I don't recall which of Simone Weil's works this is from, but in terms of suggesting the ineffectiveness of rights, she presented this dialog of one person pleading with a much more powerful one:
There aren't any fundamental rights which require someone else to provide them to you. For example, your right to free speech does not oblige others to provide a platform for you.
Now, "rights" can be created by law, but those are a different meaning of the word. A more apt word would be one of "privilege", "license", "obligation" or "power".
For example, it is often said that the President has the right to veto legislation. No, he doesn't. He has the power to veto legislation.
The words right, privilege, license, obligation, and power are probably the most misused words in the English language.
What Ive noticed on this topic as a staunch proponent of individual rights from their enlightenment and renaissance roots is that far too many people pontificating on this subject don't even know the difference between a negative right and a positive right, nor do they understand the perils and antithetical nature of collective rights.
> There aren't any fundamental rights which require someone else to provide them to you.
But don’t all of the fundamental rights require someone else to protect them for you? Otherwise they aren’t rights, they are just observations of the state of the world.
In the end, what is the difference between protecting a right and defending a right? They both require action and resources, and are both an obligation.
We empower the government to guarantee our rights.
They are rights whether the government exists or not, and whether the government enforces peoples' rights or not.
For example, slavery violates peoples' fundamental right to liberty, whether the government legalizes slavery or not. Rights do not flow from government action. Rights are a fundamental consequence of human nature.
> Rights are a fundamental consequence of human nature.
What does that mean? If someone stronger forces you to do work for them and beats you if you refuse, that seems like a “fundamental consequence of human nature” a lot more than saying that they shouldn’t.
To me, the “natural state” is for that you can do whatever you can get away with. Any limitation we place on that is our attempt to impose our conception of humanity on nature.
To put it another way, what about the state of nature would imply that we have ANY of the fundamental rights people speak of as being such? The natural rights I see are what animals have; the right to try to survive as best you can, by doing whatever you can.
Now, I am in no way arguing for anarchy or anything, just that there is nothing ‘natural’ about our concepts of rights.
As soon as people get together, they tend to form rules, a leader, and a means for dealing with someone who breaks those rules.
How we find out what the rules should be is by observation of the results. A very large number of societies have been created, with every set of rules imaginable, multiple times.
By correlating rules with success or failure of the societies, we can begin to tease out what the best set of rules are. Clearly, some sets of rules work a lot better than others.
The best outcomes come from rules that guarantee a set of rights, best excemplified by the Declaration of Independence, the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and later by the Bill of Rights.
Some rules work out very badly, like Marxism. No amount of wishing Marxism would work made it work, and no amount of coercion made it work, either.
This strongly implies that rights are natural, innate characteristics of being human.
> By correlating rules with success or failure of the societies, we can begin to tease out what the best set of rules are
This is not how we decide what should be considered fundamental human rights. Plenty of rules work out fine (i.e. effectively maintain social order and persist for long stretches of time) for “society” while being disastrous for the disempowered living under them.
> best outcomes come from rules that guarantee a set of rights, best excemplified by the Declaration of Independence
This is entirely circular reasoning. You have pre-determined that outcomes similar to your personal experience should be considered “good”, and then are declaring your society to be best because it led to your experience as an outcome. But you have neither clearly articulated what you mean by “best outcomes”, nor considered the outcomes for the less fortunate in your society. The argument more or less boils down to “Life worked out for me personally, and if it didn’t work out for you in my society, tough luck. If it didn’t work out for you in a different society, well mine is better.”
For example, I might for the sake of argument point out that Cuba clearly provides dramatically better healthcare and education outcomes than America (an astounding accomplishment considering its limited resources), and therefore conclude that Cuban society must be better structured and do a better job guaranteeing basic rights than American society.
> I might for the sake of argument point out that Cuba clearly provides dramatically better healthcare and education outcomes than America
How many Cubans want to leave and come to America? How many Americans want to live in Cuba? Venezuela? N. Korea?
Therein lies the answer to your argument.
It's interesting you chose to compare health care and education. Public education in the US is a gigantic socialist system. So is health care. You're not comparing a socialist system with a market based system. You're comparing a socialist system with a socialist system - which says nothing about what market system could do.
And lastly, who collects those astounding statistics on Cuba? The Soviet Union was famous for celebrating astounding statistics on food production, while the people starved. Why should we believe statistics collected by another communist, totalitarian outfit?
