i reject 2) and it so happens that 5) and 6) would be true, if only 5) and 6) were worded better (to be properly comprehensive about what they concern), for example: being morally obliged to ‘stand around and die’ or ‘sit around and die’ or ‘whatever else can be done without violating the cabin’ (basically everything that is doable that does not involve violating the cabin, not one particular one of them i.e. ‘sitting’)
isnt it cute how sterba tries to sweep the property rights fundamentalists away with a turn of phrase:
It is sometimes thought that there is a different interpretation of libertarianism where rights, not liberties, are fundamental and where another argument is needed to establish the conclusion I have just established here.[69] Under this presumptively different interpretation, the rights taken as fundamental are a strong right to property and a weak right to life. Yet, given that for libertarians such rights are also rights of noninterference, that is, (negative) liberty rights, the question arises of why we should accept these particular rights of noninterference (liberties) and not others—which is just the question that arises when we consider the conflicting liberties to which an ideal of liberty gives rise. What this shows is that the “rights” interpretation of libertarianism is not really distinct from the “liberty” interpretation we have just been discussing.[70]
Danny,
I think I’ll pass replying to your last message. I’m not sure what point you are making and the message is too convoluted (for the lazy me at least). If you want to make your point more concisely, feel free to, but if not, that’s OK as well.
Sorry to jump in again.
Donny:
What if it was a cabin with room for only one person? What if the occupant was also freezing to death? What if there was an alarm system that automatically shot and killed the intruder? What if aliens threatened the man in the cabin that they would kill him if he allowed anyone else to enter?
Are we basically saying that whoever has the best story has the right-of-way?
This is nothing but a lifeboat scenario which has been answered countless times. You’re proposing a “rights” system(I use that word very lightly), where someone’s property rights are only granted to them if the context allows it. Tom only has a right to HIS stuff if there isn’t a hungry person outside. But this isn’t a rights system at all. It’s a priviledge system. You are granted the priviledge of having stuff, so long as your context doesn’t determine that someone else has more of a right to it than you.
But that’s downright absurd. Tom ALWAYS has the negative liberty to not have his house broken into and his food stolen. It matters not if the person doing the stealing is very hungry.
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If something applies in all cases, it’s absolute. If it applies in some cases but not others, it is dependent on some condition, i.e. it is conditional. Those are the only two possibilities.
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A right is a justified claim. If someone violates that claim, it cannot be justified. If it is, they never had that right in the first place. A justified infringement of rights is a contradiction in terms.
And a privilege system requires a hierarchy to organize who has what privilege when, separate from the actors in the relationship.
This is the justification arbiter that Danny is unable to clearly identify.
Of course, the arbiter will play the role of a state. That’s why it’s so hard to identify. [;)]
I find it hilarious that by trying to improve on a notion of rights, this thick/thin stuff has managed to come full circle back to having a state.
Why is it then that libertarians have no real problem in delineating positive and negative rights and showing how the former collapse into absurdity? And what is a “weak” right to life? One not to enslave people to provide for you?
Hmm…tooootally forgot about this! Sorry to have walked away from the debate in the middle! It was brought to my attention by a flurry of visits to my blog from another thread where people said I was totally refuted in this thread…yeesh. I guess it would make sense to defend myself here?
Um…so here’s what was happening before I disappeared. I offered the following set of claims:
- Tom has a right that his cabin not be broken into
- If Klemm were freezing to death, and the only way to save his life would be to break into Tom’s cabin, Klemm would be justified in doing so.
- If rights needed to be absolute, and if (2) were true, then we would have to reject (1)
- Therefore, if (3) were true, then either (1) is false, or rights are not absolute.
Since I think it’s rather important that we don’t reject (1), it makes sense that I would think we would need to soften our conception of rights. If there’s a controversy about (2), then this could be offered:
- If Klemm would not be justified in breaking into Tom’s cabin, then he would be morally obligated to sit down and die.
- Klemm is not morally obligated to sit down and die.
- If (5) and (6) are true, then (2) is true.
