Sorry, but this just isn’t true. Not that truth matters to a logical nihilist such as yourself. Steven Pinker lampoons this conception of language as legislated by agreement here.
Clayton -
In that sense, the meaning of words is both objective and intersubjective, but it has nothing to do with how many people call a table a table. It has to do with observing that people use the word table in that particular manner - it doesn’t matter if it’s one or one thousand. Intersubjectivity is a further distinction, and is useful for making sense of the world. The word gay means homosexual in most contexts, not because it’s an inherent meaning, but because the subjects using the word are using it in the same way.
I see that you are not using objective to mean inherent, so we were talking past each other. Many people seem to use objective to mean inherent, so that is why I assumed you were using it that way. My mistake.
Right, no one person controls the meanings of words for other people. Language is an example of spontaneous order. The meaning of a word can be independantly observed, but the manner in which it originates and is used is intersubjective also. An example of this on a small scale is if a group of friends use a word in a nonstandard way (or even make it up entirely). We can observe that they use it in this specific way, but it is used in that manner in the context of those particular subjects. Another example might be the word “googled”. People just started using it. If I used the word “googled” to someone who didn’t know what google was originally, then it would be meaningless to them. It would have the meaning I meant, and that can be independantly observed, but it would depend only upon me. Once they understand what I mean by it, then there is intersubjective agreement.
I can see that we were talking past each other.
Yeah, I hate that usage of the word “objective”… it’s like a sissy way of trying to say absolute, while pretending not to be claiming absolute. If you mean absolute, just say it, don’t beat around the bush and half-ass it with the word “objective.”
I would state the case slightly stronger than you have. We can separate “percentages” in regard to observing human behavior into three categories: 0%, 100% and everything else. If no one does X, then you can safely say that X is (objectively) not a part of human nature. If 100% of everyone does X (yes, there are some things that 100% of all people without exception do… think carefully), then you can safely say that it is definitely a part of human nature. If it’s just some percentage of people between 0% and 100%, then it may or may not be a part of human nature. Answering the question is more difficult but not impossible. It may be just a matter of being more specific, such as asking whether all males do X, and so on. Furthermore, it might be useful to concentrate only on representative humans (i.e. those not suffering from a major disease/dysfunction). And so on.
So, we can say that it does matter whether it’s one or a thousand. For example, “English speakers” has a fairly definite meaning and we can ask questions about this category of people. “What percentage of English speakers agree on the meaning of the word ‘table’?” It’s 100%. You might say, “Ah, but a troublemaker might purposely misreport his understanding of the word” but that’s just a methodology issue… perhaps you need to do the experiment blind or double-blind to get around observer problems.
Language is just a category of human behavior (human nature). Hell, we can say “humans speak” - it is part of human nature to speak. This is an objective fact about language!
I would say it is the canonical example.
I think it can be argued that there is no other way that words originate. Maybe in the modern era you might have some spontaneous multiple-origination of words but the core of all languages was doubtless constructed from zillions of little “in-crowd” words, some of which caught on.
Clayton -
I was considering my original inquiry (if any human cannot initiate life-threatening or life-ending force against any other human because that human has a natural right to life, how is it that the same force against a non-human animal species is permitted when these animals are just as alive as humans are?) and I thought I’d step away from the linguistic debate and give my knee-jerk reaction/answer, seeing if this might step us in the right direction:
Perhaps Neodoxy is correct: rights don’t truly exist and instead they are mere human construction; purely subjective and notwithstanding. This would be why lions eat zebras, birds eat worms and we eat chickens, each case rarely (if ever) resulting in guilt or regret. The animals taste good, issuing a dopamine response and reinforcing the behavior, and the nutrients obtained from eating these animals help us live, grow strong, etc. I would say it is certainly natural to kill and eat other animals; practically all natural, living beings survive by this principle.
But is what is natural also ethical? How many times have you been beaten at something, say in a game of Monopoly where it was natural to slam the board and maybe even threaten your opponent(s) in some way, whether by initiating force or saying something out of pure emotion. It seemed natural to do so, but was it ethical? Most would say it was not.
I don’t see a necessary correlation between nature and ethics, which leads me to believe that ethics are–indeed–about human interaction, and without interacting with other humans, ethics wouldn’t exist. Granted nothing exists in its Platonic sense as someone mentioned a long time ago in a different thread I read recently (like mathematical Platonists who think numbers hold property somehow, somewhere, almost as in a state of Heaven), and while rules hold no physical property, the consequences to these rules are behavior by other people that we attribute a certain linguistic design to; for instance, if a man punches me for cheating at a Poker game, I can say I was punished for cheating, when physically speaking, all that happened was I threw down some cards and a man punched me. Perceived rules lead to ethics.
