The Trouble with Self-Evident Human Rights: An Example
The Declaration of Independence begins with a bit of bad philosophy: to wit, positing, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” These supposedly self-evident human rights do not really exist for reasons I touched on the other day. They are neither self-evident (known non-inferentially or as analytically true) nor accessible through intuition. There’s no way to demonstrate their existence–or that they are endowed by God, who also eludes demonstration. In practice, these “rights” are grounded in nothing more than the say-so of whoever has the power to have them recognized in culture and in law. They fail at the start at their raison d’être–establishing a firm basis for an objective morality.
Take, for example, the culture war debate over the ethics of abortion. On the one hand, you have the asserted right to life on the part of the fetus; on the other hand, you have the posited right to choose abortion on the part of the woman. Both sides in this debate operate 1) under the notion that the Constitution, in truth, recognizes their alleged right, but also, and more importantly, 2) under the principle that the law ought to recognize and secure their own posited right (and not the other). Within the framework of self-evident human rights, however, there’s no basis for choosing one right over the other. Both the pro-life side and the pro-choice side will appeal to more than “self-evident rights,” of course–e.g., the sanctity of human life and the autonomy of the individual, respectively–but of course they have to go beyond this rights language to have any kind of objective grounding. To stay within this field of rights is to play an endless game of power.
What gives you the right to criticize the Declaration?
I see it as an obligation.
Well said.
Thanks, Tod.
It’s a fun argument to make when discussing, say, abortion.
What happens when you wish to discuss chattel marriage? The practice of Sati? Even smoking areas?
To stay within this field of rights is to play an endless game of power.
To leave the field is to concede a number of points before the game has even begun. What does the scoreboard look like in your prefered arena before the game can be said to have begun? (Was it 0-0?)
This.
Of course self-evident human rights can come into conflict with one another, and we have to decide which right gets restricted, and by how much; but at least this premise starts the parties in conflict on roughly equal footing by acknowledging that they each at least have a claim.
Otherwise, it’s nothing *but* might makes right, all the time, always. As Jaybird says, the game is over before it is even begun, and the less-powerful party never had a chance.
Why consider the fetus at all? The mother is bigger & stronger – heck, that fetus can’t even speak up for itself, let alone fix a sandwich. But most will concede that whether a fetus (or the father) possibly has any conflicting rights to that of the mother is at least a question worth considering, no matter where you end up landing in the final analysis.
Or take the converse, the common free speech exception, shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. We restrict people’s right to yell ‘fire’ whenever they feel like it because we deem the ‘right not to get trampled’ as superior; but I can still yell ‘fire’ under many other circumstances. Without the rights conflict, and the pragmatic compromise we arrive out of the conflict, don’t we risk a world where you can either always yell ‘fire’, or never yell ‘fire’, depending on who holds the reins?
The messy middle, winning some and losing some, is where life flourishes. That the process is flawed, messy and imperfect is no reason to throw it out. This is the very definition of making the perfect the enemy of the good.
I am really trying to understand where you are coming from. But I must say I really don’t get it, it just seems like games. Which is OK in a coffeshop debate, but in the real world strikes me as playing with fire.
What is your replacement framework that gives the powerless at least some small chance before they get crushed? If such a framework cannot be articulated or implemented, what’s with the rush to drop the best framework humans have yet found?
He’s coming from the same place you are: conflicting interests have to be negotiated. He just thinks there’s no self-evident really-existing species of thing in the world that resembles what most people have in their head when they use the term “rights.”
If what you are saying rights are is just an implied idea that helps implement what we might likely agree are more rather than less desirable ways to approach negotiating conflicting specific interests, such agreement being likely as a result our having many common desires with respect to what are desirable ways to approach those conflicts, and those common desires in turn resulting from the fact that we’re beings of the same species looking at our own interactions from the perspective of the same culture in which a largely common set of higher-order values and preferences proliferate even while specific interests come into conflict…
…then I think in fact there is little difference between us all on rights. If, on the other hand, you feel the need to go beyond saying that rights are a useful placeholder idea for the working out of that consensus approach to resolving conflict in a society, to say that they have an existence of their own apart form that general need/desire of any society to do that resolution in a way that doesn’t destroy human happiness on a mass scale, then, indeed, you are not on the same page. I’m still not sure I see why it’s so hard for you to see where he’s coming from, though.
Is this a particular philosophical path that other cultures have walked down before?
Is what?
The thoughts that “rights” are merely social constructs to be negotiated. Surely 21st Century Internet Denizens aren’t the first people to think such thoughts.
Were there any cultures/societies/governments who thought that way?
Absolutely: The birth of philosophy in the West as we know it is greatly concerned with the question of the difference and also the relationship between the natural and the merely conventional, but every philosophy as we understand philosophy implies some distance between mistaken knowledge and truth. In the meantime, the mere assertion of the obsolescence or unreality of “natural right” is just that, an assertion. By its own logic, it is completely arbitrary – the truth of truthlessness – but oddly enough that fact doesn’t prevent people from treating it as meaningful or even as established beyond doubt. My suspicion is that its prevalence is symptomatic of long-developing cultural-historical exhaustion, not of good logic or a clear understanding of the argument.
Wrote a response to this on an unfamiliar iPod Touch at Starbucks and it was predictably eated.
Long-short: if I understand your implied point (i.e., Nazis didn’t believe in rights, or at least human rights [or perhaps they were instead or also messing around with whom whatever rights they did believe in applied to, which will always be one way for those who want to do evil to get around, or provide a fig leaf for ignoring, whatever we convince people in a society they have to believe/say/pretend to respect about rights]), basically you’re making an instrumental point about what very earnest rights-talk professing a certain viewpoint with regard to what they are in a metaphysical sense in a society. Just in terms of that point, I don’t have much of a problem with that at all. I think we basically both want a lot of the same things to happen from whatever rights talk happens.