Thedesolateone and NirgrahamUK both noticed that in (5), I was loose with my words. Obviously I didn’t mean that Tom would literally be obligated to sit on the ground and wait for death. I was trying to convey that Tom would need to resign himself to an all-but-certain death. And in (6), my point is that if anything seems uncontroversial, it is that Klemm would not be morally obligated in this situation to resign himself to an all-but-certain death if he could save his life by breaking into the cabin. This seems like something that Rawls might call a “provisional fixed point”; if I were being asked to choose between rejecting a moral theory and rejecting (6), it seems almost certain that I would declare the example to be a reductio for the moral theory.
MatthewF then (politely!) interjected, offering a number of alternative examples where it would probably be pretty difficult to decide who should have the right of way, and where it actually seems pretty likely that there would be some conflict over what should be done. And I certainly don’t mean to suggest that I can offer a theory that perfectly captures the priorities of all morally relevant considerations in making moral decisions, or that something like that would even be possible. My point here was that there are other things that are morally important in making decisions besides property rights – like one’s own life – and Klemm shouldn’t always be expected to subordinate all other considerations to property rights. So in a situation where he can be certain that the only harm would be the invasion and destruction of some of Tom’s property, and his life was at stake, it wouldn’t be wicked for Klemm to break in. Surely if the situation were different – if there were other bad things that would happen if he broke in – it might be less clear that he would be justified. And surely we could imagine that there might be some situations in which we would think that Klemm was being a jerk if he decided to save his life; for example, what if in order to save his life, he had to do something that would cause the rest of humanity to be driven into horrible enslavement at the hands of brutal aliens? I would think that was a pretty not-okay thing for him to do. But that doesn’t mean that it would be evil for him to break into the cabin! The fact that someone would need to say, “But what if things were worse?” seems to only be evidence for my point, doesn’t it?
Nibbler followed up Matthew’s point by suggesting that if rights can be legitimately infringed, then they are “privileges” that are “granted” only when someone doesn’t “need” something badly enough that would be incompatible with you having the right. I think this is a weird way to talk about the issue. First, there doesn’t seem to be anyone who is granting anyone anything – liberty student would later latch onto this in order to further condemn me, but I’m pretty sure that this idea is entirely Nibbler’s, and not mine. Second, it isn’t like you totally lose your right to something if someone would be justified in infringing it. For example, if Klemm would be justified in breaking into the cabin, that doesn’t mean that everyone would be justified in doing it. I mean, imagine that Sandra were sitting on a mountain far away looking at Klemm through a telescope, and she saw that he was in a situation that would justify his breaking into the cabin to save his life. And imagine that just after Klemm broke into the cabin, Sandra jumped on her motorcycle, drove over to the cabin and let herself in as well. It seems like she would clearly be unjustified in being there, and the reason would be that Tom had a right against people breaking in. Klemm’s circumstances justified his infringing that right, but Sandra’s circumstances were different and she has no justification for infringing the right. So I guess I just disagree with Nibbler’s understanding of my view.
Stephen Forde then added two points: First, that if rights do not apply in all instances (I take “apply in all instances” to mean that exceptions are ruled out), then they are “conditional.” Second, that it is an inherent feature of rights that they are not conditional; they must apply in all instances. If this is the case, then I would hold back on calling my view a “rights” view; I would call it a “schmrights” view, and insist ardently that people don’t have most of the “rights” that libertarians often attribute to them, but perhaps it makes sense to say that they have “schmrights” which sound a lot like libertarian conceptions of “rights” except that they’re more plausible. For the purpose of this conversation, though, I’m going to use the word “rights” where I really mean “schmrights”; hopefully people can keep this in mind.
Finally, Jon popped in to point out that positive rights are crazy, and so talking about a “strong” right to something is always going to be crazy. This wasn’t directed at me, but I’d just point out that libertarians are comfortable with talking about strong rights when there are contracts; that is, if you contractually agree to provide with a car, then I have a strong right to get the car. It’s not a “weak” right to the car because the point is not that other people would be unjustified in stopping me from pursuing the car myself; it’s that someone else needs to provide me with it (namely, the guy who signed the contract). I think that this terminology is useful, and that we really do talk this way: when you contract to provide me with the car, we say that I gain a right to a car, and the right is a strong one – you have to provide it for me. Obviously strong rights claims need to be confined to their proper place, but I don’t think that we should necessarily abandon the terminology.