As far as rights are concerned, or more specifically “natural rights,” perhaps we need to take the time to define what rights are. According to the Oxford Dictionary, a right as a noun means “a moral or legal entitlement to have or do something.” Let’s say for our purposes, a right is a moral entitlement to have or do something. (There’s no need to make the distinction between morality and legality with this community, thankfully!) Taking this as our baseline, we could equally as well say, “Do moral entitlements exist at the moment of conception, viability or birth?” (This is not intended to start an abortion debate, and I recommend we avoid that dilemma if we can!) I, being an admirer of Classical writers such as Locke and Bastiat, say that yes, the moment a person exists (hence, the moment he or she or it (as in a fetus without gender) becomes alive, the said individual has a right to life, liberty and private property by way of production or trade. Granted the physicality of the circumstance is limited for such an individual (due to being inside the womb or, in the case of being freshly born and unable to use the body to produce anything except brief, gross-motor movements and cooing), the right still exists as a potential: for instance, I don’t have to purchase anything from anybody or produce anything, but it would most certainly be in my benefit to do so in the long run, and regardless of what I produce or whether I produce at all, I have the right (or the moral entitelement) to have or produce that property.
I believe that the majority of us in here are talking about different aspects of the same topic. Those who believe that rights don’t exist are, in a Platonic sense, absolutely correct: they hold no physical property and therefore we must logically deduce that rights exist in the subjective realm (hence, they’re purely mental constructs). However, as I mentioned before, words are mere symbols. One can just as easily say my neighbor doesn’t exist because words don’t truly define anything and the term neighbor does not equal the person I’m viewing as my neighbor because neighbor could means virtually every person on the earth. It is an arbitrarily-assigned title.
However, those that maintain that rights do exist are, in a sense, absolutely correct. Just as the Poker player, I mentioned earlier, might cheat according to arbitrarily established rules, gets punched when he cheats against those same rules, he could easily say he was punished. I fear, though, that the members in this thread are discussing the same issue: one is saying punishment doesn’t exist while others, like me, say that indeed the punishment exists, and we’re getting hung up on how we can define something rather than the end result: someone was punched in the face.
Where this takes this thread, I have no idea. I just wanted to give my unbiased, knee-jerk response to the original question after having read the prior posts.
What say you, friends?
Absolute = irrespective of context.
Objective = mind-independent.
They are different terms.
Clayton’s is the closest to my stance in this discussion.
Property rights are evolved social norms, just like language. Eating 1yr old babies for holiday dinner is another possible social norm (out of infinitely many others) that could have evolved except, for one reason or another, societies that may have practiced it simply didn’t make it – that branch on the social evolutionary tree was simply a small, short one.
Given that none of us can choose the social evolutionary branch on which we exist (i.e. the evolved social norms prevalent in the acting humans around us), each of us has a choice: (1) study/discern/acknowledge these norms and adjust my behavior so that my process of using means towards reaching my ends benefits (from) the same process of others, or (2) disregard these evolved norms, do whatever I want whenever I want to do it, and suffer the consequences accordingly. The choice between (1) and (2) is also a part of the evolutionary process. Humans who become good at (1) are likely to flourish more relative to the ones who, for one reason or another, pick (2).
Hence, someone that strongly valued eating 1-yr-old babies for dinner wouldn’t last very long on our current social evolutionary branch, but may have been doing ok on some other branch, while it lasted.
Then you must admit that you have no right to liberty. Is this correct?
Yes, correct. I already asked you this on the first page:
Do you consider yourself to be a libertarian?
Do you consider taxation to be wrong?
Yes.
Depends what you mean by “wrong”. I have discerned ownership (in self and property) to be a robust social norm across humanity. Another norm is the prevalent preference for voluntary interactions. Austrian Economics has further taught me how these norms are fundamentally important means toward the end of a flourishing human society. Given the above and given my subjectively valued end of living a flourishing life in a flourishing society, I consider initiation of aggression (including taxation) to be “wrong”, in the sense that it is conflicting with my ends and, I believe, with the ends of (most of) my fellow humans.
I think this is a confused way of using terminology. A “right” is a corollary of law. Hence, rights-language is just a way of talking about law-as-it-is, or law-as-it-ought-to-be (criticism).
Liberty is a very fuzzy term that means different things to different people. Basically, it is a feeling that there is an absence of constraints. I don’t see how these two domains cross. Rights in law do not necessarily have anything to do with how constrained people feel. In fact, one can argue that’s half the reason our laws are so screwed up: people do not feel constrained by laws that they ought to feel constrained by.
Clayton -
I like to see everyone coming together and acknowledging that rights are normative concepts. It should be emphasized that as concepts, they do have a very real physical existence within brains to the extent they’re acknowleddged.
OP has basically acknowledged this. He has, therefore, already answered z1235’s question in a roundabout way, but I’d like to see him answer it directly. “Do you have a right? If yes where did you get it from and where do you keep it?”
