[quote]smh_23 wrote:
The universe is a collection of elementary particles and nothing more.
Do natural rights exist?[/quote]
It wouldn’t matter, so this will be my only post on it.
[quote]kamui wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]kamui wrote:
The non-arbitrariness of rights doesn’t need to be evidenced. Because the very notion of an arbitrary right is self-contradictory.
[/quote]
This.[/quote]
On the other hand, that does not mean that these non-arbitrary rights necessarily exists.
It only means that if a right exists, it is non-arbitrary.
This doesn’t rule out the theoretical possibility of the non-existence of rights.
At this point, the skeptics will use a narrow definition of existence, ask you for proofs and won’t ever be convinced by the kind of proof you’ll have to offer.
And they get their easy pseudo-agnostic win.
It works with anything remotely metaphysics. It’s magic.
One should never let them lead the discussion to this regretable point.
One should simply remember them that, by envisioning the possible inexistence of their own rights, they hereby allow you to savagely rape them.
This method not perfect, because it’s obviously not an objective demonstration of existence.
But it’s still a subjective (but effective) demonstration of irrelevance.
[/quote]
Well of course I totally agree. We have arbitrary laws based on arbitrary rights. For instance, the arbitrary ideal that a woman’s dress is unnecessarily provocative, vs. her right to get raped because of it often gets regrettably muddled.
I think the problem lies in that in society we have a mixture of laws or societal rules that are arbitrary based on human belief and those we consider that of natural law, the inalienable rights.
What I see artificially expounded is that because some laws or societal rules are man made and loosely if at all based on natural rights, then all rights are man made. Therefore the argument, since some morality imposed exists man made, then all morality is thus man made. No separation is made between that which is man made and which is natural right, because the two coexist in the same moral fabric.
Back to the OP, I don’t really believe that I’m from the “left” per se, but I do believe that it is a government’s responsibility to provide for the general welfare of its citizens. In light of this, social welfare is vital for capitalism to be both legitimate and palatable in a post industrial economy. How much or how little is the question.
[quote]kamui wrote:
[quote]But let’s pretend I’m Pat for a minute and that I can decide–without expertise or even bare-bones proficiency–enormous and complex philosophical questions on a whim, because once I misinterpreted a few paragraphs I found on the internet and now I am able to refute the arguments of professional philosophers historical and contemporary alike.
And let’s say I decide that the idealists and the platonists and the theists are wrong. All life is meat and all meat is matter-energy. The universe is a collection of elementary particles and nothing more. Scraps and fields, all of it.
Do natural rights exist?[/quote]
The existence of rights, natural or not, does not depend of the magnitude of your assholeness.
But for someone without expertise, you did pretty well.[/quote]
I know that you were using my phrase, but “someone without expertise” is precisely, in this circumstance, who I am (though I certainly do have my moments). This is why I don’t tell people that I know and can prove the answers to the largest questions that can be asked. But hey, everybody’s definition of an asshole is different, isn’t it?
[quote]
The idealists, the platonists and the theists are indeed wrong.
Life is meat.
Meat is matter-energy.
The last one is a bit more problematic.
The universe is not a collection of elementary particles. The existence of your own subjective experience proves it.
You have ideas, and the subjective phenomenology of ideas can’t be reduced to the objective processes of matter and energy.[/quote]
Jackson? I was unaware that this matter had been settled and that a pronouncement of death had become possible and advised. Or did you just take a page out of Pat’s book?
I have said “maybe” since the beginning.
Edited
[quote]countingbeans wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
I don’t understand your response to this, and it is the crux of the entire argument.[/quote]
Then I’ve completely missed the entire point and have been arguing something different.
Yes. However I haven’t even argued that. I’ve thought the whole time you were saying the thing we’re now referring to as “the [instinctual, if you like] wanting and the striving” wasn’t there.
If you’re asking me if I think morals exist, then my answer is yes. I don’t however, argue with moral relativists, particularly ones as well read as you, lol. (This is mostly due to the conversation quickly gets out of my league, and I’m not partial to the subject to the degree it takes to study what I have faith in.)
But you don’t argue the existence of instinct or abstract thought though correct?
[/quote]
I take my share of blame for the misunderstanding: I wasn’t saying that the instinctual drive is not.
For the record, I’m not a relativist, though that’s the position I’m taking here because I’m arguing against its antipode expressed with unwarranted certainty.
But anyway, I do apologize for the talking past each other.
