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

richardhutnik said:

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.

If two people - neither of whom I know - are so pissed off at one another that they want to fight each other to the death and they are so stupid as to do it, I don't see why it's any of my business. Is S&M unethical behavior, and should it be legal? Because you own yourself and your body, and if you willingly enter into an agreement with another party to inflict harm on one another's bodies, what is the difference whether it's fighting or fucking?



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Kasz216 said:
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."

That credo alone is sufficient to build an ethical system around?  The trend of this discussion is individuals arguing that credo alone is sufficient.

 

In regards to The Hunger Games, if one happens to see it ONLY has a a totalitarian government at work, one misses how the games themselves are structured and the message the writer was trying to discuss.  And the critiques aren't focused on free will, but barbarism.  A number of other stories have touched on the same subject:

http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/what_came_before_the_hunger_games/

 

Rollerball in particular, is one.  It takes in a corporate run future, where the violent game Rollerball is the top sport:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073631/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollerball_(1975_film)

 

The focus of these stories are on barbaric states societies can let themselves fall into, and their horrors. But hey, so long as no one is coersed, why be concerned about it? 



richardhutnik said:
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

 

 

I do notice that you didn't answer my question ... 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?

 

 

I already stated that life, in and of itself, is not a right because everyone dies and your life ending does not mean that your rights were violated ... You do have the right to live your life free of intentional harm inflicted by others including, but not limited to, being murdered by someone else.

Now, you seem to confuse what someone has a right to do with something that is ethical for them to do. A person may be entirely within their rights and still do something unethical, but the fact that it is unethical doesn't eliminate that he has that right.

As for your murder cases ...

If someone is in a situation where they are aware of significant risks to other people, and they have the ability to prevent harm occurring to other individuals without suffering harm to themself, they have an ethical responsibility to interviene; but this doesn't mean that the person who risks harm has a right to their intervention.



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.  The bigger picture of a system that seems incredibly cruel is that you have no basis for saying it is wrong, if you merely reduce it to one of choice.  And even in that world, the people in it choose to end up being entered in more.  They can choose to be complaint.  People can also choose to not watch.  The entire system could go down, if people choose.  So, in light of choice, you can't even argue that the games are wrong, because people choose to be compliant with it.

 

First of all, Have you actually read the book Hunger Games?  Because it doesn't seem like you have a very good understanding of it.  First of all, they don't choose to watch it, they are forced to watch it under threat of death.  Also, they are forced to enter their name in more than once if they actually want to eat.  I mean, obviously the series ends with the people choosing to rise up and rebel, but I think they do that so that they can have the choice, not in spite of it.  

Also, if they had volunteered to fight to the death for fame and glory, how exactly is that different from somebody joining the military today?  People do volunteer to fight and die today and nobody looks at a soldiers death and says, that was unethical of him to volunteer and do that.  



richardhutnik said:
Kasz216 said:
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."

That credo alone is sufficient to build an ethical system around?  The trend of this discussion is individuals arguing that credo alone is sufficient.

Which it is.

Outside which.

I'm pretty sure killing someone else in a hunger games style enviroment would qualify as "One man's fist ending at another man's nose."

 



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I was just looking over a few of the arguments and just wanted to point out something.
-The right to not be forced to pay for someone else's health care.

I mean it all sounds good to me, but ......isn't this already violated by mandatory Tax on EVERYTHING we buy and in many states our paychecks??? We have no say in the matter, portions of our money are being funneled into god knows what and we do not get to say "Hey, I want my portion of the tax to go to _____".



      

      

      

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gergroy 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.  The bigger picture of a system that seems incredibly cruel is that you have no basis for saying it is wrong, if you merely reduce it to one of choice.  And even in that world, the people in it choose to end up being entered in more.  They can choose to be complaint.  People can also choose to not watch.  The entire system could go down, if people choose.  So, in light of choice, you can't even argue that the games are wrong, because people choose to be compliant with it.