Danny, you’re fantastic with rhetoric. Including the bit about forgetting the discussion. [;)]
The entire thing is farcical. 2 is false and 5 is a non-sequitur. Therefore 3 and 6 are false, 4 and 7 are irrelevant. The argument now looks like this.
You don’t even have a working circular argument to advance.
When you last posted, you still had not made your argument, and neither have you made it with your latest responses, which while verbose, contain no answers to the fundamental flaws exposed in your reasoning. The best you could muster was rights = schmrights in response to Stephen Forde, which one could generously expect as an argument from a preteen.
If 1 is true, then necessarily all 2 thru 7 are irrelevant. You know this, which is why you advance that it’s a right, but we need to soften it aka “make it not a right”, when we all understand rights to be absolutes.
The problem is, when increasing the malleability of the property right to forge your argument, you undermine the possibility for any rights, including Klemm’s supposed right to life or survival, which also must be softened under a schmrights [sic] system because absolute rights do not exist per your previous responses and if they do, you haven’t yet explained why there is any difference between Klemm’s right to life and Tom’s right to property.
Put simply, Klemm can’t have an absolute right to life, unless rights are absolutes. In which case, Tom’s right to property cannot be softened.
Haha sorry; the last few weeks have been pretty crazy. I’ve been getting my living situation together for the fall, finishing up at my job, planning my summer, and having a really in-depth discussion on the subject of metaethics on my blog…a lot of stuff has gotten lost in the shuffle! But no matter; you haven’t forgotten [:P]
In setting about writing a response to you, I’m finding that it’s difficult for me to engage your position, since in dismissing my conception of rights as baseless, you’ve offered precisely no defense of your conception of rights. It seems to me that there is no plausible argument for the idea that we should believe that there are standards by which people ought to be treated in every situation, regardless of the urgency or importance of the ends that could be promoted by breaking with those standards. And yet you seem to take such a view as the baseline, such that you’re willing to deny things that I think most people believe to be clearly true in order to maintain your position. But why?
It should be clear to any onlooker that getting to my position is built on the idea that there are certain claims that we want to take as provisionally fixed and to see if we can arrive at an understanding that allows us to integrate all of the claims at once. The point is to build an understanding of how rights works from the ground up. It is intuitively plausible that people deserve to be treated a certain way and that this is captured by a notion of “rights.” But it also is intuitively plausible (to almost everyone except the people on this board) that in extreme situations, we can be justified in treating people in ways that would ordinarily not be justified – like when Klemm breaks into Tom’s cabin. If we understand rights in a rigid way, we will not be able to integrate the claims; if we adopt a softer view, everything works. The theory allows us to get our views into order.
For most liberal thinkers, the cabin example is decisive: it forces us to reject the rigid view in favor of the softer view, since surely we would not want to say that Klemm is morally required to resign himself to death. The illustration forces us to acknowledge that property rights are morally important, but they aren’t the only thing that’s morally important. Surely Klemm’s life matters too! This point can be strengthened by putting Klemm in an even worse situation and making the infringment upon Tom’s rights even more insignificant. Imagine if Klemm were bitten by a poisonous insect and he knew that he would die a slow and agonizing death if he didn’t immediately cover the bite in gasoline. And imagine that sitting outside of Tom’s cabin was one of those red containers of gasoline. Would Klemm be justified in using some of it? Obviously! Does that mean that Tom doesn’t have a right to his gasoline – that it’s as good as in the commons? Obviously not!
What you’re committing yourself to is a position that is not logically false, but seems ludicrous and unfounded. On what basis could you say that Klemm is morally obligated to die a slow and agonizing death because it’s supremely important that Tom’s claim to his gasoline be exhaulted? You are supporting a position which seems absurd – the fact that your view commits you to this is a reductio against your view! I don’t think the burden should be on me, then; I’m the one whose position conforms to common sense. What do you think is going on?