Their argument wasn't the specifics of the hypothetical. You're actually supposed to believe that Cuba isn't unilaterally better than America for the example to work.
You're in the middle of a discussion about Rights, why would you think this is suddenly a debate about Cuba?
> By correlating rules with success or failure of the societies, we can begin to tease out what the best set of rules are. Clearly, some sets of rules work a lot better than others.
How do you measure success or failure? Whoever lasts the longest is the most successful? Because by that measure, the longest lived societies were empires ruled by monarchs.. they did not guarantee rights.
Here's one way. Does a country build walls to keep people in, or keep people out?
How about that terrible video of people clinging to a jet leaving Afghanistan and falling off of it to their deaths? Were they fleeing a Taliban golden age in Afghanistan?
I personally know several people who fled the USSR. Ask them about the golden age they risked their lives to leave.
> Here's one way. Does a country build walls to keep people in, or keep people out?
Ok, so this basically amounts to using average life satisfaction as your measurement for success of a country. You could easily use any other measure, though, if you have a different goal... for example, my first thought was that "continued existence" was the measure of success, and whichever nation lasted the longest would be considered the most successful (a sort of Darwinian measure)...
Look, I personally agree with your measure of success. I am a child of the enlightenment, and I do believe that state authority rests with the will of the people. However, that is not an a priori fact... not everyone agrees with that as the criteria you judge a civilization, and it is not some natural fact that everyone is equal and deserves liberty, etc. Natural law is "whoever survives survives".
I guess the if we ask the people who built those walls they'll give us whatever answers they think are convenient for their propaganda purposes in the moment.
I think it's important to note that these rights are there regardless of who you are or what you have done. And that differs from "natural" human tendencies to strip wrongdoers of their rights. We have collectively agreed that a wrongdoer can have some rights revoked (prison) and yet continue to preserve more fundamental rights. Yet many people today still feel that someone that commits a terrible crime should be stripped of all their rights, including in some cases their most fundamental right to be alive.
Yes, at least in the US I have both of those rights, but neither is a "fundamental consequences of human nature".
I have the right to not be enslaved because the government and broadly society deems that valid. But that's a consequence of government force preventing people from enslaving others. Without government intervention, slavery emerges. It even still happens today, in the US in particular cases (prison, as one legal example). I don't see how something can be considered a fundamental consequence of our nature if, when left without supervision, it disappears.
I don't think that you can provide a clear list of such "natural" rights. If "liberty" is one, why isn't "health"? Improving my health improves my liberty, but (in the US) we don't culturally consider healthcare a "right", although it is considered such in some other countries.
> I have the right to not be enslaved because the government and broadly society deems that valid. But that's a consequence of government force preventing people from enslaving others. Without government intervention, slavery emerges.
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that you do have the right not to be enslaved, just by dint of being a human being, but that sometimes, someplace, because there are no laws or government to enforce your right, you might be enslaved anyway.
In this second perspective, you have the right not to be enslaved even if you happen to actually be a slave; it's just that your right is being violated.
That is, I think, what is meant by a "natural" -- or, if you are American, in a perhaps more familiar term, "inalienable" -- human right. You always have it; it cannot be taken away (or "alienated") from you.
Yeah, I'm also a bit confused as to why the "Founding Fathers" left out healthcare. But maybe they didn't -- I mean, can you really be "happy" if you're ill...? So maybe they meant for it to be included under "the pursuit of happiness". (Hey, in their day medicine was less advanced -- you couldn't be as almost-certain of a beneficial result from medical care as we can today, so that, too, was more of just a "pursuit".)
I jest, but not completely: It'll probably have to be by philosophical introspection. You'll have to look at society -- societies, all over the world and throughout history -- and decide for yourself which of their traits are expressions and which violations of human rights. Figuring out from that which of those rights are "natural" and which not is... Not easy, so I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader.
> Without government intervention, slavery emerges
A closer examination of history shows that slavery tends to fail when in competition with free labor. The emergence of free labor destroyed slavery the world over. The Civil War was the last gasp of slavery in the US attempting to protect itself from free labor. Slavery had already died out in the northern colonies due to it being uneconomic.
Free labor caused the collapse of the USSR. Free labor destroyed Nazi Europe.
> we don't culturally consider healthcare a "right"
Sure we do. >50% of health care in the US is provided by the government, and the rest is heavily controlled by the government. Emergency rooms are required to treat people who cannot pay for free.
