Comprehensive Libertarian Pro Life Argument.

Economics Political Theory
181

I’m talking about the source of rights, that is man’s nature and observations thereof.

Because rights, as such, as legal concepts, you can attack them as “words, words” but you cannot attack the reality from which they are drawn. I say that, for instance, a man’s right to life is inalienable, you call that hubris, but it’s true because it is a fact of reality that a person is alive. And if anyone in society expects to have their life respected they must apply that equally to others, creating mutual respect for life. Thus, to murder, is to deprive of life unlawfully.

Even if someone wrote a law that murder was okay, that would not make it okay, as it denies that ethics have a basis in reality. It should be obvious that murder can never be right, no matter what law is made accepting it, which shows that there is a fundamental objective reality behind what murder is, and it is that which we need to look at when drawing rights.

The best ethical system codified into a system of legally protected rights will seek to align themselves with reality, that is to protect in society that which nature determined in Man.

Thus, we observe that man is living, and create an ethic that policy should respect life, and create a right to life. We observe that man cannot live without obtaining food and other goods, and create a right to own and dispose of lawfully obtained property. We observe that man is free by nature, and conclude that freedom is a right, and build society on the assumption of personal freedom and all of its corollaries (this one’s a big one, including such things as free speech, free association, freedom of the press, etc.). We observe that man is rational, a decision-making animal, and conclude that he is responsible for his decisions, which is what makes legal-prosecution at all cogent, that for any action taken only the person who did it is responsible, barring circumstance, etc.

To say that rights are alienable is akin to saying that mankind can live without eating–as your right to property ensures your ability to eat, that is your ability to take a piece of food (property) and dispose of it for your and purely your use (to eat it).

To say that rights are alienable is akin to saying that the consciousness inside a person does not control everything that person does, that is to deny freedom, and freedom of choice and its consequent responsibility. But that’s ridiculous. Only the consciousness inside can control the actions on the outside.

Rights are not alienable, in the same way that murder will always be murder. A just and true, an objective, legal system is one that codifies into law in accord with the facts of reality. It must observe that man is alive, free, rational, and protect those attributes. If it does so, it allows men to operate in their greatest capacity as men, and the result is the modern world we see around us.

If law does not accord with reality, the result is that men are less effective in their dealings with themselves and others, a situation embodied by countless cultures the world over with no tradition of freedom, reason, and property.

Birth is a stupid rubric for qualifying one for rights. What exactly is it about birth itself that should confer rights on someone? That’s a much more important question. And the simply fact is that for every thing about birth you could cite, I will quickly and easily destroy each point you list.

Ethically, there’s no difference between a baby 5 minutes before birth and one 5 minutes after birth. Yet legally there is. This oversight, this injustice, must be changed for the law to remain consistent. Abortion is quite simply murder.

Care to expand. Your point seems to be that a lion and a gazelle both experience the event from different viewpoints, therefore inalienable rights are irrelevant. Come again?

Just because you accept perspectivism does not force me to :stuck_out_tongue: It is little more than relativism, and based on a fundamental error in epistemology. There -is- an epistemological absolute and it is reality and the method of obtaining knowledge is science.

Existence exists. Man’s route for knowing the world, that is for knowing truth, is through perception, the senses. From the senses man abstracts concepts into knowledge.

The gazelle, no matter how much it may want to reinterprate the event of being eaten by a lion (ie: perspectivism), is still going to die. If Nietzsche were correct, science would not work.

As for abortion, certain facts are not in dispute and cannot be reinterpreted to suit your ethical whim:

  1. The fetus is alive.

  2. The fetus is human.

  3. The fetus is separate from the mother bodily.

Since it is both human and alive, anyone consistently applying the non-aggression principle must aggre that to kill it would be an aggression and unethical. Any argument otherwise must show an aggression on the part of the fetus which could be responded to with lethal force (note: I support all abortions done on the basis of the mother’s life imminently in danger, so don’t try that one).