Right but in this instance they do not violate negative rights and that is why they are unproblematic. They’re voluntariy created obligations, as it were.
I’m not dismissing your position as baseless. Your position is baseless because it suffers from the basic logic error that some rights are absolute, some of the time. And the person violating rights gets to determine that.
Argumentatum ad populum Danny. C’mon…
Oh man, at least you made me laugh at 4:45 AM.
Sure, if we muddle up the definitions then A != A.
A = B. A = C and so on. We can make A anything! All problems solved! Tom doesn’t own a cabin, no one owns anything without property rights! Klemm isn’t violating property rights that doesn’t exist! Nothing exists!
Nir already addressed that as a non-sequitur.
No, that is just a rhetorical trick. This is all a lifeboat Danny. You’re trying to solve lifeboats, to provide moral justifications for emotional discomfort by positing that no rights exist, because for a right to be a right, it must be absolute.
It doesn’t matter how outrageous or unobtrusive you make the example, the question is not one of magnitude. It is an error of logic as described in the last two sentences of my last post.
Put simply, Klemm can’t have an absolute right to life, unless rights are absolutes. In which case, Tom’s right to property cannot be softened.
It seems ludicrous and unfounded to you. The universe according to Danny and the mob. The universe based on how people feel today.
Because the same right he claims to live, is the same right that prevents him from aggressing to live. And again, you are advancing the non-sequitur.
Are slow and agonizing emo-words meant to inspire compassion for your position? Am I supposed to feel guilty for opposing relief from a slow and agonizing death, or is this appeal for readers, now thoroughly confused by your argument that sounded so good, but maybe doesn’t quite make sense?
Klemm is dying a slow and agonizing death because he is an idiot. He got himself in a bad way, and in your example, he decides to lie down and die if he can’t violate someone else’s rights. He doesn’t move on and look for other opportunities to save himself because that would imply that he is able to determine the outcome without Tom. He doesn’t knock and ask Tom for consent, because that would verify that Tom has consent to give, which would undermine your premise that Tom has no absolute property rights to exercise. Klemm doesn’t seek cooperation and mutual aid because that too would imply that Tom has rights which must be respected by Klemm in order to save himself.
According to you, Klemm’s only option is to sit there and die.
To you.
lmao.
You’re proposing a notion called “Respectarianism” based on positive liberty. You are the one who proposed the lifeboat. You are the one by your own admission that is not in accord with people on this site. Seems to me the burden of proof is squarely on you despite the attempts at the beginning and end of your response to shift it to me.
Whose common sense? Nothing you have proposed has made sense. You’ve advanced the same non-sequitur multiple times, and I’ve pointed out the obvious logical error in your premise.
I think your issue can be resolved by just disowning the notion of absolutes and rights. If you can disown all absolutes, and all rights, then we have a perfectly ethereal paradigm that you can dictate your sense of morality and common sense to and watch it form a new soft reality that most people find true even if it is illogical and immoral.
I’ve noticed an unfortunate tendency in libertarians to fall into the dualistic fallacy (false dichotomy), i.e. that something is either entirely true or entirely false. But not everything is black and white; there are shades of grey.
Danny, how would you respond to this? Is an absolute right to life false? (Scenario where aliens demand Bob sacrifices himself or else they blow up the Earth sorta thing?)
That’s the whole point of the hypothetical scenario. Klemm is in a position where his only way to survive is to break into Tom’s cabin. You can’t just change the terms of the scenario. We’re trying to figure out what is just under these specific circumstances.
things that are shades of grey are shades of grey and things that are black and white are black and white. you are obviously strawmanning to say that anyone here believes ‘everything is black and white’ though we can probably excuse this as nothing but loose speech and not what you meant, presumably you mean that moral issues are grey and not black and white. but this is a point that you might need to put some effort into proving.
yes, its false, people have property rights in not being bodily agressed against, i./e. not being positively killed. this a is a negative right to their bodies. they do not have a positive right to life, i.e. a positive right to a non-dead body.