 

First of all, Have you actually read the book Hunger Games?  Because it doesn't seem like you have a very good understanding of it.  First of all, they don't choose to watch it, they are forced to watch it under threat of death.  Also, they are forced to enter their name in more than once if they actually want to eat.  I mean, obviously the series ends with the people choosing to rise up and rebel, but I think they do that so that they can have the choice, not in spite of it.  

Also, if they had volunteered to fight to the death for fame and glory, how exactly is that different from somebody joining the military today?  People do volunteer to fight and die today and nobody looks at a soldiers death and says, that was unethical of him to volunteer and do that.  

There are individuals that choose to enter the military, because they see no economic opportunity available to them.  The pick what they see as the lesser evil.  Pretty much you see this happen.  As economic times get worse, people are more willing to join the military out of necessity:

http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,204238,00.html

 

In regards to choose to watch or not, a lot of choices in life come down to deciding not to die or not.  People will feel compelled to pick a poorer choice over death.  What the discussion here has come down to is enshrining choice above everything else.  People will argue here that so long as I personally choose to do something, it makes it ok, so long as I don't interfere with other choices.  And it was a focus on liberty above every other value that will pop up in rights-based ethics system.  What you see in this is a blind spot to situations where someone could intervene to enable a person to not make a bad choice, but they don't.  By saying ethics is simply a case of not punching people's in the nose, it fails to address actual issues that could reduce what other values systems would see as evil.



forevercloud3000 said:
I was just looking over a few of the arguments and just wanted to point out something.
-The right to not be forced to pay for someone else's health care.

I mean it all sounds good to me, but ......isn't this already violated by mandatory Tax on EVERYTHING we buy and in many states our paychecks??? We have no say in the matter, portions of our money are being funneled into god knows what and we do not get to say "Hey, I want my portion of the tax to go to _____".

There are individuals who argue tax is theft, and there should be no taxes.



richardhutnik said:
Soleron said:
It's easily solved by saying no one's rights have priority over any others, so your right to religious belief that contraception is wrong doesn't extend to stopping others' right to access contraception.

Religious rights are not special, they are a specific case to freedom of thought and speech, but that doesn't mean freedom of action or a right to dictate how things are going to be.

The issue isn't that the Catholic Church is trying to ban insurance period for covering birth control, just that Catholic employers MUST provide it.  It goes from religious beliefs to property rights issues.  Do employers have a right to do what they want with their own property or not?

You can't take the easy way out by say no one's rights have priority over any other, because in this case, the issue requires one person's rights to have priority over another one.  And you ended up placing religious rights lower than other rights.

If one person has the right to use contraception it doesn't violate another persons right to not use contraception (because of religion or whatever). And the catholic church as employer is no person, so the concept of personal rights doesn't apply here.



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richardhutnik said:
Mr Khan said:
It's ultimately a moot point. We should have universal health coverage, and the gutless government is doing so in a way that happens to force religious institutions to betray some of their values.

The Obama Administration shouldn't be doing this, but the "why" of it has little to do with religion.

Another example I could of used is how a homosexual activist forced a Christian film development studio to develop a promotional film for homosexuality, by means of the courts.  The activist argued they had a right to not be denied service, and pitted that said right against the owners of the company to say they didn't want to be involved with anything they saw as promoting sin.

EHarmony.com ran into another one.  They offered their service for heterosexuals only, as their market.  They were sued in court to require offering their matching services for homosexuals.  To placate these requirements, eharmony.com ended up setting up a separate service.  I know of eharmony, because Dr. Warren targeted his research at churches in the beginning.

Again, you see over and over what people considered rights in continual conflict with other people's rights.  And these rights end up individual or collectively.  The rights-based ethical systems don't provide any answers for prioritizing.

Both examples are again persons against non-persons. Again, if you prefer personal rigths it's clear which side wins.

And yes, rights of one side always can conflict with other rights. That's normal. We usually have priorities defined.



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