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
But anyway, I do apologize for the talking past each other.[/quote]
Not worried about it. You guys made me think, so it’s a win in my book.
[quote]kamui wrote:
New doesn’t mean false. [/quote]
Here, for your claim, it does:
If I am bound to die, I am going to die. That is what “bound to” means: “sure,” or, at the very least, “overwhelmingly likely.”
If everyone is bound to play the game under consideration, everyone is going to play it, or it is likely to the point of virtual certainty that everyone is going to play it.
Not everyone is going to play it. (See: pogrom, violent conquest, war, slavery, sexual slavery, death camps, killing fields, abortion.)
Thus, not everyone is “born and bound” to play your game, and most certainly not, as you had it, “by nature.” Q.E.D.
[quote]Bismark wrote:
Back to the OP, I don’t really believe that I’m from the “left” per se, but I do believe that it is a government’s responsibility to provide for the general welfare of its citizens.
[/quote]
That’s a pretty broad statement. And the use of the word “provide” is suggestive of the government being an economically autonomous entity as opposed to an institution funded by the public treasury. In the sense of essential services I agree to some extent - it would be absurd for each individual to contract private companies to dig their sewerage systems or build their roads.
Ah, now we get to the part where you’re veering off to the left. “Social welfare?” You mean socialism. The lazy, unlucky and disadvantaged living off the successful.
[quote]
How much or how little is the question. [/quote]
It’s not a question of how much. It’s a question of legitimacy. Is it legitimate to take from Peter to give to Paul?
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
[quote]Bismark wrote:
Back to the OP, I don’t really believe that I’m from the “left” per se, but I do believe that it is a government’s responsibility to provide for the general welfare of its citizens.
[/quote]
That’s a pretty broad statement. And the use of the word “provide” is suggestive of the government being an economically autonomous entity as opposed to an institution funded by the public treasury. In the sense of essential services I agree to some extent - it would be absurd for each individual to contract private companies to dig their sewerage systems or build their roads.
Ah, now we get to the part where you’re veering off to the left. “Social welfare?” You mean socialism. The lazy, unlucky and disadvantaged living off the successful.
[quote]
How much or how little is the question. [/quote]
It’s not a question of how much. It’s a question of legitimacy. Is it legitimate to take from Peter to give to Paul?[/quote]
So 96% of Americans? That is the percentage of U.S. Citizens who benefit from some form of government social welfare. 10% of social welfare spending is also allocated to those in the top 10%, who certainly aren’t lazy (presumably), unlucky, or disadvantaged.
[quote]Bismark wrote:
So 96% of Americans? That is the percentage of U.S. Citizens who benefit from some form of government social welfare. 10% of social welfare spending is also allocated to those in the top 10%, who certainly aren’t lazy (presumably), unlucky, or disadvantaged.
[/quote]
Assuming that those numbers are correct, they do a great job of demonstrating that social welfare spending has nothing to do with helping people, but instead is just the few determining the winners and losers in society. 96% of Americans can obviously not truly benefit from government spending, especially if 10% of that spending goes to the top 10%; the state has no money of its own, so all it does is redistribute money to suit its desires. Again, thanks for pointing out that the U.S. is no different or better than any other empire/state(A state is nothing but a potential empire that has not finished the job-the U.S. is the most successful in history-who challenges this one? Others only play defense.).
this :
doesn’t prove that :
[quote]
Not everyone is going to play it.[/quote]
Not everyone is going to play fair. And not everyone is going to win.
It doesn’t mean that not everyone is part of some kind of society.
Saying “this is the game, this is the rule” doesn’t violate the distinction between “is” and “ought”.
Invoking Hume’s distinction is not enough to disprove my proposition.
To do that, you would have to show that :
-Morality / ethics / legality are not specific and distinct “language games”
and/or
-that those games can be “unruled”, so to speak.
As long as you can’t do that, the only alternative is “there are rules, and they are not totally arbitrary”.
That’s where we could stop playing with the word “are” and could start building a minimal consensus to investigate the structure of the game, identify the minimal “meta-rules” and maybe even answer the OP’s initial question.
Granted, that would take some time.
But still less time than the technical, complete demonstration of the existence of rights.
Which require the rigorous exposition of
-an entire epistemology
-an entire ontology
-an entire axiology
and a progressive demonstration of the links of necessity between those three levels.