Klem has a right not to be killed by any moral agent, he does not have a right against nature not to be killed. if the only way he can escape nature is to aggress on the property of others then he is the bad man, to the extent that he performs these aggressions. Even though he might awaken our sympathies , his mortal danger does not give him carte blanche over the property rights of others. this isnt even a lifeboat situation, a lifeboat situation would be Mr A Klem, and Mr B Klem exposed in nature and their only hope is to use resources of the cabin, but the resources are only sufficient to save the one and not the other. lets say the cabin owner explicitly allows the use of his cabin for exceptional invasion. then how do A Klem and B Klem solve their moral dilemma, well, whatever they do they better do it non-violently right…?
Given the scenario Klem’s morally permissable actions are circumscribed by his inability to morally invade Tom’s cabin. This should not be all that shocking. It may well be that a desire to own 1million$ may only be achieved by some set of people through the use of force, armed robbery for example, and it will be the case that such actions would be immoral. libertarian fellow travellers have trouble as they instinctivly feel that the prolonging of a life through time is a more worthy project than that of the material enrichment of some life. This is just a feeling and can’t be justified.
What I don’t understand is why doesn’t the “needy” person knock on the door of the cabin and explain his position nicely? Why bust in and act all crazy? If somebody was busting in my house and therefore no discourse occurred for all I know this “needy” person is psycho and wants to kill me so I shoot him. Now if he was nicey nicey about it and knocked on the door like a reasonable person and asked for assistance, then at least I would understand what’s going on instead of having somebody bust in like a beast.
In other words, this scenario shows nothing but an animal contending to overthrow and take somebody’s own life and property. It’s a let’s make life all about - king of the hill. Human life is much more than being animalistic. It’s quite simple really. Don’t complicate this Donny with a pet project. Reasonable people sit down and talk events through. Donny with an A you’ve applied an absurd tangle for yourself.
Liberty student, first of all, your counterargument, “Put simply, Klemm can’t have an absolute right to life, unless rights are absolutes” is at least not necessarily true. Klemm can have an absolute right to life if only some rights are absolute – namely, the right to life – even if other rights are not absolute – namely the right to property. There is no logical problem with that – to imply otherwise would be to imply that there’s a logical problem with saying, “Not all cats are black, but some are.”
But in any case, I’m not sure that I agree that Klemm has an absolute right to life. If Klemm were attacking me, I might think myself justified in infringing his right, or if he were attacking someone else, or if he were falling on me from on top of a cliff and I had a rocket launcher, or if he were strapped to the front of a tank that was coming to run me over and I had an anti-tank gun (h/t to Judith Thomson for the preposterous examples). You can say that the right to life is absolute except in cases like those, and perhaps you do. But as you pointed out, this would be a really weird way to use the word “absolute.” Instead, I think we would want to say that people have a very stringent (non-absolute) right to their lives, and we need certain kinds of justifying reasons if we’re going to infringe those rights. “Klemm is attacking me with a knife” would be an appropriately strong justificatory reason for infringing on Klemm’s right to life. And it seems to me that “Klemm will die if he does not break into Tom’s empty cabin” or “Tom will die a slow and agonizing death if he does not use some of Tom’s gasoline” would be similarly strong justificatory reasons for infringing Tom’s right to not have his cabin broken into or his gasoline used without his permission.
The foundation of your position – that people cannot have absolute rights if rights are not absolute – is completely missing the point. That’s what I was saying to Stephen; if you want to try to win this argument by defining your terms so as to make me wrong by definition, then I can use different terms. The way I’m using the terms is rather prevalent, so I’m hesitant to say that I have no right to them, but if you want to make this a semantic argument then I can shift terms. I am very obviously not arguing that people can have absolute rights if rights are not absolute. I am arguing that people can have non-absolute rights if rights are not absolute. And it is not incoherent to talk about rights as being non-absolute. Most people do talk about rights as if they’re non-absolute!
