Have the forums been functioning EXCRUCIATINGLY slow for anyone today besides me?
K, well I’m probably wrong than. But it seems to me that he means that I am presuming more than is warranted when he calls me arrogant. If my statement is correct however, and he doesn’t understand the universalizability principle, then I wasn’t really being arrogant. I know that’s a bit of a stretch. But I’m not sure I used it incorrectly.
Did you read the page I linked?
Just the part you quoted. I understood an ad hominem to mean responding with a personal attack instead of a logical argument. I was wrong about that. I’m still not sure though that there was no ad hominem.
Yes, LvMI has been running slow.
That’s quite a lot of pages of oversimplified arguments, people completely talking past eachother, a repetition of the naturalistic fallacy in multiple ways and a total inability on hashem’s part to provide any real grounds for his claims.
So Brainpolice what’s your justification for natural rights ?
edit : or justification for a lack of natural rights if that’s the case.
Stephen,
I drew the line. What is the basis of your assertion that I don’t understand the universalizability principle? (That latter isn’t tautological unintentionally both in the rhetorical and thus denoting the propositional logic, too.) And don’t say because I didn’t answer your questions that came up later, after the fact. I drew the line right at when you made the initial assertion. Anarchist Cain answered your question and you apologized - why did you find the need to apologize?
I know what it means. I’m talking about what came up before and continued to come up in a mixture with more pertinent questioning.
OK, we get it. How about some proof?
And all this proves is that there should be now law requiring humans to murder each other. If you try saying “if there were no laws requiring that people refrain from murdering each other, humans would not exist”. I’d say, sure, but if there were no laws requiring that humans refrain to taking heroin, the same thing would happen. So, I guess we should ban heroin now, right?
And what, in your opinion, is so good about human survivial anyway?
How did you define the term “aggression”? You probably had defined the term “aggression” to constitute the following actions:
- Killing innocent people without consent
- Seizing property from someone without consent
- Enslaving people
- Vandalizing homes
- Taxing people without the option to secede
- Regulating people’s lives
For example, when you say that a person has a ‘right to free speech’, that means that they can say anything they want without suffering from aggression. However, because you had defined the term ‘aggression’ as the above list, the person that has a ‘right to free speech’ cannot have their income taxed, and lives regulated. Therefore, you had defined that all rights are necessarily synonymous to ‘non-aggression’.
Contrastingly, a “right to regulate people’s lives” is self-contradictiory by definition. Because you had defined ‘rights’ as necessarily synonymous to non-aggression, and that regulations are aggressive, you had contradicted yourself.
‘All rights are necessarily non-aggressive’, at least according to your definition of ‘rights’ and ‘aggression’.
One additional fact: Some people will refrain from killing one another even if there exists no law requiring people to refrain from murdering one another. Those people refrain from killing because they feel empathy for one another.
Same thing with heroin: Heroin will kill some people, but it will not kill some others.
Why do you not want to set laws prohibiting heroin but want to set laws prohibiting killing? That sounds like cognitive dissonance.
Because heroin is voluntarily injected into your blood system. If you voluntarily consent to being murdered, the it is assisted suicide. That is a very basic distinction.
But that depends on your definition of ‘voluntary’. Usually, ancaps equate ‘voluntary’ with ‘non-aggressive’. Therefore, that depends on your definition of ‘aggression.’
You defined ‘murder’ as ‘aggressive’ and injecting heroin as ‘non-aggressive’.
What if I made a loud noise in my neighborhood without everybody’s consent? What if I emitted carbon dioxide without everyone’s consent? What if I interfered on someone’s broadcasting frequency without his or her consent? Do you define all those as aggressive or voluntary (non-aggressive)?
Why did you label killing an innocent person without consent as ‘aggression’ when you did not label the above scenarios ‘aggression’? Sounds like cognitive dissonance.
But that was neve rpart of Hashem’s original exposition.
Deriving consent from a party or person. That is a loose definition of voluntary. I am not one of those libertarians who simply thinks that if there is no aggression in the world then there can be no dominance.
That would be a question of whose property you are on.
Again a question of property rights.
A form of aggression against the property rights of another.
Strange. You made this statement without even waiting for my replies as to what is and isn’t aggression. I don’t apperciate being told what I am supposedly thinking. Don’t do it again. It is tasteless and in poor manners.
What can I say? I don’t like to see several individuals pelting a single one with multiple criticisms. I am also a natural rights theorist and I’m sure if I say something Hashem feels differently about, then he will raise his objection.
I was setting forth my original position for MarxisStudent because we were going to carry on a debate here.
For the umpteenth time: natural law for any organism states what is good and what is bad for the organism. Thus, the law is “murder is bad,” not like the positive law “do not murder,” or even something as ridiculous as “murder is impossible.” The law holds, murder is indeed bad. For if the law were “murder is good,” then it would follow that humans would feel an imperative to murder (since the laws are based on the nature of a given organism), and yet we don’t and even if we did, we would not exist.
Heroin use does not necessarily invade the property of anyone, and its effects are not universal, so I’m not sure what natural law has to say about heroin in respect to humans
Says you.
Arbitrary/fabricated distinction TBH, try better. You are conflating “natural” with “primitive” without having offered any proof that primitive societies don’t have property (nonsense, even ones with use-based concepts of ownership do.)
The task of political philosophy is to assign rules regarding the use of scarce goods. It is a theory of legal norms, specifically who is justified in controlling a given resource. Justification only comes about in the course of interpersonal propositional exchange. If someone denies this, they are attempting to justify a proposition to another person and affirm the very thing they are denying i.e. they are caught in a performative contradiction.
When a proponent makes an argument they must presuppose that their opponent is capable of understanding the truth of a proposition in the same way they do and must therefore be based on objective criteria. The only truly objective criteria however, are those that must necessarily presuppose argumentation and its superset, action.
Now what this implies in the field of ethics is that all distinctions between justified and unjustified claims over scarce goods must be based on praxeological criteria. Any argument which is not based on objective criteria, but on arbitrary value judgments is incapable of convincing one’s opponent by argumentative force alone. But convincing one’s opponent by argumentative force alone is itself logically presupposed by the proponent in the course of making an argument. Therefore any argument in favour of an ethic based on arbitrary categories such as need or income inequality must be regarded as unjustified.
Furthermore, certain legal norms must be logically presupposed during the course of interpersonal argumentation. Both participants must allow full unhampered control over the other’s body during the course of the exchange. Otherwise the participants in the exchange cannot meaningfully argue. At the very least, both participants must have control over their own vocal chords, ears and brains and since there is no praxeological distinction between different parts of the body, it is impossible for anyone engaged in argumentation to deny the right of one’s opponent the uncoerced use of their entire body. In addition, for one to engage in argumentation, they must also occupy some standing room, or land. Because there is no praxeological distinction between different types of land, the right to homestead must be assumed by anyone attempting to justify any legal norm whatsoever. Also, there is no praxeological difference between actors who are engaged in argumentation and those who are not, both legal norms must be considered justified for every human being.
Sorry it’s not shorter.
This is your premise, and it’s wrong, so your entire argument, so long as it allegedly derives logically from this premise, is wrong.
The task of political philosophy is rather to describe the laws already assigned by nature, and their applications concerning humans.