Do you have any rights?

As long as we, The People, can go to the ballot box and send the scoundrels packing, we have control. Until this election cycle, I was losing confidence that we still had the power to do so. My cynicism turned out to be unfounded.

The democrats had NO input into the process, because their candidate was chosen for them, and no real competition was presented. Nothing they did would have changed the pre-arranged outcome. HRC was to be their nominee, and that was decided at the outset.

The republicans had exactly the opposite situation; they fielded a large group of qualified candidates, yet the least experienced of them ultimately won the nomination, in spite of every effort of the RNC and establishment republicans to sandbag him. In the end, the republican establishment machine had absolutely no power over the desire of the electorate to elect an outsider.

The democrats are exactly as you describe, and I think their electorate is coming to realize it. The republican electorate still has control over their governance, and will go to the polls to change their representation when necessary. Overall, I think this has been a greatly positive experience for The People, because the situation you describe IS trying to take control. We still have the power, but we must fight to keep it. Send ALL the scoundrels packing.

 

I hate to break it to you, but your candidate was ushered to nomination by none other than the left-wing branch of the MSM as always. They masterfully herded Republican sheep to the primaries on his behalf by parading him as the electable(that's the only thing Republicans really care about with respect to their candidates) "anti-establishment" candidate while biting their tongues about their true disdain for him and them. Republican voters fell for it,.. again.

Right now, you're elated because players wearing your team's jersey have the ball, but the ratcheting effect of progressive politics is still firmly entrenched, intact, and functioning.

We're way off topic here, so this is my last response on the matter.

 

Not my candidate, and not my team. But carry on.

 

Sure they do. We evolved as social animals, and that society is tribal. It's why the study of history is basically one long war after another after another. It's why we have laws, prisons, punishments, and rewards.

I'm coming at the idea of rights as a product of both biological and social evolution. They are attempts to retain peace within the tribe, or if you prefer intra-tribal. Inter-tribal warfare is one way that we progress. A war is fought and to the victor goes the spoils. That includes resources, women, land, and young men to bring further progress to the next tribe. The conquered were conquered because they were inferior. They might have inferior technology or tactics or whatever the case may be, but they lost because they were inferior. The progress the victors bring include the laws that helped make them superior. The very laws and values that had a hand in producing their superiority are spread, and this progress is necessary for the species.

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Capitalism is much like warfare, except it doesn't involve violence. There is still competition, and this competition in the market can replace competition on the battlefield. There are rules that competitors agree to that mirror the same rules you were trying to identify as universal rights. Personal property shall not be violated, risk to life and limb, mutual agreements, honesty, integrity... These are things that capitalism rewards and punishes.

If you think about it, we're still talking about tribes. Just that companies war against other companies with jingles and sales pitches, rather than guns. The progress that warfare brings is accelerated through mutually beneficial agreements, rather than wholesale slaughter of inferior armies.

And there we have a definition of rights. They are things that the superior tribe has that inferior tribes do not. Rights are what make us superior to the chickens that we eat or the countries we conquer. The right to personal property (not yours, but those of my tribe), the right to life and limb (not yours), the right to liberty... These are the products of our superiority.

 

Your definition of right(that which is allowed by the most powerful tribe at the time, affordable to its members only) looks like one that would be meaningful only to you. You don't really need the word though, because a "guarantee" is much closer to what you're describing than a "right". Other words you won't be needing on that view include "morality", "justice", "justifiability", "wrong", "virtue", "fair", "ought", all their antonyms...

What most people mean by "right" in this context is:

Since this thread is about natural rights, we obviously don't mean "legal entitlement", so we must mean "moral entitlement". An entitlement(legal or moral) is not to something one will necessarily get. If you and I agree that I will sell you a certain apple for $1, and you give me $1, we would both agree that you are entitled to the apple whether I give it to you at that point or not. A right to life is not a guarantee that someone won't kill you. Rights can be violated. These are all well understood, coherent concepts. Of course that's according to the dictionary definitions of "right" and "entitlement" that we all go by. On your view, it would depend on which tribe each of us is from.

If I see a man standing over a baby with a sledge hammer, preparing to smash its head in, I would immediately know that he is about to do something wrong. My instinct would be to stop him. On your view, you would have to check and see which tribe the baby is from, which tribe the man is from, and only then could you determine whether or not smashing a baby with a sledge hammer is wrong.

I know it's wrong because I presuppose that, by virtue of being human, the baby has a right to life, a property right in its own body. I suspect that you know it too, and that the position you've articulated so far is just so much equivocation and conflation.

 

Yes, most people think of a right as something that is guaranteed by the government. It doesn't fly very far if your government/state/tribe is not worth a can of beans. With a copy of the constitution and a can of beans, you might be able to have a meal before your "rights" as you define them are violated.

I believe I made the moral argument by pointing out that superiority is how rights are attained. It's an entitlement that is moral because as society progresses, our rights naturally increase. Since morality is good by virtue of definition, then that which achieves morality is also good.

Yes, that means that the ends justify the means. You can argue that the means do not justify the ends, but that's a long potholed and dusty road that I doubt can handle much close scrutiny. Are rights not the desired end result?

You're looking at this as if the life of a baby is axiomatically moral/valuable.

Your premise is that by virtue of being human, that we have a right to life. Yet, you're just assuming that this is true because others might agree with you. That's an ad populum fallacy.

I made my argument and you disagree. It does include rights, but it's a bit bloody, and yes I know that many will disagree with me.