182

Wrong. I can have the biggest club, the most deadly firearm and the track record of having used both of them to demolish anybody who does not follow my orders. Thusly, I have a viable strategy to expect everybody around me to respect my life.

We observe man is alive but we also observe that man routinely kills man.

183

And more than half the people that have ever lived have never died… What’s your point? We observe that my shoes are blue…so?

184

Thus, we observe that your shoes are blue, and create an ethic that policy should be that all shoes must be blue, and create a right to blue.

Anemone,

I am playing a bit of the devil’s advocate here deliberately with the hopes that people – even Hashem – will see the light, that rights are arbitrary preferences.

185

What I said there was how one can maintain their moral position in regards to themselves and others, by living by an ethic of respecting life and applying it consistently. If you’re out killing people, you may have a “viable strategy to expect everybody around me to respect my life” but you’re also aggressing against people and thus not deserving of respect of life via the disrespect of other’s lives you’ve shown, which is why everyone would consider it a just act to kill you to prevent you from killing imminently again, or at least subjecting you to incarceration.

186

Nonsensical. Rights enshrine freedom of action independent of other people. They impose no obligations on others. They are the bridge between ethics and law, subjecting society in toto and government itself to ethical consideration.

Did you not see where I explicitly rejected the premise that rights were arbitrary?

Rights cannot be arbitrary, anymore than whether murder is wrong or not is arbitrary. Murder will always be wrong whether the law enshrines that principle in law or not, and so too will a person have inalienable rights whether or not the law recognizes and protects those rights. The most basic, objective, right is the right to your own life. All rights are property rights, as Hashem is so fond of reminding us, and the ownership of your own body is the most basic, fundamental right. All other rights are corollaries to the right to life. For instance, without the right to property and the product of your own labor, you could neither produce anything, nor eat that which you produce–meaning you would not be able to sustain your life, meaning to deny the right to property is to deny your right to life.

He attacks the ability of the fetus to own, without realizing that without self-ownership the fetus could not ever gain consciousness or own anything ever. He attacks its individuality, without realizing that without being an individual it could not live biologically. He attacks its youth, without any reference to why age or developmental stage should be an ethical consideration whatsoever–especially when age is not a factor in any other ethical consideration. He attacks its unconsciousness, without realizing that consistency would demand he apply the same standard to other unconscious adults, without realizing the logic crumbles instantly under a consistent application of his standard.

It’s laughable, really.

187

You said that murder will always be wrong. What do you mean by wrong?

188

more than half the people that have ever lived have never died

Actually false:

http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Number_of_humans_who_have_ever_lived

Just saying.

189

It will always be an initiation of aggression. That’s a fact you cannot get around. I use that example because everyone would likely agree that murder is wrong whether the law says it is wrong or not. This is because they do not want to be murdered, peple value their own life by nature, and to be consistent should apply the same respect to others. That feeling that murder is wrong regardless of what the law says points to the fact that murder is an abrogation of something that is not a mere human concept but a reality beyond human concepts, having a basis in reality, or at least in unchangeable human nature.

That is, murder is not wrong because we discovered murder and then banned it. Murder was wrong before we discovered it as a concept and created the terminology to discuss it intelligently. Just as gravity existed before we had a word for it or understood the mathematical relationship behind it.

I can see what you’re driving at, you’re likely to quote the definition of ethics as mere “social standards.” You may even list some societies where murder has come to be regarded as legal and natural, where they don’t regard it as wrong but as a fact of life. But such societies are living contradictions, like one who says that poison is good to eat.

To think murder wrong is to make a value judgment about an act. This is true. So my claim is that there are valid and invalid value judgments.

The consistency and broad-application test can help us evaluate a moral standard such as murder. We can ask, if murder is okay, then what if we murdered everyone. Well, clearly, in that case, no one in society would be left alive, and it’s clear that murder is harmful to society.

