, "grab whatever external resource I feel like".

sprucevoid 2y ago

> protecting the basic rights that everyone has to have to have a free, civil society, and stopping there. A government that has more power than that has too much power. What's your empirical evidence for thinking that such a setup is better and that going further than that brings "eternal conflict"? Since all prosperous democratic countries in e.g. north america and europe combine private property with taxation for public provision that goes beyond what you desire. Furthermore in empirical studies of life satisfaction and happiness the top of the list is consistently held by countries with extensive welfare states funded by taxes[0]. How does that square with your claim? [0] https://happiness-report.s3.amazonaws.com/2024/WHR+24.pdf#page=17 https://happiness-report.s3.amazonaws.com/2024/WHR+24.pdf#pa...

pdonis 2y ago
> What's your empirical evidence What if you gave the same happiness survey to people in Saga period Iceland, which had no government at all? Or to people in some of the American colonies in the late 1600s and early 1700s, such as Pennsylvania, which had governments, but those governments did virtually nothing? The fact that all first world countries today have governments with vastly more power is no evidence at all that such a system is the best. All it means is that that's the only kind of system that's being evaluated for first world countries. It's easy to place first if you're the only one in the race.
- sprucevoid 2y ago
  Hard to tell what those people would report if we had a time machine and could go and ask them. I sure as hell wouldn't want to switch position with them. Would you? On objective measures of health, nutrition, longevity and prevalence of violence they would score much worse. > The fact that all first world countries today have governments with vastly more power is no evidence at all that such a system is the best. It is some evidence. Since if a system with a less extensive state that offers less of public services like schooling, infrastructure and health care is what is really better for people, why haven't people made it happen already? See here also my previous point that gradual steps towards such system should, if they are really an improvement for people, show up as higher scores in happiness surveys. Absence of that trend is some evidence against your claim.