I’m struggling to believe you read my post, but maybe I’m just not a good communicator. “Agreement to liberties” is 3 words which by themselves can be construed any number of ways. But of course I provided many more words for the purpose of clarification. What is it that is incoherent to you? “Agreement”? “Liberties”? Something else? Please explain so that I can see where my exposition is deficient.
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What is it that is redundant and pointless about MY idea of a right to engage in free acts? As you surely read in my post, I’m merely reducing the concept to simple observable facts–because that is the only way that I believe a concept can be meaningful. Is it that you don’t agree that people can communicate with one another? Do you not believe that people have values? Do you not believe that one person can identify another person’s values? Do you not believe that a person can consciously choose to act in a way that does not negatively affect another person’s values? Or is there some other aspect of this concept that I am overlooking?
As I just wrote to you (you read it?), it was my belief that you did not understand my post prior to this one, because in that post I clearly and deliberately distinguished the concepts of liberties and rights, and yet you continued to respond as though I did not. So, I could not further comment on the distinction. Instead, I wrote this as further explanation of the foundations behind my thoughts, so that you could go back and interpret my prior post in that light.
I’m sure you completely disagree with something, but the disconnect between my ideas and the ideas you seem to be responding to leave me wondering what that disagreement is.
The government in question. We never established which state we were discussing. Merely the institution of it. The government is the state, so when I refer to the government of United States, it can also be infered that I am discussing the State in which Americans [ slang for the citizens of the United States ] live under.
Because they don’t have a judicial monopoly in a certain territoriality region. It’s quite simple. They are property owners or agents for property owners who tend to the property at the behest of the property owner.
I suppose “liberties” or “agreement” or the combination of the two with “to” as liberties simply don’t come from agreement. Agreement comes from liberty.
Your idea of a right to engage in free acts is a redundant and pointless as all ideas about a right to engage in free acts. By their very nature, free acts don’t require rights. I agree that people can communicate with one another (obviously), I believe people hold values and can recognise those of another, and can therefore deliberately act. The point is simply this: none of that changes the distinction (or proves the existence of natural rights).
As before, your distinguishment was simply faulty. I’ll reply again directly.
Liberties are not a self-imposed obligation, they are the lack of obligations. Rights can be and are a product of liberty, but not vice-versa. They require consent, which comes from liberty.
NirgrahamUK, already made the point I was getting at.
Property owners definitely, definitely do have a monopoly over certain territorial regions. Its called property.
No. I’m talking about a state.
“I define the state as that institution which possesses one or both (almost always both) of the following properties: (1) it acquires its income by the physical coercion known as “taxation”; and (2) it asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defense service (police and courts) over a given territorial area. An institution not possessing either of these properties is not and cannot be, in accordance with my definition, a state.”
But that wasn’t my idea at all. As I wrote to you, liberties are “unilateral”. That is, a person unilaterally decides that he does not want another person to interfere with him. However, it is an undeniable fact, that no matter what one person unilaterally wants, another person need not care. That is an everyday fact of life. And, if nobody EVER COULD care (people lacked the capacity, in a way a tree lacks the capacity), rights simply would have no meaning, and neither would liberties. That is, if there is nothing out there in the world that can agree to act according to our wishes, liberties have no meaning. It would be like saying you have the liberty to not have the clouds rain on you, a tree fall on you, or a bear tear you to shreds. It is rights and liberties in the Robinson Crusoe scenario (minus Friday)–rights and liberties have no meaning in such a context. Rights and liberties have meaning only with reference to 2+ entities capable of rights and liberties.
If people COULD care, but nobody ever DID care, rights simply would not exist. But liberties, I suppose, could still be said to exist as recognition of the potential that someone might one day care, and make a choice.
By their very nature, free acts DO require noninterference. We can talk about noninterference by bacteria or rockslides or the like, but doing so only serves to reveal that by “free” we are only talking about free from a particular type of interference. It is entirely possible that a person might be oblivious to our very existence let alone our desires, and we may have no possibility of communicating with such a person. Well, that person is effectively no different to us than rockslides, bacteria, and all those other aspects of nature that we must deal with by force or flight. So it isn’t even people per se that we are referring to when we say “free”. What we are really talking about is being free from things that can deliberately choose whether or not to interfere with us, while they know that we do not want them to.
So, the way we are using “free” in this discussion, requires (1) that one person desires another person not interfere (and such possibility exists), (2) the other person consciously recognize that desire, and (3) the other person consciously chooses not to interfere. When we say “liberties”, we are talking about (1). When we say “rights”, we are talking about (3).