But it’s not an actual argument about rights, which is what Kyle is raising here. Sure, we can be afraid of that, worrying that it’s the beginning of the end of a conceptul-social superstructure that it has been amply demonstrated must be maintained to avoid cataclysm. But I’m not convinced that we have to look at it that way. From my perspective, what I would like is for rights talk to progress to a point where we can kind of do some Real Talk about it and not be afraid that civilization might collapse as a result. I think that’s realistic, and in fact I think it would be an advance both for the cause of bringing prevailing thought closer into line with what actually exists, but also for the actual effectiveness of the rights concept at doing what it is we actually want it to do, which your question suggests is the main reason for your commitment to it (i.e. there’s no fundamental argument for the truth of the concept there, but rather a warning about the results of its rejection). My counterargument s simply this: how well does the concept you want to preserve actually perform the function you want it to? What if a concept of rights that was better-formed to reality but which would require you to let go of your existing concept performed the function we both want rights-talk to perform better than the one we have in place now?
Let’s assume “The Good” and “Human Flourishing Is Possible” for the sake of the argument.
If we want to assume that these things exist and/or are True, we have to look at what gets us closer to The Good and what makes Humans Flourish… and whether “rights talk” and the assumption of rights qua rights result in more of The Good and more Flourishing.
If we assume that they’re just emotional states that have been intellectualized and then idealized, and then we notice that rights are little more than creative visualization in the same way that people “love” their children as an evolutionary trick played upon them and, from there, see what the cultures that have adopted these ideas have turned out… and if, whaddya know, they don’t have as much flourishing and don’t end up wandering towards The Good, does that tell us anything?
If there is a The Good and if it is possible to flourish, aren’t these things something that we should want in and of themselves? (And from there, shouldn’t it be possible for us to compare toolkits?)
I mean, it might tell us that we might want to engage in certain kinds of rights talk for the instrumental purpose of bring about those other things we want. (Though it might not tells us exactly what kinds of rights talk best gets that done, and it doesn’t tell us anything about rights themselves, unless we’re already saying that rights are just an implied idea that we use to help bring about more concrete things that we know we want).
…I’m not sure what part of this I wasn’t already affirmatively agreeing to.
The difference comes to what’s prior. You seem to be arguing that “what we want” is prior.
I’m saying that the “what we want” things are the “self-evident” things. “The Good”. That’s why we want them.
Plato discussed this, of course.
(From there, I’m pointing out that assumptions of self-evidence and assumptions of social construction have led to different places… and, from there, asking which different places we expect our assumptions to get us to this time.)
((Of course, nothing ever ends.))
Well, I don’t think that what we want is self-evidently The Good.
But I’m also just not following you at all at this point. My point remains just that your argument has so far been for the instrumental desirability of belief in rights and engagement in earnest rights-talk, even, so far as I can tell, taking into consideration the latest points you’ve made – not a direct one for their reality (whatever that might mean for you of rights). At this point I honestly can’t tell what you’re saying about that contention of mine.
To steal from the man himself:
Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”
Now let’s just kill the gods and replace them with ourselves.
Are we not stuck with the same dilemma?
Well, I guess no one ever said that Platonism is the easy road. Have fun.
JB, America is rare in rejection of social contract.
American Founder James wilson [signer of the Declaration, the Constitution and later a SC justice]:
“Man, says Mr. Burke, cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together. By an uncivil contradistinguished from a civil state, he must here mean a state of nature: by the rights of this uncivil state, he must mean the rights of nature: and is it possible that natural and civil rights cannot be enjoyed together? Are they really incompatible? Must our rights be removed from the stable foundation of nature, and placed on the precarious and fluctuating basis of human institution? Such seems to be the sentiment of Mr. Burke: and such too seems to have been the sentiment of a much higher authority than Mr. Burke — Sir William Blackstone.”
[BF mine.]
James Otis, 1754;
“So too, James Otis in 1754 lays out the American concept of rights, contra several great British political theorists:
“Government is founded not on force, as was the theory of Hobbes; nor on compact, as was the theory of Locke and of the revolution of 1688; nor on property, as was the assertion of Harrington. It springs from the necessities of our nature, and has an everlasting foundation in the unchangeable will of God.”
TVD 2012:
“Under social contract theory, rights really are no more or less than what we can wrest from the government and/or each other. The American scheme is not one of social contract. This is why the Bill of Rights was argued as unnecessary—it is the government that has enumerated powers and no more. In a social contract, it is the people who have enumerated rights and no more.”
So the idea of rights is merely a useful device for resolving social conflict? If so, then “might makes rights”, no discussion needed, just a show of teeth and horn-tossing and it’s all decided. And nothing to consider regarding anything other than human, either.
What matters is how feel about things, individually and also when we get together and think it over with others. That doesn’t go by the wayside whatever we decide about rights. Rights talk helps us figure that out, but that doesn’t mean that our idea of what rights are (in addition to that of what ones there are) can’t or shouldn’t change over time. That’s basically all I’m saying I think.
@patricia
Your conclusion that “might makes right” does not necessarily follow from your premise that “rights are merely a useful device for resolving social conflict”.
While it is admittedly difficult to measure, the acid test for any moral idea including rights is do they lead to improved general wellbeing.
I always thought Thrasymachus won that one: Justice is in the interest of the stronger, i.e., might makes right.
We can all agree that might makes might, no? When we’re talking about this, I often get the feeling that that’s really the main point that the person making the version of that point that uses the “R” word is really interested in. But we all know that. I don’t think this is actually nearly as confounding as it first seems. Might makes might. In the face of that, right is something of an afterthought. That’s what I think gives us the luxury of being able to work out what rights really are and aren’t. Might is still going to make might either way. We may as well get rights as conceptually grounded as we possibly can. Conceptual rigidity breeds applicative fragility.
@Gordon:
“Your conclusion that “might makes right” does not necessarily follow from your premise that “rights are merely a useful device for resolving social conflict”.
True, but it is practically apparent more often than not, when rights are reduced to mere social device–generally as a shield or weapon. When it’s a conflict, might makes might and then everything else is an afterthought, as Michael says above. Of course, it’s only an afterthought to those who have the power whereas for everyone else, it’s rather fundamental, since power almost always ends up intruding on their ability to live as themselves.
So unless we take the idea of rights out of the power-paradigm, it is a useless construct for ever-failing results. It is helpful to say, in this context, that “might makes rights” rather than “might makes right” because overweening power not only decrees what is considered correct/incorrect but also declares whose identities are/aren’t deserving of respect.
@patricia
Your view that the moral landscape is sculpted only by the powerful and in whatever form takes their fancy is far from reality. The moral code of conduct in use by a group is certainly influenced by the shakers and movers to a greater degree than by ordinary people. But you’ve only to look at what most Catholics do compared to what the Pope wants them to do to realise that there are factors other than power in play.