For what it’s worth, my answer would be that if I accept and value whatever social norm, then I have that “right” as a concept in my brain, and it has utility only to the extent that others accept and value it (in other words, just because it’s called a social norm doesn’t actually mean that every member of society has adopted it). I would have got it from my society, and I would have no choice about where I keep it (as my concept, it stays in my brain).
@hashem: As always, you continue to obfuscate and generate line-noise in the discussion. Pointing out that an abstract noun is a concept is like saying “Everything we say is just words!” OK, so what?
No, social norms have nothing to do with individual acceptance. That’s the whole point in calling it a social norm. It’s not a private morality, a private “way it oughtta be”, it’s a description of how people in a society react to different behaviors.
Cultural etiquette, for example, has nothing to do with the assent or dissent of individuals within the culture to the etiquette. The etiquette is what it is and exists independently of the influence of any individual. Etiquette is only one kind of social norm, there are many others.
Rights have nothing to do with what is going on inside the brain of an individual. Rights are a corollary to law; rights-language is just another way to talk about the law, what it is and what it ought to be. Law - the most rigorous, consequential and formalized of all social norms - has nothing to do with individual acceptance of it. Law - like language, like etiquette - is what it is irrespective of what any individual thinks of it. Thus, rights are what they are irrespective of what anyone thinks of them. This doesn’t mean that criticism of social norms is impossible but much of it is fruitless… like proposing that English-speakers switch from using the modern English verb “are” to the Old English verb “art”. Good luck with that.
Clayton -
If you can demonstrate inherent contradictions in non-libertarian positions I think you can sideline the whole debate largely, on whether rights exist or not.
obfuscate and generate line-noise in the discussion.
You’re projecting. Obfuscating the issue is what you’re doing. You argue in red herrings, what else would that do besides obfuscate things.
No, social norms have nothing to do with individual acceptance.
Speaking of obfuscation…as I’ve come to expect from you, this root of your objection is a red herring, and a non sequitor anyways. The appearance and evolution of norms within societies are utterly dependent on individuals. Not only is this is elementary meme theory, but elementary austrian theory. But more importantly it’s a red herring, because my point was that IF I acknowledge and value a norm, THEN I have it as a right; and as a right, a subjective, prescriptive, normative concept, it has a very real existence in my brain.
Yes, I have a right to life, and it’s from God. Its nature is implicit and indirect; hence, the fact that people should not take my life because I’m alive can be otherwise terms a right to life.
Oh boy, now we’re back to rights based on superstition.
You people really don’t get it? Rights as a “gift from God” is managed dissent. If rights are a gift from God and we live in a secular (practically atheist) culture, what rights do you have??? None. Oh, and 2+2=4.
Clayton -
It’s still a concept, and it only has utility to the extent that others accept and value it.
Oh boy…
Religion has historically been a limit on tyranny. This is why the State and the church have frequently been at odds with one another. But the most powerful religions today are those that “sold out” and joined forces with the State (see the other thread on this). They promote moral ideas that are diametrically opposite of those originally taught by the religions from which they are derived.
When people said “we have these rights from God”, it was in answer to the King’s men who said, “we have these rights from the King.” In other words, the people are saying to the agents of the King, “You assert that the King can overrule the law with his own law. Fair enough. But by the very same token, we assert that the King of Kings overrules the King’s laws with his law, which is: thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, and so on.”
But once you kick out the props from the popular religion, that is, once you promulgate secular ideals into the culture, you no longer have this argument. I cannot answer the IRS agents at my door: “Oh, so the US government can override customary law with its statutes? Well, I know someone On High who can override the statutes of the US government with His statutes; His name is Jesus and He says, ‘Thou shalt not steal’ and He makes no exception for the US government.” Doesn’t work because nobody to speak of actually believes this, that is, this dogma holds no sway in the popular mind.
Because we have given up our original religious communities and have yielded to the secularist monoculture, we have no choice but to refute secular rights-claims on their own terms, that is, without invoking religion. But this is as easy as pie since no one - by virtue of their name or DNA code - has a privileged place in a secular world. We’re all equally meaningless, including the US government and its agents. Hence, no one should be afraid to tell the US government and its agents to go to hell. There is no hell, after all.
Instead, we have people cowering to an unspoken, mystically binding moral code in the absence of anything that makes it binding. If there is no God, then moral codes are not binding on you, they flow from your own judgment of the consequences of your behavior. Hence, there is no reason not to stand up and take your place among men as a peer and to tell anyone - however fancy their uniform, or however long and complicated their paperwork forms - who attempts to violate the rights we know we have to go to hell.
But don’t try to get me to act like there is a God while the governments of the world rampage around like there isn’t one. If they are not afraid of God’s judgment in the next life, neither am I… so let come what may, I’m not going to sit down and shut up out of fear that God might dislike something I’m saying, including defending my rights as a human being with dignity and pride. The manipulators want it both ways… they want to live in a world where nobody can point out their godless barbarism but where they can spook everybody with the boogeyman “Oooh, God’s gonna be mad you dint pay your taxes!”
Clayton -