I don't disagree with this, but I would put the emphasis differently. Yours is on the tentative nature of rights, their conditionality. Mine is on my judgement that the only way to proceed morally is to act as if it were true. Philosophers do that all the time.

I’m with you on this. My concern is that the whole thing opens itself to a withering criticism, for instance Bentham’s critique. The project of natural law was never the same since then and with devastating consequences. Perhaps there is a way to reestablish it on better footing.

Do you know of any cases of that?

I’m sure of it in my own case. With each passing day I get closer to it. Lysander Spooner is another.

I have portrayed natural rights as not existing. The behavior of granting rights, natural or otherwise, can exist, as I have already explained.

If the slave can claim his right to freedom, or in the case of natural rights, already has it, why is he in chains? If he can take the right or already has the right, no one needn’t afford it to him, and we can just go on with our day without intervening. In any case, when it comes to asserting rights, the slaver’s right to own the slave has won out over the slave’s right to freedom.

Your so-called balance and equality is might makes right. The slaver has the right to own the slave so long as he can claim and take the right. The slave has the right to freedom so long as he can claim the right and make an exit.

That’s right. The distinction is between so-called natural and positive law. In my mind positive law is circular and dangerous. But natural law is often seen as silly and superstitious, sometimes rightfully so.

Bentham believed a belief in natural rights would lead to anarchy because they contradict the very idea of government. I think he’s right on that.

I like what you said there. Though I do not agree that they are built in to any nature, human or otherwise, they are definitely reasoned from observing human nature.

But I maintain that Natural Rights, like any right, exists only in the heads and mouths of those who are willing to confer them. He observes and reasons about human nature, derives from it a sum of acceptable behaviors, confers the right to perform these behaviors to all people, and endorses and defends them thereby. The whole project of human rights is dependent upon the rights giver, which as already intimated, is everyone.

The more and more people believe in natural law, take it upon themselves to confer rights, the more and more we have natural rights. The less and less people do this, the less and less we have natural rights. At any rate, as soon as the natural lawyer disappears or otherwise stops conferring those rights, the rights are no longer conferred. We’ve seen this happen for instance in Germany where legal positivism became the handmaiden to Hitler’s power. Had there been some natural lawyers there I wager it would be a different story.

I think civil rights would fall under legal rights.

I believe in natural rights and natural law. I just don’t think we’re born with them. The opposite is the case. They must first be granted and defended.

I was anticipating the straw-men, quoting out of context, and quibbling. I guess there is no profit in good faith.

I don’t understand what you’re getting at. Perhaps this is because you suspiciously left out the rest of the argument, for some reason terminating it where it cannot be terminated, leaving out clauses which clarified what I meant. When I said that “everything about my supposed rights depends entirely on the will of those who offered them to me”, I meant whether they will uphold or violate the rights that I supposedly have, as is obvious by what I said.

Willing is an action performed by a thing and not itself a thing. I’m not trying to suggest these people carry with them things called “wills”.

Good point.

Any attempt at distributive justice performed in a manner that utilizes injustice in order to achieve a just result is impossible. It can only compound injustice.

But I think there is a case for reparations as far as institutions are concerned. I believe reparations are owed to the descendants of slaves, for example, from the institutions that profited from stolen people and labor.

As these things go, the arguments for Social Justice become unintelligible when they are premised on methodological collectivism. It involves positing purely imaginary connections between disparate individuals over vast amounts of time and space. These connections, often derived from superficial facts, serve as a sort of mental framework. With it we can skip the seemingly impossible task of rectifying actual injustices and just let it all permeate, willy nilly, through these imaginary connections. Now we can believe people are the perpetrators or victims of crimes committed long before they were born, and other absurdities. But we fail to distinguish between the deserving and undeserving, and so there is nothing just about it.

If the goal of justice is to give people what they are due, it utterly fails in this regard. So we can suspect that rectifying past injustices isn’t the goal, but to seek a sort of public penance through which its advocates can receive absolution.

Each term represents the misapprehension of human biology, though I think Self is more applicable. Their referent is perpetually absent or hidden from any observer, so we literally and figuratively can’t quite put our finger on it. I would include in this “consciousness”. Why we posit these phantoms I am not certain, but we can be certain that we posit them in certain objects, and these objects are infinitely greater in size, complexity, originality, and value than any of these phantoms.

To me, organ donation is morally wrong if the donor does not consent. The same is true of human incubators, which is its own kind of organ donation. What if the guy wakes up? It’s no doubt rare but people have been declared brain-dead and nonetheless made full recoveries.

So I find the opt-out program is morally wrong and unjust. The utilitarian argument for “presumed consent”, in this case using human beings as incubators without their consent, whether for organs or children, requires too much faith in human infallibility and authority for me to be comfortable with. It illegitimately considers human beings as state property. The acquisition of the human being as property was unjust. For these reasons I wouldn’t make it past the first premise.