A moral tenet needs to be culturally acceptable. It also needs to be acceptable to the social emotions and instincts gifted to us by the evolutionary process. Most of all it needs to have greater utility than what went before. All this means that the shakers and movers will be pissing into the wind if they advocate moral conduct that doesn’t meet these criteria.
@Gordon, 12:54am:
It isn’t my view. It’s what I see happening when “rights” are reduced to mere social device. Many people (including myself) don’t reduce them that way, being aware that there is more to them or underlying them.
I think “rights” are a portion of the larger picture that is ethics/morality.
“A moral tenet needs to be culturally acceptable.” I don’t see it as a requirement. I wouldn’t want masses of people to solely determine what is most ethical in the same way that I wouldn’t want those with all the power to make the determination. One can easily find times in history when societies go completely awry when the ethics are left to either bunch.
“…gifted to us by the evolutionary process.” The evolutionary process describes biology over long periods of time, towards whatever works best to promote continuance, with what’s available at particular points along the continuum. The evolutionary process may promote something not all that great for anything but biological continuance. Likewise, it may skip over some fine aspects because they get in the way of a circumstantial requirement. Therefore, I don’t rely on the evolutionary process to define ethical standards except in those areas where basic continuance is under consideration.
@patricia,
Thank you for your post.
I certainly see attempts by the powerful to get their ideas accepted into the general moral code of conduct. But I struggle to find an example where they have succeeded in this when what they advocate is culturally unacceptable, instinctively unacceptable and has less utility than what was the previous practice.
Perhaps you could provide an example of what causes you to take this view that the powerful are able to play fast and loose with the general moral code of conduct.
Again, if you don’t believe it’s necessary or even desirable for a moral tenet to be culturally acceptable to be used in practice perhaps you could give an example of where this has happened. I agree that cultural practices may well not be a good basis for a moral tenet nevertheless, in practice, you would struggle to include some practice which is culturally unacceptable in a moral code of conduct.
It’s certainly true that societies have declined in history due to unsuitable moral conduct. However, I see this happening when culturally motivated ethical habits hold sway in situations where the society faces new existential threats which require change.
While it’s true that biological c0-operative traits like all biological traits are present because they increased the chances of the survival of our genes you would still find it difficult to get individuals to behave in a manner they found instinctively unacceptable.
Perhaps you are thinking of instances where the powerful have manipulated the population, either by accident or design, by taking advantage of the limitations of moral systems to apply only to members of the “in group”.
I think of the way the Nazis first demonised the Jews, removed their citizenship and operated a propaganda campaign against them before taking drastic action. If you can persuade people that an individual is not a fellow moral agent of their group then that individual becomes fair game for any treatment.
But this is rather different to changing the moral code of conduct itself. And certainly different to changing the code in a way which is culturally and instinctively unacceptable and also less useful than previous practice.
You wrote regarding Nazis: “If you can persuade people that an individual is not a fellow moral agent of their group then that individual becomes fair game for any treatment….But this is rather different to changing the moral code of conduct itself. And certainly different to changing the code in a way which is culturally and instinctively unacceptable and also less useful than previous practice.”
But the German people were not only “persuaded” by their elite, but turned blind eyes to rampant murder in their midst. Moreover, large sections of them also openly approved/aided. And in a real way, almost everyone was involved in dastardly conduct in one way or another simply because the whole culture was bent in that direction, and it was a smallish culture in a smallish land and there was no way not to participate short of leaving. Was that not a profound change in moral conduct? And also a change much less useful than their previous practice and even further, one about which they felt absolutely awful, afterwards?
People en masse occasionally give themselves over to horrible ethical practices, in larger or smaller ways. An obvious large example that ran across all cultures/religions, for generation upon generation, was our firm belief that women were not quite fully human. And one can’t even say it was because they were “outside the group” such as might be said about blacks, etc, etc. Chimpanzee females aren’t treated the way that human females have been treated. What is that?
You agree that unsuitable moral conduct can occur: “…in situations where the society faces new existential threats which require change.” Yes, Germans were suffering existential threat via their trashed economy and their inability to self-govern under untenable post-WWI punishment. Change was certainly needed but what made it take such a profoundly destructive form, a form that in the end, trashed their very selves in a far deeper way than the original threats they were under?
Or, let’s look at the US. The ethical standards by which our country has been governed has shifted profoundly over the last decades and the standards are much the same no matter which party is in office. What is happening? And look at how we citizens are slowly shifting our ethical standards so as to accommodate the increasing power-grab that runs rampant over our rights to privacy, habeas corpus, an honest economic system, freedom from continual war, open government, freedom from assassination, administration of justice in our courts, etc. All these things go against our instinctive ideas of what’s best for ourselves and our society but we are slowly convincing ourselves that these changes are ethically sound.
Humans, whether those in power or those en masse, have the ability to be hypocrites, self-deceptive, to turn black into white and BS into gold. Mostly it is driven by fear and/or desire for power.
It appears to me that you put your trust in people and behind them, in the evolutionary process. I think that is a path to disaster. I agree with Kyle that self-evident human rights are not all that. But I do not agree with his opinion that they do not exist. They must be sought and then lightly held, not lightly in terms of the strength of the ethics themselves nor to our devotion to them, but as to our certainty about where they lie and how they apply.
Enjoyable conversing with you, Gordon.
He’s coming from the same place you are: conflicting interests have to be negotiated. He just thinks there’s no self-evident really-existing species of thing in the world that resembles what most people have in their head when they use the term “rights.”
Exactly, Michael. I acknowledge that we’ll always have ethical conflicts; I simply advocate for negotiation based on something more than say-so.
Sorry, life intruded, didn’t mean to drop the thread.
Instead of ‘coming from’, I should have said ‘going’. I see where he is coming from and concede some of his points.
I just don’t see any good destination, and for whatever reason questions like this do make me feel like there is some agenda (THE LIBERAL AGENDA!!!)* that I am not aware of.
As you allude to below, if there is a potentially better framework I am OK with examining it, and possibly amending or even replacing the current rights-based one. But positing the possibility of a better replacement, while a necessary first step, still does not provide it.
I’ll keep reading the thread and see if it has come up and save any further comments for that. 😉
* this is a joke, in case it is not clear.
Argh, this was supposed to be a reply to Michael Drew up above.