You move on to write:
Klemm is dying a slow and agonizing death because he is an idiot. He got himself in a bad way, and in your example, he decides to lie down and die if he can’t violate someone else’s rights. He doesn’t move on and look for other opportunities to save himself because that would imply that he is able to determine the outcome without Tom. He doesn’t knock and ask Tom for consent, because that would verify that Tom has consent to give, which would undermine your premise that Tom has no absolute property rights to exercise. Klemm doesn’t seek cooperation and mutual aid because that too would imply that Tom has rights which must be respected by Klemm in order to save himself.
According to you, Klemm’s only option is to sit there and die.
This is the thought experiment I’m working from (h/t to Joel Feinberg):
Suppose that you are on a backpacking trip in the high mountain country when an unanticipated blizzard strikes the area with such ferocity that your life is imperiled. Fortunately, you stumble upon an unoccupied cabin, locked and boarded up for the winter, clearly somebody else’s private property. You smash in a window, enter, and huddle in a corner for three days until the storm abates.
We can imagine that Klemm (my name for the backpacker) has been in the area before and knows that there are no other cabins. We can imagine that he knows all the cabin owners on the mountain and knows that none of them are around, so no matter what in order to save himself he would need to break into someone’s cabin. We can – at least I can – imagine a set of circumstances for Klemm where he knows that his choice is between near-certain death and breaking into a cabin. You seem to believe that this is not the case – that we can never be relatively certain that if we don’t do something, then we will die. But this is ridiculous; of course we can, and Klemm’s circumstances represent one instance of this. And my point is that in circumstances where Klemm faces such a choice, it would not be wicked of him to break into the cabin. You can’t deny that point by saying that in other circumstances, where there are other options, Klemm would not be justified in doing the same thing. The point is only that where there are not other options, it would be permissible to break in.
Your last resort seems to be to deny that “lifeboat” situations have any bearing on moral thinking. But the characteristic mark of a lifeboat situation is that it puts people in circumstances where all of their available options requires them to act against values that normally win out in making moral decisions. Normally, the right to property wins out, and normally the importance of preserving one’s own life doesn’t require someone to infringe upon anyone’s right to property. The point of the lifeboat situation is to show that sometimes, these values can conflict with each other, and we’re forced to make a choice. In the standard lifeboat situation, where you will die if you do not kill the other person in the lifeboat, this is made difficult because the values in question are so strong – killing someone for selfish reasons seems so horrible, but so does dying in the lifeboat. In this situation, I’m not trying to make things so difficult. I think that the moral importance of Tom’s property rights in the backpacker example so clearly pale in comparison to the moral importance of Klemm’s saving his life that the choice is clear: break into the cabin.
Nirgraham and wilderness, the last paragraph in my response to liberty student applies in some measure to your comments.
Has anyone asked Tom his opionion in this scenario? I admit that when I first read this, I assumed Tom was not in the cabin at the time, and therefore unable to give consent at the time of Klemm’s entry. Is that the case? If so, then the whole debate is moot. The only person able to determine if Klemm violated Tom’s property rights is Tom. Period. If Tom’s property rights are absolute (and I agree they are) then Tom has the ability to grant permission to Klemm to use his property, even after the fact.
Since there is no guarantee that Tom will decide that the break-in is a a violation of his property rights, Klemm, is faced with a dilemma; on which side should he err? Should he gamble that Tom is a nice guy who will allow the use of his property in these extreme circumstances, and take the consequenses of being wrong, or should he die without trying?
Under almost all circumstances, we can generally assume what the property ower wants - the locked door, the fence, the “No Trespassing” sign, etc. However, in extreme circumstances, I believe one is justified in at least testing these limits. Who determines if the circumstances are extreme? The would-be trespasser. Who determines if the circumstances were extreme enough? The property owner. So even though Tom’s cabin is locked, Klemm may gamble that Tom would allow him to beak the lock to save his life. He may be wrong, but it’s not our call; it’s Tom’s, and only Tom’s.
Why doesn’t Klemm just ask? Why the need to break in? You have created an immoral dilemma for yourself. I would shoot anybody that broke into my house cause I can’t assume they are cold and starving. How the f-k would I know unless they could easily just knock at the door, ask for help, and thus explain their situation. I’m sure many options could be panned out from there. Your lifeboat scenario is unrealistic.