A question for natural rights advocates and/or Rothbardians (or anyone well acquainted with the theories).
If natural rights for humans are property rights, derived from our nature, part of which is our consciousness and our necessity to reason and to act, then what about when we are asleep or otherwise incapacitated (under anesthesia or high on DMT). Do we lose our rights then? Why?
I don’t see why rights would be automatically thrown out the window while asleep.
The human is still a rational thinking being, he/she is just shut down at the moment.
But I suppose that this would also bring up another question, does a person in a permanent vegatative state have property rights?
I think the answer is that rights depend on moral agency, which in turn depends on rational capacity. Since a sleeping person does not lose their rational capacity, they don’t lose their rights.
On the rights of the rationally impaired, see this, 52:40.
If I am not at my house because I am at my workplace, does my house not belong to me anymore?
I think we all know intuitively what the right answer is… don’t be afraid to use your intuitions. Its typically how libertarian thinkers handle weird situations.
Obviously as long as you are asleep you are not able to exercise your rights, but if you ever wake up, look out!
So it’s like other property rights? Once we homestead our body, then we retain title to it even while we’re away?
Mind and body are not separate entities in my opinion.
That’s fine, I was just trying to establish an answer consistent with natural law and Rothbardianism to explain if/why we have rights while asleep…
If right’s are defined when a human demonstrates that he has them, then what about when a human is just sitting there doing nothing? Spacing out?
They still have the capability of showing that they have right’s, they are just not currently demonstrating it.
A human that is sleeping would seem to be no different.
If you are going to be extremely rigid about the definition of when someone has rights, then it seems like the only way that a person could have right’s for their whole life is if they are continually, nonstop, demonstrating that they a rational beings capable of demonstrating rights.
I think you’re right. Case in point, natural law and Rothbardianism aren’t like your last paragraph.
It slipped my mind that some rights can’t be abandoned, intentionally or accidentally, explicitly or implicitly. Such as the right to self-ownership. This should have been obvious because the other scenario taken to it’s logical extreme is a reductio ad absurdum (nobody having rights while they sleep = humans extinct).
It’s morally wrong to initiate sexual intercourse with women who are asleep, if that’s what you’re asking. Nice try though.
Damnit now you tell me!
If you were to fully apply the implications of that assertion to the method of your inquiries within the demarcation of the science of praxeology, of economics et cetera, you would thereby entirely extirpate the heretofore existence of the autonomity of that science, the science of praxeology. It would thereby become, to you, yet an other branch of the science of physics.
No one would dispute the fact that the science of biology, geology, medicine, vel cetera analyze physical phenomena. Yet, simultaneously, no one would suggest, as two examples, that we should or could, atleast at the current stage of the development of our corpus of knowledge regarding the world, attempt to describe the nature of the transitions between the various stages of the evolution of a species or the functioning of the lymphotic system of an animal via a series of references to the equations and laws of mechanics, a branch of the science of physics.
The physics of atoms does not explain the physics of planets. The perhelion of mercury for example. Just because you know the lower laws it does not mean it is sufficient to understand the next layer up, but it is necessary.
I do not really understand what point you meant to advance in your response, above. I, in the post that you quoted, just meant to imply that whether the mind and the body are separate or whether they are distinct, praxeology, as an autonomous science, considers them to be the former, separate. So, unless you can reduce economics to biology, to mechanics, vel cetera, you must acquiesce to the method of praxeology, to consider that the mind and the body are separate, that the mind controls the body.
If you entirely and completely understand the laws and concepts of the lowest level of description, viz. physics, you necessarily entirely and completely understand the laws and concepts of any of the higher levels of description, e.g. biology, praxeology.
However, in such a situation, the separate “levels of description” would be obsolete. We employ the separate “levels of description” merely because our knowledge is incomplete. Each new “level of description” employs a simplified, abridged version of the foundation of the previous “level of description”.
“The physics of atoms does not explain the physics of planets” only because our knowledge of the “physics of atoms” is incomplete.
Actually, I would say that’s contextual. If it’s asked for before hand…
[:P]
I can see that going horribly wrong…
Some guy has sex with some drunk passed out girl and then later he claims she said he could right before she passed out, lol.
Does it truly matter if your agent of action is a mind or a mindbody? I feel that the mind body combination removes some of the trouble surrounding rights changing as our state changes.
Not exactly, the group behaviors of atoms is different that the behavior of an atom. The group behavior of cells is different that the group behavior of proteins.
To what degree could you say you know how a cell works based on your knowledge of proteins? The system has a different description than its component parts right? We would not attribute the concept of “thinking” to a neuron, but we would to a mass of them.
If the agent described is a “mindbody”, the notion, as an example, of control, of property, is nonsensical. If the nature of my mind derives solely from the nature of my body, my mind is my body and my body is my mind. If, then, I claim that I own myself, that I possess exclusive control of myself, my statement is incoherent. For, if I control myself, what controls me who controls myself? and what controls what controls me who controls myself? et cetera, ad infinitum. In order to form a coherent notion of control, of property, one must somehow extirpate that infinite regression. In order to do so, you must assume that a “first cause” of movement exists, a consciousness existent apart from the body that it controls.
In the above argument, you remain trapped within the paradigm of levels of description. If, as I mentioned in my previous post, one were to entirely and completely understand the laws and concepts of the lowest level of description, one would necessarily entirely and completely understand the laws and concepts of any of the higher levels of description. But those higher levels of description would become obsolete. For we only employ “levels of description” because our knowledge is incomplete. And, with only one level of description, the notion of a “level” becomes incoherent. If we could reduce biology to physics, biology would not be an autonomous science anymore, it would merely be an arbitrary and meaningless demarcation within physics.
Is a nation more than merely a collection of individuals?
Are the proteins the only components of the cell?