The language of self-evident rights isn’t the best ethical framework humans have yet found; it may be one of the worst because it deludes us into thinking we have an objective ethics at our fingertips when we really just have the assertions of those with power. I favor the ethical languages of virtue and of obligation to others and the religious language of the Beatitudes. I’m also open to a language of rights, so long as these rights are not claimed to be self-evident and endowed by God or Nature or whatever, but are rather conceived as the origin of obligation, i.e., that which obligates.
Kyle, please forgive my ignorance, because I still may be missing the point, but how do virtue /obligation or religious/beatitudinal approaches solve the fundamental issue of conflicting interpretations/needs and the need to resolve same?
To take it back to the ethics of abortion – presumably the currently-espoused right of every ‘I’ to life (possibly including fetuses, depending on who is interpreting the ‘I’) can be recast as the obligation of every ‘you’ to not harm any other ‘you’. And the right to privacy or bodily autonomy currently enjoyed by the mother ‘I’ can be recast as an obligation to every ‘you’ to ‘mind yr own dang business’.
So the conflict would presumably still exist, and some sort of resolution reached, and presumably those with power will both decide the definitions and control the processes of conflict resolution – so why is your favored approach any better at it than a rights-based one?
What does it offer in terms of either clarity of thought or equitable/peacable conflict resolution, particularly to the non-religious or the outright selfish (who IMO are far more likely to accept a rights-based framework than an obligation-based one)?
The conflict of interpretations is never resolved, not fully, but we can perhaps get closer to a unified sense of truth by having some ground on which to anchor ourselves. “Self-evident rights” language refers to something that isn’t really there and are in effect mere assertions. Virtues and obligations, however, you can see in their manifestation within human actions, so they provide at least something of an objective grounding.
Hey Kyle, it won’t surprise you that I still don’t think I agree (still chewing over exactly why), but I appreciate you taking the time to clarify what you mean for us laypeople. Thanks.
And I do think, as was posited by Pierre below, that part of my reaction is emotional – that instead of approaching it as philosophy, my mind jumps to the political consequences, where it sees the rubber hitting the road, and it doesn’t like what it sees. I will try to approach your posts with a different mindset from now on.
I’m not sure quite sure what you’re asking here, Jaybird. Power plays rarely if ever begin on equal footing. The trouble with “self-evident rights” is that they reduce the ethical conflict to a power play because such rights can at most be posited, never proven, and never demonstrated. They have no objective grounding, despite claims to the contrary.
No God, no rights. True.
No rights period, if we’re talking about the supposedly self-evident, endowed kind.
Kyle, it’s easy to reason from “imago dei” to “dignity of the human person” to “natural rights.”
Brian Tierney has done remarkable work showing just that evolution in Western thought via medieval canon law, predating the “Enlightenment” by centuries.
http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/Law508/tierney2.htm
If you’re moving from imago dei to human dignity to natural rights, then the rights at which you arrive are not self-evident, ie, not known non-inferentially or as analytically true. You’d have reached them through inference.
Not atall, Kyle. Read about the work of Brian Tierney and the history of “rights” in Western thought.
And your use of “inference” here is imprecise if not disingenuous. That which is derived by reason is also called rational and logical.
The Declaration [and Mr. Lincoln] admit that “all men are created equal” is a proposition; CK MacLeod sagely notes below that we hold that truth to be self-evident, not that it is. The rest logically flows from that fundamental equality, by what right does one man rule another, and where that right ends, the rights of the individual begin.
Without that “proposition,” you can’t even get to Thou Shalt Not Murder, one of the more “self-evident” of the natural laws, but one that modernity can do away with once nothing is self-evident.
Afterall, when Darwin made a “creator” obsolete, the logical next step was eugenics, “Thou Shalt Not Murder” thrown on the ash heap of history, along with “imago dei.”
Dude, the very idea of self-evident is that you don’t need inference to reach it. “All bachelors are unmarried” is an example. If you infer the rights exist because human dignity exists, then you’ve made an inference; you haven’t proposed the existence of the rights as a self-evident truth.
You’re not getting there. “Inference” is doing far too much pejorative work and does not engage the argument. I don’t know how to put it any other way: once you get fundamental equality, “rights” follow as logical argument.
The Declaration [and Mr. Lincoln] admit that “all men are created equal” is a proposition; CK MacLeod sagely notes below that we hold that truth to be self-evident, not that it is. The rest logically flows from that fundamental equality, by what right does one man rule another, and where that right ends, the rights of the individual begin.
“Do Not Murder” follows. The foundations of Western civilization follow, and per Brian Tierney’s study of canon law from way back in the 1100s, that’s exactly what they did. Forget the unicorn business. That’s not starting at the beginning.
I was hoping y’d get a kick out of this one from Scotland in 1776, that “all men are created equal” is a self-evident lie.
http://raglinen.com/2012/07/04/in-what-are-they-created-equal/
This negation of the existence of natural rights is hardly new or bold.
“Inference” is pejorative???? Inference means the act or process of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true!!!!
I don’t want to play the definitions game. Can you make your point with another word?
If you can come to know Z only by deriving it from X and Y, then Z is not self-evident. A truth is self evident is you can know it without deriving it logically from something else or it you can know it analytically. So when you say that rights follow from equality, because there is a “following from,” the rights you get are not self-evident. They are derived.
IF all men are created equal {x}, they have rights {y}.
The rest logically flows from that fundamental equality, by what right does one man rule another, and where that right ends, the rights of the individual begin.
There’s nothing wrong with deriving y from x. Call it what you want. It certainly doesn’t get you to MacIntyre’s unicorn. We need to start at the beginning, not negate from the end. Rorty’s non-foundational theory of rights is garbage
http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/richard-rorty-on-human-rights-and-sympathy/
but IF God is a reality, our creator—and there is no need to cede the question to those who affirm he is not—then “rights” is as viable an argument as “non-rights.” I think you give up too easily some times, either believing there are not excelelnt arguments on your side that you’re not yet aware of, or by ceding the framing of the discussion to the nihilists.
We cannot say that “ethicist” Peter Singer is wrong, Singer who would kill unfit infants. We cannot say the eugenicists are “self-evidently” wrong who certainly have the science to back them up that we are NOT created equal.
The hell we can’t. They ARE wrong because God IS a reality, and all his children are equal, and they therefore have rights, starting with life itself.
