Rights are not self-evident

[Dionysus]

This thread is largely a response on my part to the general impression I have developed of the way people, particularly those raised in the what might be called the Western, humanist tradition, tend to think about morality. It seems that everywhere I go (though it may just be around the campus here) people have such a blatant naïveté, that I can’t help but feel like I’ve stumbled into a Dostoevsky novel (“The Idiot”) and all the caricatured progressives are constantly demanding their rights. What rights? Well, people speak of rights as though the mere assertion of a right creates a right. In fact, I’ve come to realize (after a reaquaintance with Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes and all those characters) that this idea of the “right” is a cornerstone of contemporary western, humanist morality. This bothers me.

Why does it bother me? I’ll be frank. People do not have rights. Rights simply do not exist in the sense of the word which most people invoke when they speak of them. As an idea, they were invented by Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius (though mostly Hobbes). In fact, they were invented my Muslim jurists during what Westerners call the Middle ages, but as fat the West is concerned, they sprung from the mind of Hobbes. My question the, is why is it that westerners (especially those of them who are ardent secularists) quote Thomas Hobbes like scripture? What Council confirmed the inerrancy of “Leviathan”? Most of them, of course, have never read a page of Hobbes. And I have a feeling that if they did, they would be dismayed at this crassly totalitarian thinker, the man who conceived “the right.”

Ironically, Hobbes did not think that men “had” rights, but were merely given them by the government, and they could be taken away at any time for any reason. With Hobbes’s view, one cannot say that the genocide in Sudan is a rights violation. He who giveth (Government) hath taken away again, the right to life of the people to be deprived of it.

Ultimately, I don’t really have a thesis. What I have is a question. How can anyone postulate that another human being can or can’t do something on the basis that it violates someone’s “rights”, and honestly believe that they’re making a claim that is theologically neutral, that it is somehow in a different category from the claim of the Muslim that an act is immoral because it offends Allah, or that of a Christian who calls an act immoral because it is written so in scripture? Why am I forced by my citizenship to *believe *in human rights? Because they are consented to be true by the people? What then of religious toleration in a country that is 90% Christian, or better yet, almost 100% Muslim? Does a government really have “the right” to assert that their rights-based systems are more reasonable than the theocratic systems of Islam? I am quite willing to argue that the Islamic juristic system is much more consistent and sound than the deontological western one.

If not consent, then what? Power. We are in fact living in a theocracy. The fact that the rights system doesn’t assert the existence of a god is, I am convinced, why many westerners, especially liberals and secularists, think it to be superior to other juristic systems. This is simply moronic, for one could just as easily assert the truth of the entirety of the Shari ‘a without asserting the existence of a god, but simply holding that the laws are “just there.” Doing this would make just as much sense as what westerners do when they assert the existence of rights out of thin air.

So while these air-headed college kids who belong to STAND (an anti-Sudanese genocide group) shun to claim that what the genocidaires are doing is immoral, they eagerly and self-righteously claim that they are violating their victims rights. What I contest is that such a claim is meaningless, because either Sudan decides what rights the Sudanese have, or we’re going to have to scrap Hobbes. And then t whom will we turn? Hugo Grotius practically invented international law, how about him? Oops, his theory was based the universality of Christian morality, I guess not. How then do we justify our pretentions? Where can one find one’s rights? In the pineal gland? And what exactly is so bad about genocide?

 

[liquidpele]

Rights are simply a product of our socialization. They are the accumulation of thousands of years of trial and error as to what makes a working and fair society. As we see them now, they’re probably not perfect, but that does not mean the idea is not a powerful one.

 

[James_S_Saint]

This is simply moronic,…

Yes and…??

God is Reality itself. Choose to accept what is and slowly rearrange it, or choose to be frustrated by it.

People, in general are “moronic”. This must always be the case as “moron” merely means “less than the presumed elite” (which is generally only the average). The truly elite, perhaps yourself, are rendered powerless and voiceless because in trying to learn, they cannot afford to pay attention to the reality they are going to have to face.

Politics governs Man, not Truth, because the Truth is that “perception of Truth” is all Man can use to make decisions.

How do you cause the perception of Truth? You speak of it as though it were true and thus cause it to become true. This is truly dealing with Reality and rearranging it.

If you want “rights”, speak as though you and everyone already had them, “by rights”. Get the “morons” to do the same.

So maybe they are not as moronic as you thought?