[quote]
Jackson? I was unaware that this matter had been settled and that a pronouncement of death had become possible and advised. Or did you just take a page out of Pat’s book?[/quote]
Technically, physicalism is not dead.
It’s still-born.
It’s a program which never get past the stage of its declaration of intent.
It requires a total reduction. And it never succeeded to show a single example of even a partial one.
Pure physicalism is not serious enough to deserve to be disproved. And it never has.
Like i said earlier : this is a pseudo-epistomology for non-epistemologists. Or a pseudo-ontology for non-ontologists.
You could find it among :
-scientists, mostly in the field of neuroscience, who work to prove that mental phenomena are determined by physical ones.
-hardcore and old-school marxists
the first ones ignore that a causal reduction is not enougn to establish an ontological non-distinction
the latter ones are religious believers
Show me a philosopher who managed to reduce Brentano’s intentionality to its physicality(whatever it would means), i would have something to disprove.
Or better yet. Someone who worked to concretely establish the possibility of such a reduction.
[quote]kamui wrote:
That’s correct which is why I linked to a quantum mechanical paradox. Quantum physics is where metaphysics and Newtonian physics meet. Physicalism cannot be tested because physicalism is essentially Newtonian physics which breaks down on the quantum level.
[quote]kamui wrote:
this :
doesn’t prove that :
[quote]
Not everyone is going to play it.[/quote]
Not everyone is going to play fair. And not everyone is going to win.
It doesn’t mean that not everyone is part of some kind of society.[/quote]
No, it doesn’t mean that. And neither did it have to. Your claim was not that everyone is part of “some kind of society.” Orwell envisioned “some kind of society” in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Rather, your claim was that everyone is “born and bound to”–meaning “is going to”–play the game of (i.e., participate in) “civil society,” whose rules, to take your coinage, are “freedom, equality, reciprocity.”
And this is plainly not true, as already demonstrated.
But now, you say, they are playing the game–they just don’t know it, aren’t told about it, aren’t aware of/subject to/respectful of its rules.
To which I reply that I made a cup of coffee this morning and it was a fucking lovely game of basketball. Sure, instead of 10 men endeavoring to put a ball through a hoop, it was one man endeavoring to run hot water through a mound of ground coffee beans–but, as you yourself said, “not everyone is going to play fair. And not everyone is going to win.” Doesn’t mean they aren’t all born and bound to play basketball, all the time. You’re playing right now. You just don’t know it.
[quote]
Saying “this is the game, this is the rule” doesn’t violate the distinction between “is” and “ought”.
Invoking Hume’s distinction is not enough to disprove my proposition.
To do that, you would have to show that :
-Morality / ethics / legality are not specific and distinct “language games”
and/or
-that those games can be “unruled”, so to speak.
As long as you can’t do that, the only alternative is “there are rules, and they are not totally arbitrary”.
That’s where we could stop playing with the word “are” and could start building a minimal consensus to investigate the structure of the game, identify the minimal “meta-rules” and maybe even answer the OP’s initial question.[/quote]
“I am making all of these quasi-mystical, assertive claims about games we’re all playing even when we’re not playing them, but I don’t like this burden of proof thing, so you take it.”
Doesn’t seem fair, does it?
But wait: For what I do hope is the last time, it is not my fault that I am (was) debating someone who takes on ridiculous burdens (ones he couldn’t possibly bear) by making declarations about his ability to prove god and natural rights. I am not going to apologize for the absurd impossibility of a task chosen by someone who isn’t me, and any code of conduct whereunder I would be expected to do such a thing is a code of conduct ruled by arbitrariness and unreason.
[quote]kamui wrote:
[quote]
Jackson? I was unaware that this matter had been settled and that a pronouncement of death had become possible and advised. Or did you just take a page out of Pat’s book?[/quote]
Technically, physicalism is not dead.
It’s still-born.[/quote]
Stillbirth entails death.
More importantly, it’s just as healthy as its competitors.
Or did I miss the part where somebody guided a theory on the nature of being across the finish line? Took a picture of the world of forms? Found and surveyed the point of contact between non-physical qualia and the physical brain? Figured out how such contact might work at all? Taped an exclusive, tell-all interview with God the Almighty? Bottled a soul?
I said that the concept of freedom, equality, reciprocity are parts of the meta-rules of society. Give or take the word “civil”. It doesn’t really matter here.
And I said that we are all bound and born to play the game, as we are all part of some kind of society. Even the most oppressed of the slaves.