Thou shalt not murder. If you don’t want to get there from “rights,” you can get there via justice. But of course, the existence of “justice” isn’t self-evident either, as Thrasymachus argues against Socrates in Republic.
Or is it?
IF all men are created equal {x}, they have rights {y}.
Assuming Y is true and follows from X, you’ve shown it to be true through logical inference or deduction. You haven’t shown that it’s self-evident. Just because something is true doesn’t mean its truth is self-evident or evident in itself. A self-evident truth is a truth you can know without taking the steps of induction or deduction.
but IF God is a reality, our creator—and there is no need to cede the question to those who affirm he is not—then “rights” is as viable an argument as “non-rights.” I think you give up too easily some times, either believing there are not excelelnt arguments on your side that you’re not yet aware of, or by ceding the framing of the discussion to the nihilists.
I haven’t denied the existence of all possible conceptions of rights. Only those that are supposedly evident in themselves. I believe in human dignity, for example, and that such dignity implies standards for how human beings ought to be treated. Call those rights, if you want, but if you do, then recognize that they’re not self-evident, but rather made evident through a process of deduction.
What is self-evident? Justice? Thou shalt not murder? I’m saying [asking] that if you go down that road, what can you say intelligibly about anything?
How can you even begin to philosophize, if the first question is What is good?
Again, Richard Hooker, that ““For to make nothing evident of itself unto man’s understanding were to take away all possibility of knowing anything. ” Once you cede the grounds of discussion to the skeptics and nihilists, you’re left with nothing: philosophy is impossible.
I’ll allow that”self-evident” is an admission that what you’re saying is an assertion. Mr. Lincoln recognized the problem, that “all men are created equal” is a “proposition.” But before we leave this, I’d just like to ask you for the record in your system—is anything self-evident? It seems to me that’s the rub here.
Aside from analytic expressions in which the predicate is contained in the subject, I’m not sure there really are any self-evident truths. First principles such as “do good and avoid evil” I have to take on faith.
Look how much time we could have saved. ;-o
Weren’t we just here? No right to be in error about God.
The upside, however, is that if *I* have a self-evident right, then you have it as well.
If we’re stuck negotiating, I’m here with my crew noticing how nice a place you have and wondering aloud about exactly how awful it would be, god forbid, if anything happened.
If I have a human right that isn’t self evident, then you have it as well.
Lest we summon him, I hesitate to say the same of “rhymes with Mailer, starts with an S”… but there are some readings of some arguments that he may have made that come to a different conclusion about rights that are not, in themselves, self-evident.
What counterarguments do you have against that manner of power plays, or that manner of rights?
if *I* have a self-evident right, then you have it as well.
You can say that will always be how you’ll operate for yourself, JB. I don’t think it is actually logically necessary that if the “if” section applies to a person from their perspective, that they actually must follow through with the “then” you give. Certainly you don’t give any argument why it is, and you’re among the more motivated people that I know who want to advance the idea. Many others are pretty happy not to concern themselves with the “then” you assert here. And I think that’s been a pretty clearly-in-evidence problem in actual human affairs over the years.
You can say that will always be how you’ll operate for yourself, JB.
Insofar as this is a valid argument, why wouldn’t it apply to, say, arguments steming from “The Good”?
If someone in power argued that The Good involved them having access to something that you don’t have access to… how to argue against that? Your self-evident equality?
If you’re asserting that equality is self-evident, and that that implies that any right that one human has, every other one does, then that’s something completely else than what I thought we were discussing. I did not think we were discussing self-evident or other equality; I thought we were discussing self-evident or other rights. And nothing about the concept of rights in and of themselves dictates that they will be distributed equally. It can be evident to someone that she has a right that someone else does not have (she can be wrong). A right is just something you can do with justification without worrying about how other people feel about it. There’s nothing about believing in rights per se that gets you to the point where you can assure us the result will be equal respect for rights that are equal for all humans. Those are more specific assurances that you have to give, which, to my mind, depend more on what the moral facts are relating to equality among humans (or, perhaps more reassuringly I should say, from the moral fact of human equality), than on what is necessary from the bare fact of what follows from a person believing in the concept of rights. You’re giving conceptual credit where it’s not due.
I’m not asserting that equality is self-evident at all.
Quite the contrary. It seems quite self-evident that people are not, in fact, created equal. Indeed, it seems that to force the unequal to pretend that they are, in fact, would be to force people to lie about what is and what is not (which is, to use as value-neutral term as I have available, pathological).
There are plenty of places to go from there, however, assuming that rights are mere social constructs that exist solely because of the current cultural fad of agreeing that rights exist.
Equality here would have meant a view that all humans are of equal moral value, which in turn would be something one might base an assertion that, whatever rights one of them has, all others must have as well (which you implied).
Yes, you might be able to bench press more than I. (Then we wouldn’t be equal). I didn’t think that you’d think that was the kind of equality I was talking about.
Note that I’m not even saying that all humans are of equal moral value. But are you also not?
What I’m saying is that if we don’t assume all humans have equal moral value (and, just look around), then we can start assuming all sorts of things about the desserts that these groups have versus those groups versus others.
The assumption of equal rights assumes equal moral value, I’d think. I don’t know how we’d get there without it, anyway.
Right, but the issue (I thought) was the nature of rights, not the question of equal rights. If rights are equal among all humans, that has more to do with the equal moral value of all humans, not with something that has to be the case about rights just because they’re rights. I think you’ve said what I was trying to get you to say: if we’re talking about equality, then it’s equality we’re talking about, not rights. Humans could be of equal moral value at the same time that rights are not the things you imagine them to be.
…And rights could be ontologically pretty much what you imagine them to be and then not end up residing equally in all humans if all humans don’t end up being of equal moral value.
I would say that it’s more that assuming the existence of, say, equality and rights results in more flourishing and consequences that are closer to what we assume “The Good” to be than when we assume that such are evolutionarily useful constructs.
Now, *IF* there is a “The Good” for us to strive for, if rights exist, and if (moral) equality existed as well, shouldn’t assuming its existence and working forward from there have different (better, more flourishing) results than assumptions that rights are what we will them to be?
Because, historically, it does seem to me that there are some very good places that have been reached and very bad ones… and the good ones tend to have certain assumptions and the bad ones tend to not. And the good ones tend to assume that this is not a coincidence (of course they would) and the bad ones tend to assume that it is (of course they do).