The reason, I think, that you believe ‘right to freedom’ is redundant, is that in the absence of the other person, freedom from interference by that other person simply exists. But in the absence of microorganisms, freedom from infection exists. In the absence of bears, freedom from being eaten exists. In the absence of wind, freedom of having your hut blown down exists. These last uses of “freedom” are nonsensical because they lack the context of an understanding entity deliberately choosing not to interfere.
Without the possibility of deliberately choosing conflict, rights and liberties have no meaning. If natural rights exist, it must refer to this type of interaction/decision. Defining natural rights as such not only defines natural rights as something demonstrably true, it also gets to the very essence of what people really mean by the term.
I never wrote that liberties were a self-imposed obligation. I wrote that rights were. And they must be. If the other person has no ability to choose whether or not to conflict with you against your wishes, then he is no different than a falling tree, hurricane, a pestilence, or a flower on the other side of the world. If he lacks that ability, rights have no meaning with reference to him. For him to enter into the context of rights, he must have the ability to choose or not choose conflict.
And as I very clearly wrote, liberties are not an obligation. They are a kind of desire. But neither liberties nor rights have any meaning except in reference to one another.
All of this that I have discussed is but the essence of rights–and a demonstration that they must exist, or that for them to exist, they must be defined thus. To go from that fundamental fact of rights to specific interactions or named rights in a society requires much elaboration.
I know that wasn’t your idea, I wrote it to explain why your ideas are faulty.
Again, thats isn’t a liberty. Liberties don’t come from decisions at all, decisions come from liberty.
Again, this is just a mistake. If there is nothing out there in the world that can agree to act to our wished, RIGHTS have no meaning. As rights are the product of agreements and liberties aren’t. Once again, you are conflating the two ideas. Liberties retain all meaning in the Robin Crusoe scenario, as they still fully exist. For instance, Crusoe still has the liberty to walk around naked. You have the liberty to do all that you possibly can in such a scenario, Friday with his rights would be the hamper.
Given that the entire body of this subject is about inter-personal relations, rockslides and bacteria aren’t relevant.
Wrong. When we talk about liberty we talk about what people can do. That is all. When we talk about “rights” we are claims against someone, which have been agreed upon. One simply consciously choosing no to interfere in someone elses life isn’t a right in any sense of the word. Just as my choosing not drop flower pedals on the ground isn’t a right. Its just a choice, a liberty.
Rights cetainly are obligations, which has been my entire point. Your last sentence is correct - the ability to choose is clearly a liberty… and nothing more.
“Crusoe still has the liberty to walk around naked. You have the liberty to do all that you possibly can in such a scenario”
You ALWAYS have the “liberty” to do all that you possibly can in ANY scenario. That is a meaningless definition of “liberty”, as it discerns NOTHING. If the king has you chained to a rock, then you can’t possibly go bowling. But you still can do all that you possibly can do. From your perspective, it makes no difference if the king chains you to a rock, or if a tree falls on you in a storm and you are pinned to a rock. Your “liberties” are the same. The ONLY way liberty makes any sense, and the only way anybody uses it, is in reference to the king scenario. Why? What is the distinguishing feature of the king versus the tree that makes liberty only applicable when the king is involved? Is it that the king MIGHT NOT have chained you to a rock? No, it can’t be, because the tree too might not have pinned you to a rock (certainly it never did before, and other trees have not pinned you to rocks). So liberty isn’t even about whether or not you are pinned to a rock, or might not have been pinned to a rock.
ONE difference is that the king can CHOOSE whether or not to pin you down. But is choice sufficient? What if the king is CHOOSING to randomly catapult balls and chains into what he thinks is an abandoned wilderness, as a kind of military excercise? Again, from you’re perspective, the king is just blithely doing what kings do, just as trees do what trees do. From your perspective, the element of choice is completely irrelevant–possibly not even recognizable as you may never even see the king or know where the chains are coming from. Trees, kings, rockslides…with respect to your actions in dealing with them, they are just more limiting facts of nature, and all you can respond with is force or flight.
But there is one OTHER potential difference. IF this thing you call a “king” first sees you waving your arms wildly letting him know you are in the way of his military exercise, he might, BASED upon seeing you, and PRESUMING you wish not to be hurt, CHOOSE not to fling the chains. Or he might not. But this is a possibility that never existed with the tree. And never existed with the king who was oblivious to your presence. And never exists with all other aspects of nature which ALWAYS restrict your “liberties” (assuming your are not omnipotent).
