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Forums - Politics Discussion - More evidence that rights-based ethical systems have flawed foundations.

SamuelRSmith on 15 August 2012

I honestly do not understand the question, it's almost as if it's been posed in a way that's meant to be confusing.

With contraception, it is pretty simple. Nobody has the right to contraception, and nobody has the right to health insurance.



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richardhutnik on 15 August 2012
Kantor said:
richardhutnik said:

This view, which looks like it resolves all sorts of conflicts, ends up missing a lot.  This view would end up saying the only issue with the Hunger Games (the games in the book) is that the participants in the games didn't volunteer to go there.  If they had volunteered, then the entire thing would be ok.  There is nothing unethical about people fighting to the death for fame and glory, so long as they freely choose to do so.

 

I have no issue with that statement.

There is nothing wrong with a group of people who have volunteered under no outside pressure to fight to the death for fame and glory, doing exactly that. They know what they signed up to do, and nobody is being hurt other than those who have willingly forfeited their right to life and safety.

An important part of a rights-based ethical system is that the forfeiting of rights is possible.

Actually, a Libertarian view of a rights-based ethical system is that it is possible to forfeit rights.  If you go with a Lockian view, then it is impossible for forfeit one's rights, because the rights are inalienable.  In the Declaration of Independence, the founding fathers considered the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be inalienable.  So, no, being able to forfeit rights is not necessarily part of a rights-based ethical system.  



richardhutnik on 15 August 2012
badgenome said:
richardhutnik said:

You PERSONALLY are not able to argue from a rights-based framework if you personally aren't going to argue that a person has a right to life, but has a right to not be murdered.

Uh... how is that? You have the right to be unmolested. That is the entire basis of "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness". Murder is certainly a deprivation of the right to life and thus of liberty.

Your problem is that you believe that the right to life means that you are entitled to be provided with a living. But if it is the case that you have the right to be provided with something, then you also have the right to deprive someone else of something.

I don't know what the Hunger Games is, but let's put it this way. There is nothing wrong with boxing, but there is something very wrong with someone punching someone who doesn't consent to be punched first.

This is The Hunger Games series of novels (also was a movie that came out earlier this year):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Games

 

The games itself consisted of each district in the world sending a boy and girl to fight to the death, with one winner.  The entire system was built on humans executing each other with weapons.  Your view of consent ruling over every other consideration provides no basis for education that consent or individuals intervening in order to stop certain conduct that can be argued, from a conservative viewpoint, to rot the moral foundation of society.  You have no mechanism to be able to cry stop and you have everyone turning a blind eye to the suffering of others.  It also doesn't inform or enlighten as to directions people can head, just to be concerned with one's own interest.  Inheritantly it is selfish and in no way with keeping of traditional ethics that call for love and charity.  It is an heartless world of Objectivism actually, where we honor the special and have the ordinary and those who are sub-part be discarded.  

I would then ask you to go over the Hunger Games and ask yourself it the only issue with the world is that people were forced to fight to the death.

And in this view of choice being sovereign over all, you also fail to account for things like the story of Jesus and the said foolish builder:

Luke 12:13-21

[13] Someone in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me."

[14] Jesus replied, "Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?" [15] Then he said to them, "Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions."

[16] And he told them this parable: "The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. [17] He thought to himself, 'What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.'

[18] "Then he said, 'This is what I'll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. [19] And I'll say to myself, "You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry." '

[20] "But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?'

[21] "This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God."

 



richardhutnik on 15 August 2012
HappySqurriel said:
richardhutnik said:
Here is another one: Do people have a right to live? Or is life not a fundamental human right?

If you then consider human life a right, and a person find that no one will help them, and they risk death, then would not them doing whatever is necessary to stay alive be justified? They can claim their right to live justified them stealing or squatting in property. Take the case of a child that was abandoned by their parents, and now fends on the streets for themselves, and steals and what not. If human life is a right, aren't they justified to do so?

Or do you want to argue life is not a right people have? If life is not a right then, then what is a right?

Do people have a right to live? In the strictest sense no because eventually they will die and the act of dying in no way infringes on someone's rights on its own ... A person has a right to not be intentionally harmed by the acts of another person (which is why intentional acts of harm are against the law, and people may still be compensated for unintentional acts that harm them) but a person does not have the right to infringe on someone else's rights to live.