So is this an argument that rights exist or just a long way of telling me to shut up if I (want to think I) know what’s Good? (Which I don’t; I think we’re just stuck with trying to be very, very reflective about what we really want.)
No, not exactly. It’s that it seems that there seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy-slash-teleology kinda thing going on in that the realities that can be willed into existence depending on the presumptions we make. (Not all of the time, no… not for everybody, no.)
Assumptions of The Good existing, of flourishing being possible result in more of The Good manifesting and flourishing than assumptions otherwise, for example. (Not all of the time, no… not for everybody, no.)
Well, you’ve jumped up a level of generality to where we can obviously have agreement. (“the realities that can be willed into existence depending on the presumptions we make.” Clearly.)
More generally, you keep saying things that I have no or almost no problem with on their own for as far as I am willing to go along with the ideas you base them on, i.e. that such a thing as The Good exists, etc. (Though I can’t tell for sure if you’re saying it does, or whether it’s just another thing we should assume because… good things.) Except that’s basically nowhere since I don’t think that The Good exists, so the statements are basically nullities for me, except that they can be easily translated for me by just saying these productive assumptions lead to outcomes that broadly people like because… emotions. So what you’re saying is largely pretty workable for me and I agree with it to the extent it’s true, but again we’re not simply talking about whether we assume certain rights in society. The point you were at pains to emphasize was that it’s the society’s assumption about rights’ ontology on which all these good things depend, and my position for the moment on that is that I think you’re assuming your way past a rather heavier burden of proof on that point by way of vague historical handwaving. Which is okay; it’s not a criticism – I think you’re just saying, well maybe you just take the point as obvious from history and maybe you don’t, and I just don’t, not that I’m not open to more detailed argumentation.
My point is just that even if you could make that point, it actually still wouldn’t speak to the actual topic at hand, given in the OP and more directly in Kyle previous post on the topic. Perhaps we’re nihilists or unreasonable skeptics treading on dangerous territory, but we just find ourselves wishing to look under the hood of this particular assumption. That was the question, and “Maintaining the assumption has excellent consequences and not doing so has disastrous ones!” might be true and very important to say, but no matter how many times you say it it doesn’t actually speak to the question.
Like all of us, I have no idea whether Rights, The Good, flourishing, or even Spirit/Soul exist. (I actually fear that they do not.)
However, I’ve noticed that assuming their existence results in stuff that you might expect if they did exist… and, if they did exist, there are certain subtle things that we could expect to happen if certain things were, for lack of a better term, “fed”.
The wacky thing is that if this is just a positive feedback loop because of, hey, emotions… what damage is done? None worth noticing. (Is any damage worth noticing beyond the whole feelings crap if these things are mere socially useful concepts to get people to sit quietly?)
What benefit nihilism? More than that, what foundation does nihilisim give for any position of how other people ought to act that is any “better” than “I enjoy feeling good and dislike feeling bad”?
More than that, why do the same people who are so eager to abandon The Good for the sake of a good discussion become people who, in other contexts, start using words like “should” and “shouldn’t”? Doesn’t that betray a deeper, for lack of a better term, “knowledge” than one found playing games with, pardon the term, sophistry?
Everyone uses terms like should or shouldn’t, right and wrong, etc. In my view they’re usually expressing emotion born of instinct, regardless of what they also believe about the metaphysics of morals and so forth. This is not a new idea or that of sophists. The presence of a moral instinct in animals does not prove the objective reality of morality.
I’m going to choose to take your reference to sophistry as clearly and emphatically not not an accusation until such time as you inform me I’m mistaken in doing that.
…On some of your other questions, clearly nihilism offers precisely no such grounds. I don’t think my position amounts to nihilism, but on the other hand, it’s precisely the idea that it matters what we prefer, because the only sense in which anything does matter is it how it impacts sentient beings… in that those things matter to them – that strikes me as the most compelling reason to prefer certain large-scale things and orders overothers. That’s what mattering is. On reflection, we can arrive at a shared conclusion that the preferences of some of us are hateful and perverted, but they’re that because we think it. I don’t even know what it is beyond that we’re aiming at.
Basically, I don’t disagree that if a certain approach to thinking about rights brings about consequences we like, great, let’s go with it. I’m certainly not going to thrash and wail at it to try to bring it down. But it’s not going to stop me from continuing to be curious about what’s really true, what’s real. All things considered, I think I’m pretty quiet about it – I don’t really think I or people who ask similar questions pose that much of a threat to the prevailing moral order. After all, it’s supported by instinct, compassion, and, to large extent except when wires get crossed, the power of human preferences as moderated by humanity’s revealed kindness. A few questions about some of the more highly constructed claims that have been made to represent these basic tendencies aren’t going to bring down an order supported by an infrastructure with those kinds of supports.
The presence of a moral instinct in animals does not prove the objective reality of morality.
Here is a question I have never seen answered to my satisfaction:
What *WOULD* prove the objective reality of morality?
Is there any experience that could not be faked, any game that could not be rigged, any sensory input that could not have been put together by a sufficiently motivated malicious person?
It seems to me that the answer to the former is “nothing, really” and the latter is “none, really”.
So, in the absence of that… then what?
I can prove the existence of an objective morality right here:
Does anyone here think that it is morally permissible to kill a child just because you like the idea of killing a child? I’m going to go ahead and assume that the answer is no for everyone (and if not, if you could please give me your address so that I can give it to the nice men in white suits). There, objective morality’s existence proved.
Clearly this extreme example shows that there are moral prohibitions which are independent of any one mind, and therefore have an objective reality. We could, with a little more discussion, probably come up with some objective justifications for this prohibition as well.
This is pretty straightforward, unless we’re requiring that moral demands (prohibitions, obligations, whatever) have some independent existence prior to any human mind (ontologically prior, not necessarily temporally so). In which case, well, that’s just too Platonic for me. I don’t like positing the existence of Forms, ethical or otherwise (cf. our occasional discussions about the ontological status of rights). But I see no problem with this. If the ontological status of moral demands doesn’t differ that much from the ontological status of a football team, I’m not going to sweat it all that much. Or do football teams not exist objectively either?