 

[Dionysus]

I make no claim that rights are imperfect. What I am saying is that they are almost always put in a category perceived to be “above” the idea of “morality”. The common view of rights is something like this: you have a Christian and a Muslim arguing over how the laws of their country should be shaped, each arguing that it should be shaped according to his own religion. Then another man comes along and explains that each has the right to practice his own religion, but that society will be governed by laws that exclude the religious tenets of both Islam and Christianity so as to allow for members of both faiths to coexist. Rights are, to our society, something of a “meta-morality.”

What I am saying is that this is not actually true; rights are not a separate system that oversees the various moralities present in a society. They are in fact the lowest common denominator of the major moralites of a society. Granted, this may make sense as a *legal *principle, as it maximizes capacity for coexistence between different groups. However, as a moral principle, rights are completely worthless. Westerners (especially those with secularist sentiments) tend to posit that rights are superior to other moralities because it is less restrictive, because it has fewer tenets, as though the lowest common denominator is assumed to be superior to its contingent parts. The word liberal itself basks in the idea that the secular, rights-based moral system (not legal, moral; there is nothing illegal about female castration in Somalia, and yet western liberals are still indignant about it) is “freer”.

I am saying that this is absurd. There is no reason why the lowest common denominator should be given moral preference to the moralities of which it is the lcd. In fact, because every aspect of our western system of rights was inherited from religious moralities that preceded it, this system itself is fundamentally a religious system, albeit a patchwork religious system. So why then is it politically incorrect to declare an action by another human being or by another country to be “immoral”, while it is perfectly acceptable to call it a rights violation? As I see it, as far as ethics is concerned, rights should be reduced to the status of another competing moral system, for the only reason the system is seen as publically legitimate (compared to religious morality, which one is allowed to practice “in private” but is expected to abandon in factor of the rights-based morality once he enters the sphere of “society”) is because it is the only morality acknowledged by the state (in western countries) just as Islamic morality is the only morality acknowledged by Saudi Arabia.

So what is the difference? Why do we criticize Saudi Arabia for being oppressive. They have their islamic system, and we have our rights-based system; to each his own. They are on a common plane. The illusion is that because our system has fewer restrictions that it is better. But a system in which a certain degree of wanton murder is legal is even less restrictive than our rights based system. Not only can everyone satisfy their rights to fornicate with the opposite sex, not only can a few people fornicate with their own sex, and a few others drink compulsively, but few other people can now satiate their desire to kill people. One can only refute such a less restrictive legal system on a basis that is only presupposef by our rights-based system (that the murder victims had rights), and even then, the supposed superiority of the rights-based systems was based on the fact that it was less restrictive, which is no longer the case because the new system is less restrictive.

The argument in favor of the rights-based system is self-referential and therefore invalid. How, then can a state whose laws are derived from such a system be considered any more “legitimate” than a theocracy? Our western societies are just as ignorant and arrogant as every other society that has ever existed! They institute a state religion, but say that it’s not a religion, that it’s the truth, and try to force it upon peoples with other moral systems. They’re no better than the Mughals going into India and forcibly converting the people to Islam. There is absolutely no difference in principles between them.

 

[Dionysus]

Yes and…??

People, in general are “moronic”. This must always be the case as “moron” merely means “less than the presumed elite” (which is generally only the average). The truly elite, perhaps yourself, are rendered powerless and voiceless because in trying to learn, they cannot afford to pay attention to the reality they are going to have to face.

Politics governs Man, not Truth, because the Truth is that “perception of Truth” is all Man can use to make decisions.

How do you cause the perception of Truth? You speak of it as though it were true and thus cause it to become true. This is truly dealing with Reality and rearranging it.

If you want “rights”, speak as though you and everyone already had them, “by rights”. Get the “morons” to do the same.

So maybe they are not as moronic as you thought?

What I am trying to do here is have an intellectual discussion. I understand well enough how people come to percieve the truth; I’m talking here about the truth itself. My intentions here are subversive, to break the conventional perception of morality, which was perhaps formed in the manner you described. It is a preemptive strike against those who are likely to argue that this is a viable moral system (and such people are many).

 

[warpspeedpetey]

This thread is largely a response on my part to the general impression I have developed of the way people, particularly those raised in the what might be called the Western, humanist tradition, tend to think about morality. It seems that everywhere I go (though it may just be around the campus here) people have such a blatant naïveté, that I can’t help but feel like I’ve stumbled into a Dostoevsky novel (“The Idiot”) and all the caricatured progressives are constantly demanding their rights. What rights? Well, people speak of rights as though the mere assertion of a right creates a right. In fact, I’ve come to realize (after a reaquaintance with Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes and all those characters) that this idea of the “right” is a cornerstone of contemporary western, humanist morality. This bothers me.