The government has so thoroughly regulated, overseen, subsidized, distorted, etc., every aspect of health care, that in no way can it be described as free market.
Let's try something that is free market - the software business. Software in the US is completely unregulated. What's the result? Incredible progress, world leadership, and plenty of very high quality FREE software.
It's amazing, unpredicted, and unbelievable. But it's true.
> how were slaves a major part of Nazi war effort or economy?
The Nazis employed slave labor on a massive scale. Their slaves were Jewish prisoners, political prisoners, and POWs.
The US free labor produced plenty of war material for two major wars, and enough left over to supply Britain and the Soviet Union. US troops were well fed, with plenty of gas, bullets, airplanes, ships, aircraft carriers, medical supplies, trucks, everything, and also managed to ship it all to the war zones.
The Nazis and the Japanese never had a chance once the US got going. They had critical shortages of everything.
For example, what did the Nazis do when the battleship Bismarck was sunk? Game over for the Kriegsmarine except for the U-boots. What did the US do when the Japanese wrecked the US aircraft carriers? Built lots more! What did the Japanese do when their carriers were sunk? Game over for naval aviation.
Also, the Wehrmacht in WW2 was still very much a horse driven army. The German propaganda newsreels, shown endlessly in WW2 documentaries, avoided showing the horses and loved showing the mechanized troops. I don't think the US used any horses at all.
Free labor also sunk the Confederacy. The Confederacy was never able to properly supply their troops with guns, cannons, powder, food, uniforms, or even shoes. They were largely barefoot.
> The US free labor produced plenty of war material for two major wars, and enough left over to supply Britain and the Soviet Union. US troops were well fed, with plenty of gas, bullets, airplanes, ships, aircraft carriers, medical supplies, trucks, everything, and also managed to ship it all to the war zones.
A more realistic explanation of course is that the Allied powers had around 3x the population of the Axis, and that America's production infrastructure was never negatively impacted, while German and Japanese infrastructure was routinely bombed.
The UK, for example, despite not using slave labor, wouldn't have been able to win the war without US assistance, and you failed to mention the USSR at all, which beat Germany just as much as the US did, but doesn't fit the market based and slave labor free image you're trying to project.
The better explanation is that when you are already losing a war you need to eek out more production from what you have, and you're willing to sacrifice long-term things for it. Slave labor, in the short term is more efficient for some things, especially when you need the people who would normally be working in the free market to be elsewhere manning the guns. Employing slave labor didn't cause the nazis to lose WWII, at best it was coincidental, and at worst it was a response to the fact that they were already losing.
The German and Japanese homelands were not bombed until they were already losing the war.
The Nazi prosperity before WW2 was fairly limited, as the Nazis couldn't resist endless meddling with it. The suppression of the Jews surely must have had bad consequences for the economy, though I know of nobody who has attempted an accounting of it. The living standard did not approach that of the US.
> manning the guns
Don't forget that the US pressed into military service all the fit men 18-36. Didn't resort to slave labor.
(Footnote: FDR proposed forced labor in his 1945 State of the Union Address. Don't believe me? Look it up! Fortunately, that went nowhere.)
>Don't forget that the US pressed into military service all the fit men 18-36. Didn't resort to slave labor.
The irony here being, of course, that while the US courts ultimately disagreed, forcing people to join the military is arguably itself a form of slave labor. It is certainly a form of involuntary servitude.
> The German and Japanese homelands were not bombed until they were already losing the war.
The Allies had begun bombing Berlin before the US entered the war. So if your contention here was that the Nazis were losing from day one, sure. Otherwise you're not correct.
> The Nazi prosperity before WW2 was fairly limited
The German prosperity before the Nazis took power was fairly limited. That was in fact one of the primary reasons the Nazis took power in the first place.
> forcing people to join the military is arguably itself a form of slave labor
Indeed it is. But the soldiers were taken out of production in the economy, which is the point I was responding to.
> The Allies had begun bombing Berlin before the US entered the war.
Yes, the British bombed Berlin early in the war as a propaganda stunt. The US Doolittle raid on Japan was also for propaganda. They were ineffectual from a military perspective. It doesn't alter my point at all.
> The German prosperity before the Nazis took power was fairly limited. That was in fact one of the primary reasons the Nazis took power in the first place.
We both know that. The Nazis were in power from 1933-1939. There wasn't much prosperity.
> Indeed it is. But the soldiers were taken out of production in the economy, which is the point I was responding to.