The irony, and the truth is, that in order to make a value judgment one must first be alive. So, to value murder, that is to value death, is a contradiction while one is alive. You must be alive to value anything–to then value death is ridiculous. For by doing so you must approve that your own murder is fine if you are consistent. In the same way that the rules of logic cannot be disproved becuase you must appeal to them in any argument you might make, to say that murder is fine is to appeal to life while attempting that argument, and thus self-refuting. Similarly, to say man has no free will or is not self-directed one must self-direct to make that statement, thus refuting the premise by the very act of attempting to prove it.

190

I think most of the confusion stems from the fact that many people are Capitalists and think that we have a right to property. I realize that I don’t have a right to life. I only have a right to my thoughts which I can invest into this world.

I personally would avoid abortion of a fetus because I don’t think we have given that fetus a chance. That fetus could be a great thinker. But I would have less of a problem killing a 13 year old kid that has proven their incompetance as a respectful human being. I would prefer the non-violent approach of enslaving the 13 year old child so they might learn respect - at which time they could gain their freedom. We might also use the insane 13 year old child to learn the environmental causes of mental retardation among developing minds.

191

Well, I probably meant in recorded history, Wheylous. But shame on your sources for being heavy with guesswork and assumption.

192

“Saving Private Ryan”

** Help Less **

At some point, the term inalienable implies “something that cannot be alienated”.

Thus, upon what causality may one assert that “because one is alive, then one ought to continue to be alive”?

One may infer from statements that your answer is “because one wants to be alive”, from which you apparently extrapolate “a biological processes” as being consistent with want.

And, yet, one does not continue to be alive per design of nature; therefore wanting to continue to be alive cannot represent a law that one must continue to be alive.

Again, it is straight forward to deduce that the gazelle has a will to be alive that can be alienated.

** Churn More **

Verily, it is difficult to discern the meaning that many attach to the term right.

Firstly, dexterous and sinisterism are antonyms of handedness, levorotatory and dextrorotator are antonyms of enantiomers*,* however neither of the pairs are likely to objectively represent moral or ethical opposites.

The terms right and left are antonyms for direction and one should use the terms correct or incorrect to describe conditions or outcomes.

Also, the use of the term right is an abbreviation from upright, which has an attached connotation of “standing up”.

As such, an assertion that mammon is not an animal because it stands upright is arrogant nonsense.

Extrapolation of the mind body paradigm to a deity which is extrinsic to nature is a misgiving that naturalism rejects.

** Here Say **

Perspectivism does not reject discrete outcomes, rather it “… separates truth from a particular (or single) vantage point,”

For example, given certain physical conditions in a chemical reaction, where specific byproducts are created, perspectivism would challenge that the purpose of the byproducts is subjective and wholly dependent upon personal need. while the stochastic processes which form a byproduct are ethically indifferent to the consequence.

"This means that there are many possible conceptual schemes, or perspectives in which judgment of truth or value can be made. This implies that no way of seeing the world can be taken as definitively “true”, but does not necessarily entail that all perspectives are equally valid.

** Reflexive Emanation **

Is nature ethically indifferent to the event consequences?

Certainly, one may suppose that there is reciprocity in nature - a karma.

The extent to which reciprocity occurs in nature for abortion of an inchoate foetus is a subjective perception.

Verily, I am content to allow others to make a subjective assessment and decision for themselves regarding their own inchoate foetus until an onset of sentience which provisions an opportunity for mutual understanding.

** Tiny Article **

Emphatically, a wright exists because there is an entity which is capable of reprising a violation of its conditions.

Therefore, a premise for inalienable wrights is mandated upon an allusion to theological reprisals.

Now a “chance at eternal life” and “final judgment” are metaphors for perpetuation of one’s introspection and genetic identity through one’s children, and a soul is a metaphor for a sole.

A strong anthropic principle states that “one exists because one is present to attest that they exist”; it is a tautology which does not attempt to compromise beyond concrete reality.

193

"I realize that I don’t have a right to life. "

Just one word: ridiculous

194

If you had no ability to own and dispose of property, you could not live. You must eat. Yet, food cannot be eaten corporately. It can be eaten by only one person, and is disposed of utterly and consumed utterly. It is a property. If you did not have a right to the product of your efforts you could not eat that which you produced, nor own the tools to produce food. If you had no property you would not even have a body, and thus could not be alive, as you own the physical constituents that make up your physical form and produce consciousness within you.

