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I find any argument involving rights to be poor. Our goals in a social context are always to make the best possible decisions with what we know, and to enable

• TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  Rights try to predefine 'best possible' for a culture. This is a good thing because it provides a written moral standard and a legal basis for further argument - rather like a constitution. Relying on 'rational argument' doesn't work as well because most 'rational argument' in politics, law, and economics is persuasion through sophistry, custom, tribalism, rhetoric, appeal to self-interest, and/or the application or threat of force. None of these have much to do with rationality in the scientific sense of being able to build useful models of reality from data. tl dr; Defining rights makes spurious political plays more difficult.
  • ars 12y ago
    You haven't done much by defining rights, because who defines those rights? ISIS will say everyone has the right to have a slave. The UN says everyone has the right to paid vacations (yes, it really does say that). Who decides which rights should be accepted? There is no one who can do so. Rights are arbitrary and reflect the culture of those who defined them. You either decide to accept them or you don't. i.e. it's pretty much identical to "rational argument".
    • mbrock 12y ago
      They may be ultimately arbitrary, but until you come up with a final conclusive objective ethics, proven metaphysically beyond questioning, the rest of us have to make actual decisions today. The UN, as a collective body, defines various normative concepts, e.g., by defining "human rights." If you have issues with them, you join the proverbial mailing list and state your case.
      • ars 12y ago
        My point is that there is no difference between the "rational argument" TheOtherHobbes doesn't like and rights. He has tried to define a difference between them that doesn't actually exist.
  • Retra 12y ago
    Rights approximate the structure of laws that people agree in some vague way should exist. My point is that any discussion about rights can be reframed without ever using the word 'rights' and usually it is much clearer and more consistent to do so. Most of the time you can just say something like "It should be unlawful to do X in situation Y because it undermines the ability of those involved to make predictably good decisions." Rights are useful in the same way that asserting "pi = 3" is useful: it's simply better than nothing. It is hardly some kind of ideal, despite how easy life would be if it were true.
• RobertKerans 12y ago
  What's a rational argument? It is not irrational, for example, to kill or (forcibly convert) absolutely anyone who doesn't believe (religiously) that which I believe.
  • Retra 12y ago
    Rational is a well-defined term. It essentially means that you are coming to conclusions necessitated by the information you have. It doesn't mean that you think something 'makes sense' in some vague nondescript way. A rational argument is one that compels a rational person to agree -- one that provides a natural threat of catastrophic failure should it be ignored.
    • RobertKerans 12y ago
      Oh I understand what rational means, but what is percieved and understood as rational can and does differ based on society and culture and circumstance when applied to the kinds of things generally enshrined as rights (human, workers, womens, prisoners, etc). Enshrinement of rights is not by any means a perfect solution to the problem of how best to protect weak minorities, and can be used very effectively to suppress freedom, but I'm pretty skeptical that a reliance on 'rational arguments' is better.
      • Retra 12y ago
        Something is not rational just because someone calls it so. A rational argument is the best possible argument you can make because it incorporates all relevant information in direct proportion to its relevance. If relying on that isn't better, then there is no hope for improvement. Rationality is (as far as I know) the only known way to systematically avoid arbitrary errors. The problem that everybody thinks they are rational and that they don't know what rational means is not a problem with rationality. It's a problem with irrationality.
        • RobertKerans 12y ago
          At what point do you make those rational arguments flesh? Rights[1] would seem, at their core, to be reified rational arguments. As in: over a long period of time, a rational argument as to how a certain group should be treated/not mistreated (prisoners should not be tortured, say, or women should have the same opportunities as men) is made many times. Eventually its rationality may be accepted, and eventually reification may occur. Relying simply on rational arguments seems a. heavily constrained by bounded knowledge, b. extremely susceptible to interference and c. produce much more fragile legal structures than rights infer. In respect to the OP, setting down the rights of Orangutans surely is making a rational argument, then allowing that argument to be applied in all similar cases, rather than making the same argument repeatedly? [1] as fought for cross-culture/worldwide/etc (eg human rights) and positive, not culture-specific & negative (eg rights of one tribal group over all others in a country).
• logfromblammo 12y ago
  Rights are a mutual agreement between those that may wield the power to harm to not use that power on each other. In today's world, that means two things. If you cannot pick up and fire a gun, you have no rights. If you can pick up a gun, but cannot restrain yourself from using it against others who also can, you have no rights. It is convenient for some people who have rights to act as a guardian to someone who does not, to provide the illusion that they also have rights. Babies enjoy the illusion of some rights, because if you try to harm one, the parents will probably try to harm you, along with hordes of other offended adults. The entire system is built upon a civilized arrangement, where people agree that certain actions do not merit retaliatory violence. In order to insult someone else's mother without getting punched in the face, I must be prepared to hear insults to my own mother and restrain my own fist. This implies that the only requirement for having rights is the ability to respect the same rights for others. It would seem that a necessary prerequisite for that is the ability to communicate. Orangutans have demonstrated this ability with manual signing, lexigrams, and keyboards. But it is uncertain whether an orangutan could also generalize its social interactions to include other humans or orangutans that had never been previously encountered. They have learned to use money, so it's very possible they could learn the other social constructs of civilization. Orangutans have at least demonstrated learning and cognition abilities on par with some humans, so I'd be willing to pretend they have rights in line with human children or those otherwise legally incompetent. They can definitely learn to use the gun. The question is whether they can also learn not to use it. After that, it's a matter of negotiation. An orangutan might care more about fig tree rights and habitat protections than about the right to own property or freedom of religion.
  • Retra 12y ago
    > If you cannot pick up and fire a gun, you have no rights. Well, I suppose if I break my wrists, I don't have a right to live anymore. >This implies that the only requirement for having rights is the ability to respect the same rights for others This is obviously not true at all. If I tell you I have a right to own property, surely an ant doesn't have the same right. So what do you mean by "others?" Other things that I would choose to call equal humans? Who gets to say who that is? This is fundamentally why I hate the concept: people like to pretend it means something if only everybody ignores all the obvious inconsistencies in the discussion. You're saying fundamentally incompetent things, and the vagueness of your terminology lets you feel secure in the fact that nobody has the ability to correct you.
• 1457389 12y ago
  >shared experiences and cultural knowledge So you have replaced a debate about values and shared definitions to one predicated on groupthink. Basing your moral decisions on shared experiences and cultural knowledge leads to the exact kind of in-group/out-group thinking that the idea of rights was designed to combat. It isn't a perfect moral framework, but it is one that has achieved a great deal of good in the last few centuries.
  • Retra 12y ago
    Only if you assume different cultures can't or shouldn't share knowledge and experiences. But of course, that's not true. It's is a fairly simple matter to assume that someone thinks differently from you. I'm not talking about in-group/out-group thinking, but _generally applicable_ constraints on human behavior. Economics, psychology, science, etc. Things that can be optimized on _arbitrary_ cultures using techniques that are already known to succeed everywhere. Rights do not fit into this picture. Rights are not based on measurable and general principles, but upon cultural expectations handed down through tradition.