Right, but the allies had more people, so there's nothing relevant about slave labor. Like I said: slave labor is a tool of last resort, when the market fails. The US had to use that tool to get enough labor in the fighting force, but still had enough humans that market systems (and propaganda) worked in the economy.
> We both know that. The Nazis were in power from 1933-1939. There wasn't much prosperity.
Then I have no clue what your point is. My point was, and continues to be, that Nazi use of slave labor was a consequence of the already relatively weaker economy. You seem to be arguing that slave labor caused the weak economy. My point is that it started weaker and remained weaker, and to try and keep up, they had to force more people to do things.
Help me understand your train of thought, so if there Nazis had 'free labor' they would never have shortages of oil and natural rubber? Would it just magically appear? And without the shortages they would have won the war, right?
That must be the point you are making, because if they would have lost anyway then your argument makes no sense?
And what about USSR, their 'free but not free' labor caused them to win and loose simultaneously?
If the Nazis had free labor, they would have done better, but they still would have lost because the US was bigger.
The USSR likely would not have prevailed against the Nazis if the US didn't supply them. Or at least it would have been far more difficult for them.
Synthetic rubber - "Production of synthetic rubber in the United States expanded greatly during World War II since the Axis powers controlled nearly all the world's limited supplies of natural rubber by mid-1942"
Synthetic fuel - "During World War II (1939-1945), Germany used synthetic-oil manufacturing (German: Kohleverflüssigung) to produce substitute (Ersatz) oil products by using the Bergius process (from coal), the Fischer–Tropsch process (water gas), and other methods (Zeitz used the TTH and MTH processes)."
You are picking examples that fit your idea of what natural rights should be, and are ignoring the countless counter examples. If a free society is fundamentally better, why is China so successful? Countless empires have been built on 5e backs of slaves, conquered people, and oppression. Yes, most eventually collapsed, but so have all democracies except the ones that are currently around… and there is no reason to believe the ones around are the “end state” of the evolution and not just a snapshot of civilizations that will eventually collapse like all those that came before. Democracies have fallen, to be replaced by dictatorships… dictatorships still exist, and many are successful members of the international community… Saudi Arabia is a strong ally of the US, and doesn’t seem close to collapse.
I wasn't making any claim about the lives of people in Saudi Arabia... my only claim is that it is an absolute monarchy, it is still around and not close to collapse, and is an ally of the US. All of those things are objectively true. It isn't only democratic countries that have survived.
Banks, the healthcare industry, the aviation industry and NASA would like a word with you, as well as US import and export control regulators.
Not all software in the US is the vomiting of code cowboys into NPM and Github, by a long shot.
>Incredible progress, world leadership, and plenty of very high quality FREE software.
Sorry, what potentially world-crippling bug are we on this week, I've lost count. Or was it a million dollar company that got hacked and exposed PII because their database layer was written by an intern using open source code written by a high-schooler who thinks writing SQL statements with printf is elegant?
No... the unregulated wild west of software is turning out to be a nightmare. The regulated part, at least, holds bad actors accountable and doesn't depend on "all eyes making bugs shallow" and just hope quality emerges from the aether.
If I sell medical software, yes, it would have to pass the FDA. Same for software going into aviation systems (the FAA). Same for NASA.
> Not all
Not a single byte of software on any of my computers now or since the 1970s have been regulated at all.
> the unregulated wild west of software is turning out to be a nightmare
How much have you paid for the software you're using right now? How much have you paid to use HackerNews? You're free to go use software written in the 80s, 90s, 00s, etc., if you like. I bet you aren't.
Software these days is far less buggy than it used to be. It may appear more buggy to you, but that is the result of a large increase in the number and efforts of sophisticated (and well-funded) engineers attempting to subvert it.
You didn't use strong encryption that was not allowed to be shared outside the US? I remember early versions of software (PGP, I think?) in the 90s had some warnings to this effect.
> A closer examination of history shows that slavery tends to fail when in competition with free labor. The emergence of free labor destroyed slavery the world over. The Civil War was the last gasp of slavery in the US attempting to protect itself from free labor. Slavery had already died out in the northern colonies due to it being uneconomic.
I don't mean as an economic system. Chattel slavery is one particular example of macro-scale slavery, but macro-scale slavery isn't what I was referring to.