Why does it bother me? I’ll be frank. People do not have rights. Rights simply do not exist in the sense of the word which most people invoke when they speak of them. As an idea, they were invented by Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius (though mostly Hobbes). In fact, they were invented my Muslim jurists during what Westerners call the Middle ages, but as fat the West is concerned, they sprung from the mind of Hobbes. My question the, is why is it that westerners (especially those of them who are ardent secularists) quote Thomas Hobbes like scripture? What Council confirmed the inerrancy of “Leviathan”? Most of them, of course, have never read a page of Hobbes. And I have a feeling that if they did, they would be dismayed at this crassly totalitarian thinker, the man who conceived “the right.”

Ironically, Hobbes did not think that men “had” rights, but were merely given them by the government, and they could be taken away at any time for any reason. With Hobbes’s view, one cannot say that the genocide in Sudan is a rights violation. He who giveth (Government) hath taken away again, the right to life of the people to be deprived of it.

Ultimately, I don’t really have a thesis. What I have is a question. How can anyone postulate that another human being can or can’t do something on the basis that it violates someone’s “rights”, and honestly believe that they’re making a claim that is theologically neutral, that it is somehow in a different category from the claim of the Muslim that an act is immoral because it offends Allah, or that of a Christian who calls an act immoral because it is written so in scripture? Why am I forced by my citizenship to *believe *in human rights? Because they are consented to be true by the people? What then of religious toleration in a country that is 90% Christian, or better yet, almost 100% Muslim? Does a government really have “the right” to assert that their rights-based systems are more reasonable than the theocratic systems of Islam? I am quite willing to argue that the Islamic juristic system is much more consistent and sound than the deontological western one.

If not consent, then what? Power. We are in fact living in a theocracy. The fact that the rights system doesn’t assert the existence of a god is, I am convinced, why many westerners, especially liberals and secularists, think it to be superior to other juristic systems. This is simply moronic, for one could just as easily assert the truth of the entirety of the Shari ‘a without asserting the existence of a god, but simply holding that the laws are “just there.” Doing this would make just as much sense as what westerners do when they assert the existence of rights out of thin air.

So while these air-headed college kids who belong to STAND (an anti-Sudanese genocide group) shun to claim that what the genocidaires are doing is immoral, they eagerly and self-righteously claim that they are violating their victims rights. What I contest is that such a claim is meaningless, because either Sudan decides what rights the Sudanese have, or we’re going to have to scrap Hobbes. And then t whom will we turn? Hugo Grotius practically invented international law, how about him? Oops, his theory was based the universality of Christian morality, I guess not. How then do we justify our pretentions? Where can one find one’s rights? In the pineal gland? And what exactly is so bad about genocide?

this is why i laugh at moral subjectivists, they try to make moral systems based on rights, or the golden rule, etc. yet their systems are as subject to this lunacy as any other. why should i care about others “rights”? only my belief in G-d prevents me from doing as i please.

 

[James_S_Saint]

What I am trying to do here is have an intellectual discussion.

With “morons”??

I understand well enough how people come to percieve the truth; I’m talking here about the truth itself. My intentions here are subversive, to break the conventional perception of morality, which was perhaps formed in the manner you described. It is a preemptive strike against those who are likely to argue that this is a viable moral system (and such people are many).

Isn’t faith a part of the truth concerning how people MUST deal with reality?

People have accepted that certain behavior is “moral” (meaning universally good). Whether they are right or not is another issue. I would be very interested in an free discussion of what really “should” be moral and exactly why.

But if you do not maintain “rights” as a base, how would you ever gain the right to have such a discussion? Or do you presume to already know what every moral should be?

Shouldn’t you have the “right” to question morality? How can you know if something is truly correct if you never question it? How can you ever question it, if you disallow any right to do so?

It seems that you are cutting off your feet to make a stand.

I would think it wiser to proclaim the right to question and then question specific morals and their reasoning. Most, as you already know, will default to “because the Bible told me so.” But not everyone will. I won’t for one.

You would probably argue that they should not take the word of the Bible. Good luck getting that across.

The truth is that you have the right to do what you can get away with. The only real question is what can you really get away with? And perhaps more, “what should you even try to get away with considering the potential dangers?”

There in lies the true issue of morals and rights.

The Bible has made suggestions, advice. But take it, investigate what it intended to say, or leave it.

…just more advice.

 

[Dionysus]

With “morons”??

