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richardhutnik on 17 August 2012
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yanamaster said:
badgenome said:
richardhutnik said:

Where does one derive any sense of duty from a negative rights based ethics system?  Duty has nothing to do with a rights-based system.

Where does one derive a sense of duty from a positive rights based ethics system? It ultimately just leads to everyone trying to live at the expense of everyone else.


Since when have any ethical systems influence shaped one's sense of duty or the actions that are taken out of the sense of duty?  How one acts isn't based on a set of moral codes as this has rarely anything to do in real life. Most people may claim to be the ethically superior by believing in god and following the good book to the last word and still not help other people should they be in direct offence  of the first parties belief system.

People that claim to have an ethical system that compells them to help people in need end up freezing when a life threatening situation occurs because the codes tells them what they WANT to do and how they WANT to act. It doesn't really mean that they will. As such I would propose to overthrow the notion ethical belief systems somehow determine the feeling of duty as this is a more primary based mechanism within every individual. Ethical systems might be correlated to such feelings of duty but they sure as hell do not determine them.

I might as well reply to both these here.

First, I had been saying that rights-based ethical systems don't provide any basis for duty.  They PARTICULARLY don't in the case where someone only believes in negative rights.  The people most likely to fulfill the demands of a negative ethical system, are corpses in a graveyard (unless they turn into zombies of course).  

In regards to other ethical systems, they do have duty and place demands on individuals to do something, and not just avoid anything.  If you see the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", for example, you see a case where positive action is called upon, not just not to cause harm.  Others would produce a reasoning for doing duty, and having obligations and requirements to do so.  This, of course, is in their purist form.  Whether or not people act on such is another story, and whether or not people really do consistently follow an ethical system, is a different issue.

A purpose of an ethical system is to provide a framework for education and conditioning one's behaviors and shaping priorities in life.  It alone won't guarantee people actually DO anything though.