Put another way, our markets are not perfectly efficient, and there exists enough slack to allow niches where inefficient cruelty can exist. Even though slavery was inefficient and had died out in the north, the South did all it could to keep it around. It still took a laws and war to get rid of it. If the government stopped enforcing all laws today, how long would it take for some people to be kidnapped and enslaved? A week?
> The government has so thoroughly regulated, overseen, subsidized, distorted, etc., every aspect of health care, that in no way can it be described as free market.
Something being not a free market doesn't make it a right, nor does the government providing it as a service to some people. You might be able to get away with the argument that emergency medical care is considered a right in the US, but emergency medical care is only a small part of healthcare.
Take a look at what goes on in the healthcare system. It's all the result of unintended side effects of well-intentioned regulation.
For another example, the AMA deliberately restricts the number of seats in medical universities. They are empowered to by law. This keeps the number of doctors down, and increases their pay.
This has nothing to do with whether or not something is a "right".
I'll remind you, the initial statement you made was "Rights are a fundamental consequence of human nature.", but you're now saying somewhat ahistorical things about slave labor and market economies. Even if what you were saying was accurate, is has nothing to do with how we define rights.
You can (and people do) invent and define rights all the time. People have also tried to legislate that pi=3. Almost daily, legislatures try to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand.
That doesn't make them rights, and it never works.
What makes something a right, then? You keep talking around it, and saying things which you believe are rights, but have never said explicitly what makes your set of rights somehow objectively rights where others aren't.
Yes, I and others have asked you to list out what the natural rights are, and you've waxed about free markets. I have no idea what you're trying to say, since you seem to be contradicting yourself. Hence my request for clarification. You're doing such a bad job of communicating here that the only reason I don't think I'm being trolled is that I know you wouldn't do that.
My best guess is that you're trying to make the point that market economies are natural and that the rights we have under them are therefore natural, but this is basically an argument from status quo and it goes directly against what you said elsewhere about healthcare being a right due to government regulations.
And from that you seem to be saying that healthcare is a right due to government regulation, but here you're saying that government decree doesn't make something a right. So like I said, I'm lost.
"Now, "rights" can be created by law, but those are a different meaning of the word."
I read a few of your posts, and it felt like reading the old testament - full of self contradictions, the only constant is you don't like 'government'.
You seem to have little regard for the fact that your countrymen have laid down their lives for your rights. The only reason we don't have 'Divine right of Kings' is because we cut off their heads, and we don't have slavery because those that support it have been shot or convinced at gunpoint. Women have the right to vote because they invented the letter bomb and burned down houses of MPs that voted against them.
Every right you enjoy, from a fair trial to your very freedom, has been won in blood and while you pontificate about 'unexpected, marvelous free market' (which existed for thousands of years, Kongō Gumi was incorporated in 578 CE) society becomes more polarized and likelihood we will resort to good old ways of settling differences increases.
You evidently missed when I wrote that the function of government is to be the guarantor of rights.
> You seem to have little regard for the fact that your countrymen have laid down their lives for your rights
You would be very, very wrong about that. I have many family members who fought in American wars, all the way back to the American Revolution. I know what they fought for, and it wasn't socialism.
> Every right you enjoy, from a fair trial to your very freedom, has been won in blood
You're right, and I enjoy those rights and thank our American soldiers for fighting for them. You are very, very wrong about my feelings about GIs. My own father volunteered to fight the Nazis at the sharp end of the spear, and volunteered again for the Korean War at the sharp end. He also served in a support role during the Vietnam War. I take American freedom very, very seriously.
I am grateful for all American servicemen and women who risked their lives for American freedom.
Your post isn't really an argument. It's just contradiction.
The whole point of calling rights "ineffective" is to say that this idea of fundamental rights that other people aren't obligated to provide to you has no utility. Your definition doesn't really contain any evidence to the contrary.
> There aren't any fundamental rights which require someone else to provide them to you.
I mean, people have a fundamental rights to food, water and shelter. So it certainly seems like we have to provide people with those or those rights cannot be satisfied.
> There aren't any fundamental rights which require someone else to provide them to you.
This is, of course, totally false. From the moment of birth your parents have to provide sustenance and safety, or you'll die. Similarly, someone must teach you a native language, if only indirectly, or you'll be unable to communicate or acquire skills. If a parent neglects a child and fails to provide them "services" (or whatever), the state will absolutely take the child away and punish the parents.
As an adult, you have the right to a system of justice that allows you to argue grievances and petition for redress against others. You have the right to police and fire fighters. Those are all services provided to you.