What you have been doing in your posts is STIPULATING a key distinction between humans choosing to restrict you, and nonhuman forces doing so. But you are not explaining why that is anything more than an arbitrary distinction. But it isn’t an arbitrary distinction. It is a distinction relevant ONLY because of the fact that humans (and so far as we know only humans) can hold values, and interfere with one another, and communicate with one another, and can choose actions based upon those communications. If some nonhuman silicon-based alien blob warlord came to earth and also possessed those characteristics, then rights would have relevance for that alien as well. We might talk about the alien violating our rights or infringing upon our liberties. But rights do not hold relevance for an asteroid coming to earth. We would never talk about an asteroid crashing into our house violating our rights.
You are making the error of a floating abstraction. You are BASING your explanation on the stipulation that it is relevant to humans, without explaining why (that one can ask “why” shows it is not a foundation). You might just as well stipulate that liberties and rights are only relevant to bowls of chili. There is a foundation (mundane as all foundations must be), but you have not yet recognized it (are in fact disputing it). Building a philosophy on air as you do, is what leads people to simply conclude that what you say is arbitrary. People conclude that “rights” are just a fiction–a stipulated concoction of wishful thinkers. That is because, unfortunately, for most lovers of liberty and the philosopher they read, that is indeed true. But as I have explained, it need not be the case. In fact, it necessarily is NOT the case. Rights are as mundane an objective fact of nature (albeit human nature) as anything else that anybody has ever observed. Rights are not the imagination of men, they are what is observed in men. The existence of rights can no more be denied than the light emanating from your computer monitor. Unless of course one chooses an unfounded definition of “rights”.
“Liberties for one party are the self-imposed obligations in another”
Can’t let you pull this out of context. It smacks of thoughtless selective drive-by reading. I will assume it was unintentional.
I might also say that “Purchases for one party are the sales for another.” That does not mean that purchases and sales are the same concept. And I expended several–apparently unread–words to you articulating that point. And I think I repeatedly explained that liberties and rights are related. It is, you may not have discovered, possible for distinctly different concepts to be intimately related and even interdependent. And of course, I have now at length described liberties and rights to help you with context.
Perhaps my posts are too long for you to read, but if you are to be persuasive and not make these mistakes, you must read them. I won’t be offended if for lack of time you do not respond. Just don’t respond without trying to know what you are responding to.
Libertarians generally seem to define liberty as a condition where everyone respects the NAP (however they define aggression) with regard to them.
If no one violates the NAP (as I see it) in any of their actions that influence me, I can call myself 100% “at liberty” in the libertarian sense. I may be pinned under tree that fell in a storm and dying, but in terms of libertarianism I am 100% “at liberty” (i.e., 100% free).
Under this conception, the libertarian concept of liberty corresponds with the concept of de facto libertarian rights, meaning the libertarian rights that are actually enforced in a society. In fact, these two concepts are identical in practice:
“Person X is in a state of complete liberty” = “There is 100% perfect enforcement of libertarian rights / the NAP (as the speaker interprets it) with regard to everyone’s actions that influence Person X” = “No one violates Person X’s libertarian rights / the NAP (as the speaker interprets it)”
Succinct version:
“X is in complete liberty” = “No one violates X’s (libertarian) rights”
It discerns total feasibility. As earlier, you’ve steamrolled the two differences by starting your proposal with “if the king has you.” This has been covered.
Again, you have repeated the same error, “the king is just blitthely doing what kings do” isn’t anything on par with “trees doing what trees do” you are, once again, missing the boat. This has been covered before on this site, it is unrelated.
This is exatly what I’m talking about: you are repeating the same error. The idea that liberties can be infringed implies that the holder of said liberties has a right to them you are engaging in the same error as Hohfeld in your muddling.
And this is just rubbish. Light does emit from my computer monitor, its observable, testable, verifiable, “natural rights” on the other hand have neither been observed, tested, or verified. The obvious fact that I can murder you clearly shows that.
I might also say that “Purchases for one party are the sales for another.”
You could, but you’d be inapt. (As I’ve already explained many times now.) An apt use would be “Rights for one party are obligations for another.” Please try and keep up.
“That does not mean that purchases and sales are the same concept. And I expended several–apparently unread–words to you articulating that point. And I think I repeatedly explained that liberties and rights are related. It is, you may not have discovered, possible for distinctly different concepts to be intimately related and even interdependent. And of course, I have now at length described liberties and rights to help you with context.”
All of your words have done nothing more than repeat the same rudimentary mistakes, as I’ve explained many, many times now.
How about you actually read my replies. As your lengthy posts are simply ignoring the issue presented.