Presumably the bodies are kept alive in order to be used for the period of gestation. So there is the added question of: should these brain-dead people be kept alive, used as incubators, so that someone else may become a mother? Should they be kept alive so that we may harvest their organs should the need arise?

Spinoza made lenses for a living and was still able to produce some musings during his short life.

Those organizations (supposedly) are there to help others or preserve nursing and caring. If they are aware of someone who dies and their organs can help others, they can ask a judge to authorize organ donation on behalf of that person to preserve the health and life of others.

To me the judge isn't the sole proprietor of brain-dead human beings, so I would disregard his decision as illegitimate and unethical.

A disturbing paper, but very interesting. I never knew of the opt-out system.

I have to object from the get-go because there is no justification as to why the state, medical system, or any other organization should have sole property rights over brain-dead human beings.

So I’m stuck with a questions. How do brain-dead human beings become the exclusive and legitimate holdings of this organization?

This thread has turned out to be a nice little compendium of the presumption of guilt and its propaganda. 6 years of hoax, fake news, and nothingburgers.

Oh you mean the "opponents" that run to the state for bailouts and subsidies at every turn? Those statists and socialists?

Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were neoliberals. Obvious from their policies. The rest is your own strange semantic contortions and residual Cold-War era fear of communism, apparently.

I’m speaking of those in the state who give bailouts and subsidies. Milton Friedman said we don’t need central banks, that if it was up to him he would have abolished the Federal Reserve and the IMF, and was against conditional loans for their undemocratic character. The Washington Consensus was not a consensus, was short-lived, and the author left out supply-side economics, monetarism and small state policies that someone like Friedman seemed to prefer. So it beggars belief that all roads lead back to someone like Friedman or Hayek or… Pat Buchanan?. Politicians like Reagan and Thatcher appear as exceptions to the rule.

Not only that, but most of it disguises the failures of Keynesianism, of Marxist-Leninism, of socialism and social democracy, of Labour, as if these had nothing to do with the political triangulation of left-wing politicians, who needed to abandon some core tenets and adopt the principles of their enemies in order to regain power.

It was not so much window-dressing as it was an attempt to climb out of a number of ideological failures: the failure of state socialism, the failure of social democracy, and the popularity of the opposition parties. So while it tried to steal the idea of free markets from their opponents, it retained the collectivism and statism, and that’s where we’re at today.

Neosocialism? Neo-social democracy?

The big mistake about the neoliberalism theory is that it puts people like Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Obama, and Biden among its ranks. But these people explicitly rejected neoliberalism and pushed “modern social democracy”, a communitarian “third way”. Blair explained it to the International Socialist Congress here:



At the turn of the century, politicians subscribing to the Third Way governed five out of the G7 and headed 12 of 15 EU nations.

Here is an illuminating discussion about the third way according to some of its greatest advocates at the time.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?122788-1/progressive-governance-21st-century

I appreciate it.

The availability of guns certainly contributes to the use of them. There is no question about that. But gun control laws have steadily increased over time, not receded. The only arguable step backwards on gun control I can find is the Firearms Owners' Protection Act of 1986, which nonetheless banned the sale of machine guns to civilians. Oddly enough a number of laws making schools a gun free zone came into effect in the early nineties, right before the modern phenomenon of school shootings rose precipitously.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-Free_School_Zones_Act_of_1990

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-Free_Schools_Act_of_1994

As for the record of neoliberalism, the first gun-control in California was signed into law by Ronald Reagan, the Milford act. He was for the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban.

I cannot see that deregulation has occurred, much less by any avatars of neoliberalism.

There is a perfectly good thread here. Our interlocutors have every right to share their own opinion, as well.

I’ve just want to know of a single neoliberal policy that has led to a single death of despair, which for some odd reason includes mass shootings.

Let’s hear it.

Note, the connection cannot be made. He fails his own test.

So you, as a cop, are fully justified to exercise extra caution when you see a Christian when compared to a Muslim.

It appears to me that one ought to be equally cautious because the religious denomination has yet to prove itself to be any sort of mitigating factor in the criminality. It’s too arbitrary of a distinction.

Yeah, it’s a complete mystery that we have more school shootings than any country on earth. Nothing to do with policies. Maybe it’s ectoplasm.

Go back to sleep.

It should be easy to name one neoliberal policy that contributed to just one school schooling.

Ask the families whose kids died in one of the many school shootings we have.

Deregulation is a policy and a choice. It’s the choice to let industry do whatever they like, with obvious outcomes.

No neoliberal policy or lack thereof put a gun in anyone’s hand, I’m afraid. The Swiss government, on the other hand, does offer guns to every conscript and subsidizes ammo at shooting ranges, with no “obvious outcomes”.