I used to think that everything was a transaction when I was a hardcore libertarian, but I'm not anymore. There are bazillions of things that we take for granted that are just table stakes in a modern society, like the rule of law, an educational system, clean air and water, and yes, healthcare. A hospital can't refuse you emergency care if you can't pay, and that's absolutely a right established in the social contract.
Rights are a mix of inherent and acquired capabilities as well as courtesies granted by a social contract. Until you start paying back every person from whom you've learned a word in the English language, yeah, you are getting tons and tons of things for free without realizing it.
Bluntly claiming someone's post is false is rather rude isn't it? particularly on a subjective philosophical topic.
Governments are never "givers" they are just different systems of trade-offs, which can also be in terms of services and freedoms. For example, you have a right to justice if you are wronged. Society can either step aside and let you seek it yourself, or, if that behavior (vigilantism) is outlawed, then they are obligated to instead provide you with a system to seek justice within. Or they could come up with some alternative to allow you to protect your right. From this perspective, your right is not an entitlement and you don't have to postulate a new entitlement every time the govt creates a new program for (ostensibly) helping people achieve their rights better.
Your example is one of the state punishing you, not an example of a fundamental right. Services provided to you is not a right simply because the government provides them.
The proper role of government is as guarantor of fundamental rights.
> you are getting tons and tons of things for free without realizing it.
This is confusing rights with getting things for free. Nothing about fundamental rights prevents you from providing free stuff to others. In fact, you have a fundamental right to choose to give your stuff to others for free. Heck, I work on D every day, and give it away for free. My salary as CEO of the D Language Foundation is $0. There's nothing non-libertarian about that, since I freely choose to do it.
As for children, as a hardcore libertarian you should be aware that the notions of fundamental rights apply only to legally consenting adults. Children enjoy only a subset of those rights.
> Your example is one of the state punishing you, not an example of a fundamental right. Services provided to you is not a right simply because the government provides them.
I'm not sure which example you are referring to; I gave several. But if you're referring to the state punishing you (by taking away your kids for not feeding them), keep in mind the state will by default become the ward of orphaned children and it will indeed pay foster parents to take care of the children.
The broader point that we clearly don't agree on is that rights are in fact negotiated in a social contract. They are an agreed upon set. In man's state of nature before civilization, there are no rights and no authority but power: violence and threats of violence. Even proto-societies that develop in groups of primates, the rules are set by convention and agreement. Almost any statement that either you are I could come up with that starts off with "well clearly the inherent rights include X and Y and Z" is false on its face. We can really only talk about rights in the context of them being respected. By whom? The members of society and particularly its governing bodies.
Again, I gave several examples. Providing for children, even if the state does it, is clearly not in dispute, and that alone refutes your rather bold statement. Emergency medicine is another; that's something that applies to adults. In any modern society it's accepted that my human rights "force" EMTs to render emergency help, regardless of my ability to pay[1].
[1] I can't think of many countries besides America where emergency bills can be astronomical, but even there, regardless, a hospital must make every reasonable effort to save your life and eat the cost if you cannot pay.
You didn't flip the dialogue, you just substituted different words.
Replier: I should fulfill my obligations to society.
Pleader: le suffering
Replier: Ya..I should really do that now. It's my duty.
That's the difference, the perspective. You aren't asking someone to fulfill their obligations, people are taking it upon themselves because the mindset has shifted. It's now upon you to do the right thing, not hand-wave say "you have rights..but it's someone else's job to realize them"
That's not inherent to the word "obligation" any more than saying "I must do this, it is your right". It's fine as a concept, but saying "instead of talking about rights, we should talk about obligations" doesn't clarify anything, because my right is simultaneously your obligation.
Right, but in so doing you're also switching the grammatical subject. The original statement assumes the same subject, moving from rights -> obligations implies a different meaning. I.e., when speaking of myself, "my rights" vs "my obligations" are very different things. Likewise when speaking of society, "our rights" vs "our obligations" also lead to a different dialog. The onus is on what we owe to others, rather than what we are owed, even though such a contract necessarily implies both.
Exactly, people are missing that rights and laws are an agreed upon arrangement to find a set of compromise for everyone to live together happily, which results in stability and often overall growth in economy, invention, social enjoyment and entertainment, etc.
You can't just tell someone they're not allowed to take food from your plate, while simultaneously not providing anything for them to eat.
