Just to be clear, are you saying that a man not believing a father has the right to yank his daughter’s fingernails out is evidence of being hyper-emotional?
No. I just do not appreciate your opinion that I have gone off the “rational deep end”.
I imagine a band of cultists non-fatally crucifying their daughters on their open-air property and doing unspeakable things to their bodies for days on end. I imagine decent and rational libertarian saying, “This has to be stopped!” and you telling him, “Oh don’t be so emotional! And by the way, if you interfere, I’ll call the local PDA on your emotional ass.”
But if you have NO consent by default, and the other party (for whatever reason) can’t give it or withhold it from you - where do you get the justification that you can just assume consent, e.g. rape someone in a coma? If there was a cure for the coma patient, it should not be given because the patient cannot give consent to the doctor. In your view, the doctor could give the medication (even if he knew it was lethal) because the coma patient has no rights.
Would you say the same thing if they were doing it to animals? Or what if it was just “tickle torture” for a few hours?
Yes, in your scenario, that would be hyper-emotional. Would I necessarily stop them from trying to stop this dad? Probably not. I may even participate in stopping him.
I was referring to people that were not in the care of someone else. If to stay alive other people have to make decisions for you, then you do not have rights anymore.
That’s the second time you’ve said that, but you didn’t mention it at all in the initial post. Where have you shown this?
The reason I ask is that there are many situations where a person would temporarily lose the ability to grant consent. When you’re unconscious, in a deep sleep, extremely drunk, etc. I can ask you, “Can I take all the money out of your wallet?” and you will be unable to respond. Does that mean, then, that you lose your rights while you’re unconscious? If I spike your drink, sodomize you, and take all of the money you have on you, am I only guilty of spiking your drink, and not of the theft and rape? You weren’t able to grant consent.
Personally, I think you retain your rights, as I assume you will eventually wake up and regain your ability to grant or withhold consent. The inability to consent is only temporary.
EDIT: I see this was already addressed, to some extent. The point I want to stress is that the inability to consent is a temporary iniability. “You just have to wake up” is a change over time in a similar way to “you just have to grow up”. Childhood is temporary. It just takes longer to grow up than to sleep off a drunken stupor.
childhood can only be grown out of by the manufacturing of an adult brain. i.e. it is akin to the extended difference between a lump of metal as it passes down a treadmill in a theoretical car factory, until eventually there is a car that can drive. hey feautus dont have a rational brain, well, 2 years of nourishment and exercise and you will have constructed that brain. is a little different to hey jons asleep and could be woken by a pat on the back. there is a continuum here. which comatose and other issues falls in between.
waking up only requires the time it takes to change state not build a state and change to it.
i.e. i consider that if your key is not turned in the cars ignition, your car wont drive. well, not until you twist your wrist just so…
this is a different ‘temporary impact on driving capability’ issue than having your car get crashed and wiped out.
now its just junk metal that no amount of keytwisting will move you forewards or backwards.
one can also construct inbetween scenarios as one scopes out the boundary between the qualititave difference between “capable but just not doing it right now”. and “not capable of doing it fullstop”.
its a boundary problem, but we seem to cope with boundary problems in other situations… i think spidey is on the right track… hopefully we will all get there some day, me included.
The only real difference is time. Children have brains. They just don’t use the same parts as adults. Sleeping men use different parts of their brains as awake men. It just takes longer for children to start using the other parts of the brain.
If all rights are negative rights, then that’s not true at all. You do not have the right to aggress upon another’s person or property. That doesn’t mean you have to keep someone alive, just that you must refrain from killing.
Other people make decisions for you because they own your care, not your person. They do so presumably because caring for you gives them some sort of psychic benefit. They may stop caring for you (give up ownership of your care, making it homesteadable) at any time. That doesn’t mean they can kill you, though.
its both a longer passage of time and a larger degree of material changes.
we obviously have different views on the particular continuum in question, with you lumping waking men, on one side, and children and sleeping men on the other. whereas i see sleeping men as closer to waking men than children. since i can wake a man like so… but i cant wake a child, i can only wait for them
Your time preference does not negate my rights.
time preference is a technical term that doesnt seem to apply at all to this example. i will assume you mean my preference for focusing on considering a persons capabilities over periods of time does not negate rights of those that do have rights, but only dont seem to given the timeframe in which i am considering them. lets talk about these supposed rights then. are they related to the rationality of the agent at all? if they are related to the capability are we going to admit that capability is a concept defined over a continuum or are we going to deny it?
good posts JackCuyler. You’ve been saying what I would have said, so, no need for me to add anything.
Let’s drop the sleeping man and replace him with a drugged man. He cannot simply wake up, and no amount of shaking will stir him. He needs to sleep it off. We agree that even though he cannot assert his rights, he has not lost them. My contention is that the reason he has not lost them is that it’s presumed that when he wakes, he will be a rational agent. The same, then, with children. It’s presumed that when they grow up, they will be rational agents. Therefore they have rights.
Those cultists have obviously given up the ownership of their daughters’ care. This care, just like anything else unowned, it’s available to be homesteaded.
are you explicitly telling me that your drugged man is not a rational agent? and yet has rights in so much it is presumed that there will be eventually be a rational agent in place of the man should the man have enough time to ‘not be drugged’?
(is this not equivalent to supposing that a lump of metal is not a driveable car and yet we can speak of its fuel consumption since its presumed that there will eventually be a driveable car inplace of the lump of metal if we only give the auto-constructing-robot enough time and materials to do its work…?)
…trying to understand the arguments…
…trying to understand the arguments…
I’m claiming that the part of the brain that controls rational thought is not working. Further, there’s no sensory input to rationalize, and no way to act at all, much less rationally. He is incapable of any thought whatsoever, much less rational thought.
It’s like an old car with a flooded carb. It is incapable of running. Once the carb has dried out, it will run again.
in your analogy the fetal child has not yet had a carb installed, let alone one thats in there that needs drying out. its construction versus maintenance. its on a continuum but we can judge conceptual difference i maintain.
one relevant difference between a drugged man and fetal child. is that the former had at a point in the past demonstrated his rational faculty, whereas the child has not. so certainly there is more evidence (i.e. the levels of evidence are not identical even if you were to maintain that there are positive arguments for both)
I was actually referring to a whole, live, breathing, outside-of-the-womb child, not a fetus.
To take the car analogy further, then, it’s a fully formed car that’s not running right. The timing and fuel pressure need to be adjusted. It can take a loooong time to get it right.
I agree that there is more evidence that the drugged man will be rational when he wakes. I will maintain, as you suggest, that there is a positive argument that the child will one day be a rational being - thousands of years of history. The child that becomes a completely non-rational adult is a rather rare being.