Here is a hypothetical question to demonstrate the reasoning for this ...

Suppose an individual has experienced kidney failure and they need a kidney transplant to survive but (for a wide variety of reasons) the compatibility for a donor is low, would it be ethical for him to be able to force a healthy individual to give them their kidney knowing that they health of the healthy person would be significantly impacted?

And in the case of an individual who passes on not deciding to donate a kidney in their will to someone who needs it, are they unethical in not doing this? If you say no to both cases, the life is not a right, and the founding fathers were wrong to name it as an inalienable right.  Beyond this, there is the issues with inaction.

Your view here is not in keeping even with the quote by Burke:

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

 

In the rights-based ethical system, where is people who step up to help, actually stepping up to do so?  Mind your own business gets people killed.  

Where can you argue for someone to act, and do what is right?  You have incidents like the murder of Kitty Genovese:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese

 

Consider the case of the toddler who got run over twice, because no one bothered to stop to intervene: 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8830790/Chinese-toddler-run-over-twice-after-being-left-on-street.html

 

 



badgenome on 15 August 2012
richardhutnik said:

This is The Hunger Games series of novels (also was a movie that came out earlier this year):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Games

 

The games itself consisted of each district in the world sending a boy and girl to fight to the death, with one winner.  The entire system was built on humans executing each other with weapons.  Your view of consent ruling over every other consideration provides no basis for education that consent or individuals intervening in order to stop certain conduct that can be argued, from a conservative viewpoint, to rot the moral foundation of society.  You have no mechanism to be able to cry stop and you have everyone turning a blind eye to the suffering of others.  It also doesn't inform or enlighten as to directions people can head, just to be concerned with one's own interest.  Inheritantly it is selfish and in no way with keeping of traditional ethics that call for love and charity.  It is an heartless world of Objectivism actually, where we honor the special and have the ordinary and those who are sub-part be discarded.  

I would then ask you to go over the Hunger Games and ask yourself it the only issue with the world is that people were forced to fight to the death.

And in this view of choice being sovereign over all, you also fail to account for things like the story of Jesus and the said foolish builder:

Luke 12:13-21

[13] Someone in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me."

[14] Jesus replied, "Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?" [15] Then he said to them, "Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions."

[16] And he told them this parable: "The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. [17] He thought to himself, 'What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.'

[18] "Then he said, 'This is what I'll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. [19] And I'll say to myself, "You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry." '

[20] "But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?'

[21] "This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God."

 

 

Sounds like Battle Royale, only a decade late and lamer. I don't have any desire to read this shit, so I'll pass, but from the title and premise I'm assuming it's a classic case of a command economy going all pear-shaped. So, no, I think kids being forced to fight to the death is far from the only issue in that world. It's actually the result of an immoral economic system.

And yes, it's true that I don't see any reason to try and force people to live what I (or others) might consider to be a moral life style. So long as rights are being respected, what do I care what consenting people do? The best solution for individual immorality is to let the consequences run their course rather than to try and fight it with ineffective prohibition, or to (perhaps accidentally) incentivize it by subsidizing it with welfare.



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richardhutnik on 15 August 2012
badgenome said:
richardhutnik said:

This is The Hunger Games series of novels (also was a movie that came out earlier this year):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Games

 

The games itself consisted of each district in the world sending a boy and girl to fight to the death, with one winner.  The entire system was built on humans executing each other with weapons.  Your view of consent ruling over every other consideration provides no basis for education that consent or individuals intervening in order to stop certain conduct that can be argued, from a conservative viewpoint, to rot the moral foundation of society.  You have no mechanism to be able to cry stop and you have everyone turning a blind eye to the suffering of others.  It also doesn't inform or enlighten as to directions people can head, just to be concerned with one's own interest.  Inheritantly it is selfish and in no way with keeping of traditional ethics that call for love and charity.  It is an heartless world of Objectivism actually, where we honor the special and have the ordinary and those who are sub-part be discarded.  

I would then ask you to go over the Hunger Games and ask yourself it the only issue with the world is that people were forced to fight to the death.