There is no longer any plot of land anywhere that is not owned by someone else. Think of those plot of land as plates. One who doesn't own any of it is hungry, you tell them to get their own food, but they can't take from any of the plates of anyone else, so you can't use any land to try and get your food from. Now this person tells those who have all the food, hey I have the right to food as well, and people say, I don't think that's a necessity, well why is your right to your land and your plates of food a necessity as well? You can't have it both ways. If you want to have the right to own the plates of food, you must also provide food to others somehow, because you've taken up all of the abilities to get food from others.
> You can't just tell someone they're not allowed to take food from your plate, while simultaneously not providing anything for them to eat.
You can, and a lot of people do say this. And it was said many times in history, and ... people were maimed for it regularly. (And every day we get the reports, pictures, videos about people inside a fence saying that those who are outside should just go and try their luck somewhere else.)
The whole point is that wordgames are not going to get us the desired utopistic society where people feel that obligation to act to uphold others' rights in accordance to their power/ability for doing so.
It needs a culture that cherishes this, enforces this, perpetuates this.
In essence we need a control loop that keeps society on track, and this system has to be aware of all the usual problems (the optimal set-point of intolerance of intolerance, top-down systems tend to consolidate power, bottom-up systems can easily oppress minorities, political arbitrage of resources for favors is an ever present problem, and so on).
Seems like we're in agreement, unless I'm misreading something.
Obviously, you can say that, but the people you say it too now also loses their reasons to uphold your words. If you tell me I can't have food from you, and I also have no other way to get food, I'm going to have to disregard your right to property you were hoping to have and force my way into your plate of food.
And now we're back at the typical human power struggles and infighting.
I think your point is that simply asking for food when you don't have it doesn't magically solve the problem. And I agree, but if you think about who you're asking it makes more sense. You're asking those who have all the food or means of producing food to give you some, or to do something about your lack of food. They were handed ownership of food and food production, now there's people who feel they don't have the food they need. They're complaining to those who own the food and its production, which to me makes sense, since they are the best positioned to solve the problem as the owner of the food and food production. And those who don't own food or food production have little ability to do anything about it. That's what I was trying to convey, there's no where else to try my luck, everything is already fenced up.
This is kind of just a debate on equal opportunity and equity I guess. Everyone should have equal opportunity, and those who haven't in the past might need equitable retribution to make up for it.
Asking for that I think is very different than asking to be handed things without effort. I think most people simply ask for justice, if you had land and couldn't make food with it, so be it. Most people might accept their fate. Now it be nice to also deal with those unlucky in their attempts, but now it's a different debate. If you never had land to begin with, had your land taken, etc., that's another story.
I'm also 100% in agreement with the following:
> It needs a culture that cherishes this, enforces this, perpetuates this.
Even though I'm not so sure how best to nurture such a culture.
Yes, with the added twist that the people who don't have enough vastly outnumber those who have a lot. The real problem is not Elon and Bezos and the other token billionaires. After all their net worth is in their companies, most of it is unrealized capital gains.
The real problem is with the folks making over 150-200K but still think they are living "paycheck to paycheck"
So in reality it's not as simple as farmers telling homeless people to go somewhere else, but there's no more land left. It's more like the have-lots telling the have-a-bits to watch out for have-nots, and this works perfectly. Conservative populist rhetoric is very effective in suburbia.
> equal opportunity and equity
Yep. The big problem with this is that many people consider one time help as now take this and we're even "equal opportunity". Of course what's needed is a strong social safety net that helps people back on their feet. Shelter, healthcare (mental hygiene too!), education.
Again it's not cheap. And even though the economy is not zero-sum over long term, yearly budgets are. Hence the fight about how much on what to spend.
> culture
I think simply (ah yes, simply! :} ) going incrementally, starting with the best cost-benefit programs and areas. Focusing on cities where there's enough like-minded people to enact the policies, learn from the consequences, course correct, while not losing sight of the goals.
It's just a fairy tale. Laws aren't agreed upon; they're initiated by conquest and continue through the establishment of institutions that preserve an occupation over generations.
There may be some kind of "democratic" process for public participation in law-making, but that's not the same thing as laws being "agreed upon."
There may be some kind of cultural process for raising children to accept the laws that existed and were put in place by adults before them, but even that's not the same thing as laws being "agreed upon."
That seems like a bad example. In modern society rights are generally enforced by the support of the population via some judicial (or extra-judicial) system.
Pleading: But sir, you must respect my rights.
Reply: I do not see the necessity of that.