Not necessarily. Intelligent people can have moronic ideas; think of Hitler, Robespierre, and Russell. But also, yes, with morons. In fact, the more morons the better; that makes the debate easier for me.

But if you do not maintain “rights” as a base, how would you ever gain the right to have such a discussion? Or do you presume to already know what every moral should be?

Shouldn’t you have the “right” to question morality? How can you know if something is truly correct if you never question it? How can you ever question it, if you disallow any right to do so?

It seems that you are cutting off your feet to make a stand.

Not at all. You think as though I should not do something I have no right to do, as though I disavow my rights, but I do no such thing. You’re confusing “negative rights” with my abdication of the system of rights altogether. I’m even arguing against the idea that I should not be able to kill my neigbor because “I have no right to.” I’m saying that to think in terms of rights is absurd altogether, and that to ask the question, “have I or haven’t I a right to do such this” is a morally meaningless question. Technically, you might say that I have no right to kill my neighbor, but as it is meaningless to possess a right, so is it meaningless to lack a right. At the same time my neighbor has no right not to be killed by me, so the act of killing my neighbor is a morally neutral act (assuming the absence of another moral system). Rights are contracts (*legal *contracts), so when one speaks of rights, one necessarily speaks of a relationship between one or more individuals and one or more other individuals. This type of contract alone, I am saying, cannot be the basis of the question “what should I do?”

You seem to be under the impression that I attack morality altogether, or that I am attacking religious morality. Quite the opposite. I am attacking what we might call the secular morality of the state. As I stated above, Muslim theocracies have a better logical base for their laws than secular western states. There is nothing about these “theocratic” (a redundant word in my opinion) states that is logically inferior to the “liberal” western political system, but in fact I find them to be on sturdier ground than the western secular states (they may be economically backwards, but that is a different issue). There is actually a rich tradition of Islamic jurisprudence stretching back over a thousand years, but westerners prefer to label Muslims as barbarians dismiss their ideas altogether. But now I’m digressing.

My conclusion is that one begins to discuss the issue of morality only when one begins to ask the question, ‘what *should *I do?’ Hence my attack on rights. The second one says that the Sudanese genocidaires are immoral, one immediately spits in the face of the entire western “liberal” moral and political tradition by implying that people or countries should be prevented from doing *immoral *things. Technically, the separation of church and state forbids such action.

People often say that government bodies shouldn’t “legislate morality.” I say that legislation itself is a form of institutional morality. Ultimately, the idea of human rights (thought of as “objective” ethical judgments as opposed to religious “subjective” moral judgments) are nothing more than a way to avoid asking the only ethical question that matters: what *should *be done? What *should *people do?

The Bible is one potential source of morality, as is the Koran, or John Stuart Mill (though not a good one in my opinion.). Once one asks what should be done, one begins an argument that is dangerously likely (some might even say will unavoidably) lead to a theological discussion. The idea of the “right” is an attempt to avoid that discussion, to make it arbitrary, and to put state secular morality high above the other moralities.

The Right, however, is a mirage. And so those dreaded theological and philosophical questions must rear their heads once again, lest state nihilism should replace state deontology.

 

[James_S_Saint]

Well, they’re your feet.

So considering that you are on a philosophy forum, not ethics nor government, from where do you think “rights” come? Or perhaps better, what do you think “rights” actually means?

 

[Oreoracle]

only my belief in G-d prevents me from doing as i please.

Dang. I was under the impression that lying was considered sinful by Catholics, but you seem fine with it. But then, maybe I’m too hasty with my judgment. What is it that you desire to do that your belief in God betrays? Surely you wouldn’t say that your belief in God is the only thing preventing you from killing, stealing, and lying?

 

[James_S_Saint]

your belief in God is the only thing preventing you from killing, stealing, and lying?

It is in my case.

But then you have to meet my God to understand why.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Surely you wouldn’t say that your belief in God is the only thing preventing you from killing, stealing, and lying?

I will second James in saying that my belief in God is the only thing that keeps me from doing those things. Well, in some cases the law might, but that would just mean I need to be more discreet about my crimes.

Dostoevsky would say that atheists who aren’t criminals are just cowards, or bores. Conventionality is a crutch, but it is a crutch that saves us from our own unthinkable philosophies.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Dionysus,

You are clearly a deep thinker, and I agree that the theory of rights is complete nonsense. There may be a way that morality can be explained without God (Kant seems to do this), but the imperatives derived from it can never be persuasive without a lawgiver. Liberalism is simply a game which relies on the full cooperation of its participants, and puts them into increasingly crowded jails if they don’t cooperate. It’s an excuse for the bourgeois to indulge in his own excesses while condemning the proletariat for his.