[quote]
And this is plainly not true, as already demonstrated.[/quote]
You demonstrated nothing.
You tried to use diachronic elements (the existence of unfair things) to disprove the existence of synchronic structures, which is methodologically and logically absurd.
[quote]
But now, you say, they are playing the game–they just don’t know it, aren’t told about it, aren’t aware of/subject to/respectful of its rules.[/quote]
The fact that rights can be violated or even ignored doesn’t mean that they do not exist.
We are social beings.
If the game didn’t existed, we would not exist either, and we wouldn’t talk about it.
And this is especially obvious in the example you used to disprove my propositions :
There is no slave without an economy, no economy without a society, no society without rules, no rules without a concept of regularity. IE : no “we” without rights.
Actually, the very word “slave” imply one of the meta-rules i “coined” :
There is no slave without free men, and there is no free men without a concept of freedom.
[quote]Doesn’t seem fair, does it?
But wait: For what I do hope is the last time, it is not my fault that I am (was) debating someone who takes on ridiculous burdens (ones he couldn’t possibly bear) by making declarations about his ability to prove god and natural rights. I am not going to apologize for the absurd impossibility of a task chosen by someone who isn’t me.[/quote]
The existence (and non-arbitrariness) of rights is not an absurd claim.
The theoretical demonstration of this claim would be extremely long and tedious.
In this context, “show me someone who seriously believe the contrary” is an imperfect, but quite practical defense.
In this case, if you do not seriously consider the possibility of the inexistence of rights, your demand for proof is not serious enough to be considered.
And you have to accept the answer “lets play with the alternative to see where it leads”.
In itself, it is a perfectly valid strategy.
I mean, even hardcore skeptics who are used to play the socratic game of “how do you know ?” have to accept the risk of a reductio ad absurdum.
Granted. It remains technically unproven.
You won.
And you can enjoy you win.
But it leads you (and the discussion) nowhere.
Which may very well be the point.
Such feats would satisfy you ?
Try Spinoza.
Or Deleuze.
Or maybe the perceived lack of good answers comes from the irrelevance of the problem itself.
[quote]kamui wrote:
You demonstrated nothing.
You tried to use diachronic elements (the existence of unfair things) to disprove the existence of synchronic structures, which is methodologically and logically absurd.[/quote]
No, and you’re waffling.
“We are all born and bound to play the ‘civil society’ game, whose rules include wonderful things like freedom and equality” = “All humans will participate in the ‘civil society’ game, whose rules include wonderful things like freedom and equality.”
It has been quite easily demonstrated that not all humans have participated or will participate in the ‘civil society’ game, whose rules include wonderful things like freedom and equality." This is the direct antipode of your claim, and it is not a point about which controversy is possible.
But then there’s your defense. If your defense is legitimate–which it is not–and everybody is actually playing your game even if they don’t know it, don’t want to, don’t know the rules (or, more commonly, don’t follow them even if they know them), and don’t operate within any of the game’s normative boundaries, then I can indeed say, with a perfectly straight face and in the sincerest sincerity, that I made a cup of coffee this morning and it was a great game of basketball.
So there are these things, you have them, but don’t you ask me why I’m saying any of this, because I bore easily.
OK.
[quote]kamui wrote:
Such feats would satisfy you ?
Try Spinoza.
Or Deleuze.
Or maybe the perceived lack of good answers comes from the irrelevance of the problem itself.
[/quote]
1: “Physicalism is a stillborn failure that hasn’t been proved.”
2: “It’s just as stillborn and failed as its alternatives, which haven’t been proved.”
1: “None of this matters.”
Alright then.
Maybe i would not bore that easily if i had any good reason to believe in your honest curiosity.
I mean, you don’t ask “how do you know ?” and “show me your proof” each and every time someone make an unproven claim.
Unproven is the most common state of a proposition.
You’ll need a awful lot of free time to indulge in those kinds of skepticism.
You choose to jump on a specific proposition, for specific reasons, with a specific agenda.
State it. In a non-socratic way. It will save all of us some time.
If all you wanted to achieve was to prove the inability of your internet nemesis to prove a difficult-to-prove claim, good job. You did it.
But i do hope there was more to it than that.
But now, let’s start directly with the win i already conceded to you.
Let’s say rights may very well not exist.
So what ?
You now have an agnostic position about rights.
Rights you will keep respecting and defending as if you were certain of their existence.
Congratulation : the prize of your theoretical win in an absurd life.