I didn’t intend an insult with the use of the term “sophistry” (though I can certainly see how it’s a risable term). I’ll try to explain what I mean:
When it comes to moral discussions, it’s fairly easy to take an attitude toward morality, or rights, or whatever things we might be tempted to call “constructs” that would be analogous to Berkley’s attitude toward physical matter. It’s not really real, we’re making a mistake when we say that it is real.
We both know Johnson’s response, right? I’m saying that our actions refute our theories.
Now, of course, there is debate over whether Johnson’s refutation really refuted the theory. If you’d like, in a bit, I’ll be free to argue against them. Before that, I’ll have to ask for your pardon: I have to go get something to eat, feed the cats, and have a quick conversation with Maribou.
Jaybird,
If you’re willing to grant that how “real” morality seems and feels to humanity relative to how “real” physical matter seems and feels to it is a fitting representational proxy for how “real” the two things actually are in proportion to each other, I’m actually quite willing to stipulate to same myself.
(Though, still, as Pat C so aptly says in the more active current thread: what we stipulate to, assume, or lay down as axiom is essentially independent of reality; there’s no necessary representational claim there, rather that’s exactly what you’re setting aside in order to move on. It remains the case that this OP was about examining whether there is any representational connection. If where we’ve arrived at is that there’s a representational connection that can be established by way of observing humans’ strong emotional sense that morality as they understand it, whatever it is, at least matters to them, and their actions in accord with that, well, I don’t think that puts us too far apart based on what I’ve already said in this thread, tbh.)
@Jaybird
“Here is a question I have never seen answered to my satisfaction:
What *WOULD* prove the objective reality of morality?
Is there any experience that could not be faked, any game that could not be rigged, any sensory input that could not have been put together by a sufficiently motivated malicious person?”
Everything in the real world is subject to interpretation by our perception of it. So nothing can be absolutely proved except perhaps your own existence.
The existence of morality, defined as a code of conduct operated between members of a group, is quite as certain as Mount Everest even though morality is an abstract noun.
@Chris
“I can prove the existence of an objective morality right here:
Does anyone here think that it is morally permissible to kill a child just because you like the idea of killing a child? I’m going to go ahead and assume that the answer is no for everyone (and if not, if you could please give me your address so that I can give it to the nice men in white suits). There, objective morality’s existence proved.”
The fact that finding the killing of our progeny repugnant is universal or almost universal does not make it objective. It is merely a very common preference. But perhaps you have a definition of the word “objective” which is different from mine?
Kyle, I think you’ll dig this.
http://raglinen.com/2012/07/04/in-what-are-they-created-equal/
I am neither a phil-officer nor a gentleman, but I’ll intrude anyway.
The best reason to explore ideas of “rights” is for clarifying how self/other can thrive. If one doesn’t search for that knowledge, and come to some tentative conclusions, one cannot begin the action of love. Discovery of “rights” are an aspect of defining identity. In part, they are the place where one entity rubs up against the next.
“…an endless game of power.” But there are many kinds of power. Understanding the right to maintain/continue a healthy existence is not a ploy for power so much as it is to realize/establish one’s place. There is power in that, sure, but it is not “power over” so much as “power in”.
Battles for rights become illegitimate power struggles when humans give into their inclination to consider themselves pre-eminent.
Intrusion welcome, Patricia. If I’m understanding you correctly, the rights you have in mind are not the same sort of rights that I deny exist. Rights based on identity are allegedly based on something; in other words, we can derive them or not from the meaning of identity. We’ve no such process of thought in the cause of self-evident rights.
“We’ve no such process of thought in the cause of self-evident rights.” Ok, but that is the only way to make something valuable of it, right? Appealing to the idea of identity from inside the “rights” landscape is useful simply because that is what is already in place, an incoherent attempt by the broad public to try to come to terms with identity-in-society.
And if processed that way, “self-evident” rights are exactly that–evidence of self-placement and the rights that belong with that place. They’re “endowed by their creator” because that is who made them the way they are. Whether one believes in a creator or not, the information regarding the rights are contained in the disposition of the being. There is an object-ness to which one can appeal, even though of course it will always be messy and fluid.
I do not see how you can get to the ideas of identification from “the ethical languages of virtue and of obligations to others”. Virtue arises from a substantiated self, and obligations are only understood when both self and other are identified.
Thanks for letting me play. Good night.
Good comment Patricia. This expresses better than I could what I was trying to get at (and now that I understand where Kyle was going with this).
@patricia –
I do not see how you can get to the ideas of identification from “the ethical languages of virtue and of obligations to others”. Virtue arises from a substantiated self, and obligations are only understood when both self and other are identified.
I’m not sure I understand. Are you saying we need to have a concept of identity before we can make sense of ethics?
I think so. Principles of right conduct, moral choices, standards that govern a person–seems to me that we can’t form them unless we know who we are “working with”, who they “work on”. That ethics are derived by understanding the character and needs of other. That they emerge from necessities-for-continuance of the world and it’s constituent parts.
I don’t mean that we need to know all ourselves, or the entirety of other, or that ethics can’t be generalized in some ways. But if there is no “there” there, I don’t see how one can arrive at ethical principles.
Does that sound awry?
In a way, the criticism of self-evident rights makes sense. That way is the sad fact that getting ones liberty as a free-thinking human being recognized, in all cases, always, requires some form of fight…
The thing I’m afraid of about the overall critique is where it looks like it goes once it escapes mere philosophical talk for the sake of talking. People can argue whatever as recreation, but taken to the actual political field it throws out liberty, leaving only license. When even with what is being called a fiction in existence the world still has the principle of “we will decide what you can do, because we know better, because SHUT UP AND OBEY!!” to contend with, to even remove that… well, imagine if every oppressive, dehumanizing ideology there is or even could be simply ran unopposed except by each other. “Freedom? What freedom? There are only competing interests, and yours lost, so shut up!”.
Live in a world like that? I’d rather eat a bullet.
Oh, I’m a big believer in freedom! But you don’t need to posit self-evident rights to explain freedom.
Kyle,
I have some sympathy with what you’re trying to say about “human rights,” but I’ll add two comments, one unfair and the other arguably fair.
Unfair comment: denying “human rights” probably needs to be done, but it is often done in a way that tends to be off-putting to non-philosophers. Someone might take a position on a given issue, offer a throwaway sentence about “human rights” informing that issue, and then the philosopher devotes 443 pages of “dialogue” to discussing why it’s bad to rely on “human rights” without realizing that person who used that term in the first place was just using a term unreflectively. As I said, it’s an unfair criticism, but that dynamic might explain why you’re getting some of the pushback you’re getting on this.