And yet, don’t we seem *justified *in condemning such claptrap? But how could we, unless there were a true standard from which to make normative judgments? There seems to be such a thing as real morality, though it cannot be understood without “metaphysical baggage”.

 

[James_S_Saint]

There seems to be such a thing as real morality, though it cannot be understood without “metaphysical baggage”.

Wellllll… depends on what you are calling “metaphysical baggage”. I fully understand the exact “whys” of my ethics with no magic or mysticism involved. But then I am a bit… emm… “unworldly” it seems.

 

[tonyrey]

What would you say if a man entered your house, pointed a gun at you and said:
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you”?

 

[Oreoracle]

What would you say if a man entered your house, pointed a gun at you and said:
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you”?

Assuming that I’m not in a state of panic, I would reply, “Do you have one good reason why you should?”

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Wellllll… depends on what you are calling “metaphysical baggage”. I fully understand the exact “whys” of my ethics with no magic or mysticism involved. But then I am a bit… emm… “unworldly” it seems.

I use the term “metaphysical baggage” because modern thinking tends to find any theory that depends on metaphysical realities overly complex. Resorting a category like “revealed truth” seems like cheating. And it would be cheating, if there weren’t so many good reasons to consider revealed truth quite as reliable as any other form of knowledge.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Assuming that I’m not in a state of panic, I would reply, “Do you have one good reason why you should?”

I think it’s called a bullet.

 

[Dionysus]

Dionysus,

You are clearly a deep thinker, and I agree that the theory of rights is complete nonsense. There may be a way that morality can be explained without God (Kant seems to do this), but the imperatives derived from it can never be persuasive without a lawgiver. Liberalism is simply a game which relies on the full cooperation of its participants, and puts them into increasingly crowded jails if they don’t cooperate. It’s an excuse for the bourgeois to indulge in his own excesses while condemning the proletariat for his

.

By my understanding of Kant’s morality (I’ve only read of it through other writers), his argument boils down to something like, that humans are only capable of living as though there were an absolute moral system, therefore it is absurd to postulate otherwise. The irony of this argument is that, while it doesn’t require the existence of a deity, the very same logic behind it could easily be used to prove the existence of a deity. I a person can’t conceive the idea of living in a world without a deity (I think of Mitya from “The Brothers Karamazov”: if Christ were outside of the truth, then I would choose Christ instead of the truth", or something like that) then there must be one.

I’m going, by the way, on the summary of Kant’s thought by Will Durant, a historian of philosophy, so my understanding of Kantian morality may be inaccurate.

I like to phrase my summary of the fundamental moral choice poetically (because I’ve probably read too much Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and not enough of those systematic thinkers like Kant). One has to choose between the Nietzschean quasi-nihilistic Übermensch, and Dostoevsky’s Fr. Zossima (or Alyosha or Tikhon from Demons, all good characters for this). There is no middle ground, no secular humanism or marxist eschatology, just Nietzsche’s path (probably one of the only men who ever understood what atheism meant) and its polar opposite, Dostoevsky’s morality.

I’ve seen Nietsche called ‘the most thoroughgoing atheist ever.’ I find this descrition revoltingly misleading, because it implies that the Russell/Dawkins humanist crowd are just ‘nice atheists’ and that Nietzsche was just taking their point of view too far. This is idiocy of the highest degree and, honestly, it enrages me. Nietzsche was more the opposite of the humanists than the Christians were. I once knew an atheist (humanist as well) who liked to read Nietzsche’s antichrist. He never realized that nietzsche detested Christianity for the exact opposite reasons secular humanists have for their disdain for it. And NIetzsche abhorred the humanists even more than the Christians; he considered them simply another decadent religion, a tumor grown out of Christianity, composed of people who failed to see that morality and theology stand and fall together. He was probably the only atheist ever who would agree with Dostoevsky that “If there is no God, everything is permissable.” He also declared that “God is dead” not as a celebration but as a lamentation, for it meant the death of culture, and the Übermensch ideal was his hope for a way out of nihilism (by contemporary standards it is nihilism; to Nietzsche, the overwhelming majority of humanity is merely fodder for a few great men, i.e. Napoleon, Friedrich the Great.

Those two choices are the only internally consistent moralities; everything in between is just an attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too. That’s just the way I see it at least.

 

[Dionysus]

Assuming that I’m not in a state of panic, I would reply, “Do you have one good reason why you should?”

For fun! Geez, do you understand nothing?