If you have no right to life then you have no right to the things that sustain your life, including work, production, and food. Are you honestly suggesting that it is ethical to deprive you of these things unto your death?

Thoughts alone cannot keep you alive. You must eat, drink, interact. One chained in darkness can think, but they will not live very long without the material necessities of life.

Then you are evil. Lacking respect hardly rises to the level of deserving death. You have a twisted value system.

Non-violent? Suppose she tries to escape as you are enslaving her, will you use force to restrain her? Is it still non-violent? Enslaving anyone is an aggression, an abrogation of their free will and reprehensible.

That said, the fetus does not enslave the mother, it cannot. It did not cause its coming into existence. It cannot aggress.

195

No man can deprive another of life or liberty and maintain their moral position. Those who do not respect life are a threat to society, and justice demands the harshest treatment, and their separation from society. These are things that men felt intuitively before we had concepts to delineate them intellectually.

First of all, why are you putting that phrase in quotes as if I wrote it, since it’s a phrase you originated, not I.

Secondly, what’s important is what people will do willingly versus what others force on them. To force death on someone makes it ethical to force death on the aggressor, makes it just and commensurate. Most people do want to remain alive, both on an unconscious level and a conscious level. It cannot be denied that the body is a continuing process of life whose aim is to remain alive. It continues this process until it is unable. Even those who commit suicide cannot convince their body to stop creating and sustaining life within them.

Biological life is a given.

Not quite as you formulate it. Rather, if one wants to continue to be alive they must do certain things. They must feed themselves and provide water and suitable living conditions. Thus, to deny one’s right to the product of their labor is to deny them food and water and shelter which is to deny them life. To deny the life of someone attempting to maintain their life is to aggress against them and unethical. Rights enshrine the nature of man, that being exactly what you said, that while nature doesn’t make us a live as a matter of course, nature requires certain actions of us and it is these we must fulfill to remain alive. Anyone blocking such activites is not valuing life but valuing death. You cannot abstain from valuing, you must choose either or.

Again, a person’s life can be alienated or taken from them, but only by force, and this does not allow the killer to maintain their moral position in regard to other men.

“Verily”? Seriously?

Seems more like it’s denying the possibility of truth whatsoever. Do you agree that perspectivism is antithetical to epistemological-absolutism? If so, you deny the ability to discover truth whatsoever, you in fact would thereby deny that reality exists, for that is my epistemological foundation, and would thereby expose yourself as little more than a neo-mystic.

Rights deal only with the actions and relationships of men to other man. Of course chemistry has no ethical component, but rather what one does with the chemicals.

But not all of them valid.

You might say to me “man must eat to live” and I would say that you are correct, except that you are not wholly correct. Man must eat good food, for one can also eat poison and die. Thus, while you are free to value whatever you like–values after all are a product of thinking–you are not free to prosper equally on any value system. A system which values poison cannot ignore the reality that poison will kill you.

So to, a political order must recognize the facts about man’s nature and inculcate a value system that respects man’s right to life and the corollaries if that society is to proper.

This is a limited view that amounts to such sayings as “there’s no best flavor of ice cream.” Such a statement cannot be imported into the realm of factual data to which value has not been applied. There may be no one best flavor of ice-cream, but there certainly is ice-cream. Ice-cream exists, that much we can say with 100% certainty. To deny the validity of a value judgment and apply that rubric to factual questions is the fallacy of the frozen abstraction, of concept importation out of context.

Yes, but that is outside the scope of the discussion. The question is not whether nature is ethically indifferent, but whether society should be.

Do you believe in karma? I do not. Once again, should you say you do, mysticism.

I have seen no one suggest such a thing; certainly I have not.

Then, would you agree to allow others to decide for themselves whether a sleeping, unconscious person can be lawfully kiled because they are not currently sentient? In either case you’re allowing the murder of a living human being. Again, you will not escape that fact.