In the running for one of the stupidest statements made on this forum.

So stupid is it that false analogies are your only recourse. How does a government impact your life without a policy?

And the absence of food does not cause starvation.

I suppose if one depends on the state as a child does on the nipple, the disappearance of one precludes the suffering of the other. Perhaps a process of weaning is in order.

The “real self” is already apparent. You are witness to it, conversing with it, and interacting with it. You need not traverse anything to find it. It does small talk and speaks of superficial things, as you, your real self, does in return.

There is a common notion that the content of one’s thoughts, his desires, urges, and instincts represents the “true self”, as if a man with suicidal tendencies is not being honest or authentic unless he has a self-inflicted gunshot wound. No; the true self is also the one that suppresses or sublimates such desires and instincts.

That’s a good point. A policy can only have impact if it forces someone to do something or act in a particular way. The repealing or absence of such a policy does not because nothing bears on no one. The absence of a gun control law, for instance, does not make people go out and shoot another any more than it makes them go out and not shoot another. So these kind of connections invariably try to connect an effect to a false cause, a common fallacy.

Note that no connection between “neoliberalism” and a single feeling of despair has been made, much less to any number of them—nor could it. So far, it appears the only instances of despair is found among its critics.

I guess it’s easy to attribute suicide, alcoholism, and drug addiction to economic conditions because one can avoid empirical analysis, which would take account of the expressed reasons for taking drugs, drinking alcohol, and committing suicide according to those who actually do it. An empirical analysis of “despair” might be useful here, too. Until then, the direct result thesis can be dismissed.

The idea of indirect culpability for these behaviours is just as specious. In order to push someone to addiction, alcoholism, or suicide, it’s safe to say one would have to actively interfere in his personal life, like a spouse, a bully, or tax man, which seems to me anathema to any species of liberalism. No doubt some self-proclaimed liberals do resort to such meddling and interventions. In recent years the government approach of actively interfering in the lives of people during a pandemic has proven itself culpable for indirectly pushing people to fear and despair, resulting in a compounding of the issue, but that wasn’t the policy of any one economic ideology, but of statism in general, where we sacrifice the freedoms of individuals to some notion of a common interest.

Wherever the right to life, speech, to hear, is violated to serve some distant end, the censor is engaging in morally wrong behavior. That’s why I added, and you removed, “ because violating his rights just in case is morally wrong”. If we’re going to quote out of context, can we at least leave in the entire sentence?

As for military secrets, I’m not sure violating one’s obligations to one’s employer, stealing their information, and giving it to their enemies constitutes an act of speech. We need to be careful to distinguish between conduct and speech.

You did phrase it as a utilitarian argument. Maybe you made a whoopsie. But I take the logic of your position as deontological not utilitarian, i.e. "It is wrong in principle, regardless of circumstances, to ever compromise on free speech." Another way of saying free speech is the greatest good. No need to dress it up.

We can quibble about one sentence quoted out of context but I think it remains pretty clear if the rest is considered.

By saying it? I might not know it to be true, but something being true doesn’t depend on me knowing it.

I don’t know that aliens exist, but I can say that they do and I might be right.

I’m wondering how the censor can know and be confident that his act of censorship was the right thing to do.

So? If you follow this up with “therefore it was wrong” then you’re a utilitarian. If you don’t follow it up with “therefore it was wrong” then it isn’t an argument in favour of free speech absolutism.

It was morally wrong to murder Socrates and morally right to leave him alive because murdering someone just in case is morally wrong, because violating his rights just in case is morally wrong, not because leaving him alive produces a greater good for a greater number.

This seems like an appeal to ignorance. I would say that something can be morally good even if we do not, or cannot, know that it is morally good.

You cannot say whether the act saved us or not from what you promised it would. Without this knowledge how can you say it was morally good?

Then why, in a defence of free speech, did you say “one can be confident that the loss of Socrates and his art is greater than whatever trappings had been gained by his silencing.” That seems a quite obvious utilitarian defence.

I said it because I’m confident that the loss of Socrates and his art is greater than whatever had been gained by his silencing. We have the act itself, the murder of Socrates, and thus the loss of his creativity and production, so no chance of him conversing about virtue any longer. What we don’t have is any proof that his silencing led to the better world that the censor promised us. The censor was the utilitarian.

I’m not a utilitarian.

The argument was epistemological and ethical. We can never know if an act of censorship protected us from the ill effects we were told would befall us should no act of censorship occur. In the case of Socrates, we can never know if his censorship saved the youth from corruption after all. So we are unable to judge whether the act of censorship was morally good. What we do know is the act of censorship itself, in this case killing a man and violating his most basic rights, so we can judge that it was morally bad.