“You insist on conflating the issues. Since, in your scenario, the only two entities that exist that have the capacity for natural rights and self ownership are me and the mother, then IF we both share in common the value of the baby’s demise, then, as a matter of fact, the baby will die. This is the values-free prediction from natural rights that we can make. Natural rights are as objective and passionless as gravity.
Values, which you seem incapable of distinguishing, are something different. Not less, or disdainful, or avoidable, or unimportant, or irrelevant, but clearly different.
So, if on the other hand, me and the mother do not share that value–if I value the welfare of the baby–THEN rights come into play as a possible mechanism of conflict resolution. I have the capacity to choose, unlike the baby, to disregard rights and violently act against the mother in defense of my values, or to employ rights in a way to persuade her to behave more favorably to my values–e.g. threaten ostracism, offer to take or buy the child, or execute any existing contractual options.
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Then again, you are agreeing with me that the real game changers here are the values commonly upheld, and not these so called absolute natural rights.
Because even to consider an action within any framework of rights, one needs to acquiesce those rights firsts, by holding the justice system that imposes them as a value to be preserved.
So values are at the base of real world decisions. You cannot disavow that.
You can then comeback and argue that people would tend to value a fundamentalist natural rights framework for a justice system, based upon clear-cut definition of moral actors, and where nobody can intervene with violence when children are being abused by their parents.
But that’s only your speculation about the evolution of our beliefs and moral sentiments. It’s not a logical conclusion of any sort.
And it is in total disagreement with the values revealed by real flesh and bone people when they act and judge others actions.
They may one day come to the beilef that only a fundamentalist natural rights framework for a justice system is acceptable, but that’s not a foregone conclusion. It’s rather a pathetic prophecy and no amount of semantic arm-waving can transform that into a logical conclusion.
What we know for a fact is that real world justice systems accept a degree of interpretation and are based upon common-sense values, and that most real world modern justice systems would not punish someone for using violence when stopping qualified child abuse by a parent.
“You claim in your last post (but not earlier one’s) to have no regard for a rational logical elucidation of these issues on this forum–far away from the heat of such a far fetched scenario–but your words contradict your actions. You act, in this forum with the intent to persuade, while simultaneously openly dismissing the tools of rational persuasion.You do so, I believe, because the emotions of your values for human life dominate your emotions for gaining a coherent grasp of reality. ”
Now you are creating a straw man.
What I said is that you cannot establish any statement about the world on pure logics and axioms. The world is a sensorial experience, which in part is not subject to rational construction.
But any abstract argument trying to advance a theory about how the world works can be analysed rationally or logically, by deducing its consequences and comparing to the world as we experience it.
My “far fetched scenario” for instance is a rational tool for isolating the deficiencies of your proposal, by making them more apparent and tractable in a conceivable, if otherwise unlikely, situation. Of course mothers have in general the best interest of their offspring in mind and I would tend to side with them in any conflict involving the welfare of those kids; but there are conceivable situations where mothers act to the detriment of their human dignity, and where a decision to stop them can be justified, provided enough evidence that the case was such.
What I’m showing is that those attempts to a foundational treatment for natural rights, disregarding commonly accepted values and tradition, are a conceptual fraud. Nobody thinks like that. It is just an argumentational ploy and it is weak. It is something that grows out of the same dellusion of moral design and perfect rationality that has brought to life the various forms of socialism and scientific dictatorships. All part of the persistent revolt of the mind against reason itself and of the various attempts to abolish Man.
I’m not denying reason and its tools, but I’m denouncing the abuse of it. Our general understanding is for the most part not the product of reason, but of experience, itself direct or indirect and learned from tradition. Reason is a tool to shape and enhance understanding, not to build it ex nihilo.
And thats because any coherent statement about the world needs to be grounded, ultimately, in certain beliefs and values that are not proven logically nor are “self-evident”, whatever that means.
For example, you need to accept the existence of an underlying reality and trust that your sensorial experience is an approximate description of that. You accept that you have a consciousness and values and that your actions steem from those. You assume the same for other people as well. Those are all prerrogatives of reason. Without them, no rational process is justifiable. And they are all beyond the scope of reason.
But go try to prove all that, my friend.