Correct, inasmuch as rights are the legal enshrinement of ethical principles. However, those ethical principles cannot be changed by changing a law. An ethical violation is still unethical even if there is no law to condemn or reprise its violations.

Hardly. One needs only a state to coerce aggressors, not a theological entity of any kind. This is a specious line of argumentation.

196

“Curve Ball”

** Coarse Course **

Male lions kill the cubs of former prides so that their genetics may be passed into the future, the strong anthropic principle does not compromise, one is genetically present or one is not genetically present.

Recall the history of military campaigns by mammon clads in search for territories and resources to supply its survival; although one may subjectively disagree with the methods, one must objectively accept the incidences of both success and failure according to the strong anthropic principle.

Hence, any moral valuation of what ought to be is simply a matter of perspective.

** Systematic Formalities **

Now, one may engage in mutualism with a purpose of improving the likelihood of their own survival or for fostering a fruitious environment and herding animals do it all the time.

In that respect, an individual exchanges natural freedoms for citizenship in a collective, with protected (reprisable) wrights according to a constitution, which acts as a greater individual in order to improve one’s own survival or to foster a fruitious environment.

Note, however, that such a construct is provisional, a fabrication without a moral necessity by nature.

** Free Will **

My objectivity does not allow me to throw the logical term truth about indiscriminately.

There are expected values from events, goals from procedures, and consequence from conditions, which may be true or false depending upon a defintion of the problem.

My objective is to optimize advantages without pretences for grandiose allusion to moral absolutes.

** Nature of Society **

It is not outside the scope of the discussion, it is the discussion!

One cannot allude to law and excise nature from its foundation!

Objectively, a subjective argument should not deny that it is subjective!

An absolute assertion for necessary wrights is entirely based within subjective reasoning!

Even though, conditions of society can be established to objectively improve subjective preferences.

** Specious Species **

Stop mixing legalism with natural freedoms.

Murder is a legal term meaning to kill in violation of a written law (w.right).

Again, an unconscious person, whom has been born, receives constitutional protections!

If one cannot accept that a wright exists because there is an entity capable of reprising a violation of given conditions, whence all killing is murder, then see theological reprisal.

Verily, an esoteric interpretation of newton’s third law of motion does not imply anything about the ethical or moral consequences of an action; no good deed goes unpunished and what comes around goes around.

197

To both the responders of my post - your thoughts stem from the delusion that you have some “right to life”. Everybody dies.

198

There are numerous situations where the life of a person depends upon the death of another person. By accepting some notion of “right to life” - you are faced with inevitable contradictions to that notion. The closest thing I can think of to a “natural right” - is the right to think. We can absorb information and use that information to influence the world. Your body is also part of that world - even though it is likely your thoughts can’t exist without your body. But if you are going to get down to the fundamental factor - it has to be thought.

Once you are possessed by the hypocritical and selfish belief that everyone has a “right to life” - you begin acquiring all kinds of false “rights”. But I am merely saying that your maxim is not practical… else there would be no arguments like the one in this thread. I submit that we have the right to perform thought activations in defense of our life. But I do not submit that we have a right to life. These are very different maxims.

199

Let’s have them.

Give your example of such a situation and I’ll show you how there is no contradiction.

You cannot think without a right to your own life. Thus, the right to think pre-supposes your right to life, for by depriving you of life you are also deprived of thinking. You don’t realize that the right to life is the fundamental right to which all others are corollaries.

Such as?

Again, your “right to thought” presupposed a right to life and therefore is inconsistent and self-refuting.

200

The law of conservation of mass is the ultimate reason why we can be faced with situations where there can not be life without death. Consider “Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571”. The environment has very little life-giving fuel. And the companions that surround you are really the only source of life-giving fuel. Given the right conditions - it would be inevitable that someone die so that you may continue living.

In the sense of “natural rights” which many of you uphold - I say we have none. But I do think that thought is one of the most fundamental and powerful prime movers an individual can access… and is therefore deserving of the highest regard.