And in this view of choice being sovereign over all, you also fail to account for things like the story of Jesus and the said foolish builder:

Luke 12:13-21

[13] Someone in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me."

[14] Jesus replied, "Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?" [15] Then he said to them, "Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions."

[16] And he told them this parable: "The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. [17] He thought to himself, 'What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.'

[18] "Then he said, 'This is what I'll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. [19] And I'll say to myself, "You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry." '

[20] "But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?'

[21] "This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God."

 

 

Sounds like Battle Royale, only a decade late and lamer. I don't have any desire to read this shit, so I'll pass, but from the title and premise I'm assuming it's a classic case of a command economy going all pear-shaped. So, no, I think kids being forced to fight to the death is far from the only issue in that world. It's actually the result of an immoral economic system.

And yes, it's true that I don't see any reason to try and force people to live what I (or others) might consider to be a moral life style. So long as rights are being respected, what do I care what consenting people do? The best solution for individual immorality is to let the consequences run their course rather than to try and fight it with ineffective prohibition, or to (perhaps accidentally) incentivize it by subsidizing it with welfare.

So, you also have no interest in Chavez cracking down on knife fights in prisons going on currently, as the Humans Rights Commisssion has told him to do:

http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/in-venezuelas-prisons-knife-fights-organized-by-gangs-are-spreading/

Hey, maybe if Chavez justs works to make the practices voluntary, then they would be ok, right?



Kasz216 on 15 August 2012
badgenome said:
richardhutnik said:

Sounds like Battle Royale, only a decade late and lamer.


Pretty much.

Also worth noting that the hunger games happened because there was an overarching overcontrolling central government.  The districts rebelled and were defeated, and were then forced to live by EXTREMELY excessive regulations that pretty much kept them all in place and made it so they couldn't feed themselves even with plenty of ability to do so if not for the government preventing them from doing so.

The hunger games were the sign of the central governments dominance and control, and how the plebes in the outer districts should stay in there place and remember not to fight for their rights.

Essentially the hunger games happened specifically because of a lack of respect for a rights based ethical system.


I find it crazy how so many people ignore the simpliest credo.   "The right to extend one's fist ends at another man's face."



badgenome on 15 August 2012
richardhutnik said:

So, you also have no interest in Chavez cracking down on knife fights in prisons going on currently, as the Humans Rights Commisssion has told him to do:

http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/in-venezuelas-prisons-knife-fights-organized-by-gangs-are-spreading/

Hey, maybe if Chavez justs works to make the practices voluntary, then they would be ok, right?

I'm not sure why you asked me about this since the very first paragraph says:

The men in the pit have been given no real choice: refusing to fight is generally punished by death.

I think I've been pretty clear about the fact that I believe coercion is unethical. On the other hand, it sounds like you'd be enthusiastic about the coercion aspect and maybe just not so cool about the whole knives thing.



badgenome on 15 August 2012
Kasz216 said:

I find it crazy how so many people ignore the simpliest credo.   "The right to extend one's fist ends at another man's face."

But then how are you supposed to get that guy to pay for your birth control?



richardhutnik on 15 August 2012
badgenome said:
richardhutnik said:

So, you also have no interest in Chavez cracking down on knife fights in prisons going on currently, as the Humans Rights Commisssion has told him to do:

http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/in-venezuelas-prisons-knife-fights-organized-by-gangs-are-spreading/

Hey, maybe if Chavez justs works to make the practices voluntary, then they would be ok, right?

I'm not sure why you asked me about this since the very first paragraph says:

The men in the pit have been given no real choice: refusing to fight is generally punished by death.

I think I've been pretty clear about the fact that I believe coercion is unethical. On the other hand, it sounds like you'd be enthusiastic about the coercion aspect and maybe just not so cool about the whole knives thing.

If you want to argue that, then one can argue that so long as there is no coersion, knife fights to the death are ok.  I personally have greater concern about the knife fights than the coersion, because society is full of coersion that people don't die from.  Also, it gets increasingly vague as to what is coersion and what isn't.  Being forced to choose between a knife fight to the death, or a family member dying of starvation, is a form of coersion that can happen given certain economic conditions, and a society that has no value for human life.