 

Exactly!

Incorrect. Read the OP. Each of us can only judge from our own experience. From an intuitive perception of the quantity, 1, and of the quantity, 2, I can infer that 1+1=2. The axioms, there, are the respective meanings of 1, 2,+, and =. The only axiom I need to establish my own recognition of a moral right of another person is my own experience of an act committed against that person as wrong. There is no way to prove or dispute that first order experience. It is as properly basic as any axiom can get. The experience is of a moral prohibition. My recognition of a right of the baby not to be bludgeoned by virtue of its humanity can be inferred once I recognize that I only experience such moral prohibitions with respect to humans; the experience doesn't come with the idea of taking a sledge hammer to an i-phone, for example.

Recognition of natural law, and natural rights by extension, only comes with the admission that 99% of people share my experience. Those affected by psychopathy, about 1% of the population, don't experience empathy, and so do not share our recognition of moral prohibition with respect to others and, by extension, basic moral entitlements of others. The cause of psychopathy is also well understood as identifiable physical defects of certain regions of the brain. If experience so ubiquitous among people as to be shared by all of us who are mentally healthy is not natural, then what is?

 

I'm going to try and be brief and succinct.

This bit about baby lives being axiomatically important is your opinion. Yes, you can find tons of people who think abortion is perfectly acceptable who will also say that the lives of babies are sacrosanct, but they're morons.

wtf?

This makes no sense. No fair talking about variables without defining those variables. "quantity 1"? Is this your subjective opinion that killing babies is wrong?

Seriously, this isn't good enough. Don't talk about X and Y unless those are already understood. What is quantity 1? What is quantity 2?

subjective nonsense.

exactamundo! subjective nonsense.

circular logic is not an axiom. It is a logical fallacy.

For you, okay. Why not an iphone? We don't know, do we?

ad populum fallacy

1% of the population is in favor of drone strikes, war, abortions, using the power of the state to extract wealth from the people? I think it's a bit more than that.

So this is the meat of your argument. You found a study that says that amoral people have identifiable differences in certain regions of the brain compared to people who have morals.

This is an interesting idea, but you don't help by using two obvious fallacies to come to your conclusion. What if those amoral people are actually moral? Ideas of right and wrong are intersubjective (means dependent upon subjective differences between tribes, as you have already stipulated exist).

Bottom line is that you need to deal with the fallacious reasoning. It's cool that you're attempting such a dense subject, but understand that you are committing both petitio principii and ad populum fallacies to arrive at your conclusion.

 

Belch seems to think he's reading a deductive argument even though that is not what has been offered. Had he read the OP, he might have noticed that what has been offered is merely a method by which each observer can discern natural rights for himself, from his own perspective.

To know better than to float the accusation of an ad populum fallacy against inductive reasoning, one would have to know a bit more about logic than a list of fallacies, most of which only apply to deductive arguments, which is why it was admitted in the second paragraph of the OP that:

The reason it doesn't make sense to call appeal to popular opinion on an inductive inference has to do with what would make it fallacious as a deductive inference. For a deductive inference to be valid, it must follow necessarily from its premise(s), where, given the truth of the premise(s), a valid deductive inference will be true by logical necessity; i.e. it is logically impossible for a valid deductive inference drawn from true premises to be false. If it is logically possible for a deductive conclusion drawn from true premise(s) to be false, then the inference by which it is drawn is necessarily invalid. Any mistake that leaves a deductive conclusion drawn from true premise(s) possibly false is a logical fallacy. Many of the most common ways to make such a mistake have been named(hence the lists of logical fallacies all over the internet), but all of them are non-sequiturs, which simply means that the conclusion doesn't follow by logical necessity from its premise(s).

Notice that the most an invalid deductive inference does is to render its conclusion uncertain. Here's an example of an invalid inference attempting to draw a known true conclusion from a known true premise:

Most people believe Earth to orbit Sol.
Therefore, Earth orbits Sol.

Both the premise and conclusion are true, but the inference is still fallacious because it is an invalid deduction. It is a non-sequitur committing the ad populum fallacy.

An inductive inference, on the other hand, is probabilistic, and as such, necessarily uncertain. Here's an example of valid inductive reasoning:

I expect the sun to rise tomorrow morning because the sun has risen every morning hitherto.

Here's another:

I expect the next person I ask about it to believe that people have a right to life because about 99% of the people I have ever asked about it believe so.

One does not undermine an inductive inference by pointing out that it is not a valid deduction, because it is not a deduction in the first place. The ad populum fallacy is always a non-sequitur, and there is simply no such thing as an inductive non-sequitur.



To know better than to call circular logic on a simple premise, one only needs to know the meanings of "circular", and "logic". Logic is reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity. Reasoning is always from premise to conclusion. The reasoning from premise to conclusion is called an "inference" At least one inference is required to complete a circle. For a circular argument to be completed by a single inference, the premise and conclusion must be tautological. Since tautologies are pretty easy to spot, circular arguments usually consist of more than one inference. What Belch has done here, though, is to call a properly basic premise, drawn by another observer, from that other observer's own perspective, before any inference has been drawn, "circular". This is the kind of mistake that only the most foolhardy of oblivious "reasoners" would likely make.

Advice:

Read the entire post before responding.

Try to understand what is being said, so as not to look stupid. (The mark of an educated man is the ability to entertain an idea without accepting it.)

Throw away the lists of logical fallacies, and take a course in logic. (You've just been given one free class. Don't spurn it.)