(Arguably) fair comment: The abortion issue is not the best, or even a good illustration of this. People in our constitutional system are not really arguing whether there is a right to life, they are assuming that there is and that it applies to the fetus (or not). Also, the claim, especially by pro-choicers, is that the Constitution (not “our Creator”) contains an implicit protection of a “right” to privacy. But this right is inferred contextually from the constitution and not as a human right tout court, even if one theory of constitutional interpretation rests on the notion that there are human rights and that any legitimate constitutional order must recognize those rights and impinge on them only when it’s really, really justified to do so.
I actually don’t see a lot of pro-lifers or pro-choicers citing the declaration of independence so much as I see them citing legal doctrines and hoping that enough of their justices get on the Supreme Court, or I see them making claims about the respective prerogatives of the state and the federal governments. I also see them as engaging in such discussions about whether a true ‘right to life” is better realized through social welfare programs than through (or in addition to) the outlawry of abortion.
It is possible that this is where you’re going, that “human rights” doesn’t help either side here. But I don’t see either side really engaging the right to abortion, or the right of the unborn to be spared from abortion, as a human right to begin with. It sounds, to me, rather like saying that broccoli isn’t a good food because you can’t use it to make apple pie. (Sorry about the poor analogy and mixed metaphor.)
People in our constitutional system are not really arguing whether there is a right to life, they are assuming that there is and that it applies to the fetus (or not).
Exactly, and that’s why I chose this example. The right is assumed, not argued for. Pro-lifers assume the nascent life has this right at conception; pro-choice people assume it comes later in development or at birth.
Also, the claim, especially by pro-choicers, is that the Constitution (not “our Creator”) contains an implicit protection of a “right” to privacy. But this right is inferred contextually from the constitution and not as a human right tout court, even if one theory of constitutional interpretation rests on the notion that there are human rights and that any legitimate constitutional order must recognize those rights and impinge on them only when it’s really, really justified to do so.
True, but not the whole story. If the Constitution were amended with a personhood clause giving full legal rights to the unborn, pro-choicers would object, not merely because they believe abortion rights are constitutionally protected, but also because they believe they should be protected. The right to choose is seen as a part of reproductive rights which falls under women’s rights.
But I don’t see either side really engaging the right to abortion, or the right of the unborn to be spared from abortion, as a human right to begin with.
I disagree. Both sides want the law to reflect what they see as the real right. Let’s say there was no implied constitutional right to privacy under which the right to choose fell–don’t you think pro-choice advocates would want the law of the land to allow women to choose abortion and respect their right to do so?
I think I agree with your first two points her, or at least see more clearly what you mean.
I”m not sure I agree with or understand your last paragraph. I do think that pro-choicers would want the law of the land to allow women to choose abortion, but that doesn’t mean that they’d then necessarily be claiming that as a “human right,” or as a “self-evident human right.” However, maybe I’m not understanding you fully.
” The right is assumed, not argued for. Pro-lifers assume the nascent life has this right at conception; pro-choice people assume it comes later in development or at birth. ”
But the difference is not whether all persons have the right to life (or whether they have the right not to have their life ended for arbitrary reasons), but whether the unborn is a “person” (or at least an object of moral concern).
But to say that the unborn is a person is (often) to say that it has certain rights. The two terms (often) go together: that X has rights means that it is a person; that X is a person mean that it has rights.
You’re right that they go together, at least usually. To me, and perhaps this is what you’re getting at, the argument over the personhood of the zygote/embryo/fetus is an argument about what belongs to the universe of “human” when it comes to enjoying “human rights.”
Are you saying, then, that we already agree on the basics of right and wrong here but not on what/who merits the designation of (human) rights bearer?
I do feel that I’m just not grasping your point, not that I necessarily disagree with much of what you’re saying. If I am going in circles and am simply not understanding your argument, please feel free to throw up your hands in despair at the education of today’s youth (even though I am probably at least a few years older than you).
Are you saying, then, that we already agree on the basics of right and wrong here but not on what/who merits the designation of (human) rights bearer?
Partially, yes, but even if the unborn’s “right to life” was socially recognized, you would still have conflicts that would arise, say in the case of the mother’s life being in danger.
Setting aside my own reservations with Declarationism, I think your previous post and the current one show confusion about what the key sentence says or can be thought to say. Without getting into the question or rights and what statements about them can mean, a point on which I’ll simply continue to indicate reservations, the sentence does not actually state that those rights “are self-evident.” It strongly implies that the writer and signatories believe as much, but what the sentence actually says is that they or “we” “hold” them to be so. It strongly implies that someone else does not, and this further implication should already affect how you interpret the concept of “self-evidence”: Clearly, in the minds of the “hold”-ers, it is very violently not the kind of evidence that all people immediately and entirely accept in full and in the same way, to the identical implications.
Now, I don’t really agree with your or MacIntyre’s or Dougherty’s phenomenology of rights, though I do agree with some of your conclusions and and have great sympathy for the communitarian side of the eternal debate with ideal liberalism that you all in different ways represent, but wherever you shake out on the ontological status of right, in interpreting the Declaration and, a different thing, the Constitution, you are interpreting speech acts, political acts, not philosophical treatises. If you agree that, on balance, it is better to “hold” these rights to be self-evident – or to be among those who say they do, rather than among those who don’t say so – then perhaps you can go ahead and sign on, even if you remain unsure about the deeper philosophical questions, even if you are an utter skeptic of the ability of speech to contain philosophical truth at all. In the latter instance – and this is in a sense the universal instance of political praxis – you cease disquisition and act, even if in this case it means compromising absolute philosophical probity for the sake of biting your thumb at King George. (You can sign with an asterisk maybe, but it would be taken as a sign of equivocal commitment. You’ll still hang if things go wrong.)
If, in fact, it’s true enough, as you say, that “these ‘rights’ are grounded in nothing more than the say-so of whoever has the power to have them recognized in culture and in law,” then the question is whether you prefer those whose say-so includes them over those (the King and Subjects) who do not.
I think I agree with this, assuming I understand it, which I think I do.
The declaration admits that “endowed by their creator,” etc. is an assertion, as CK states, held to be a self-evident premise.
Again Richard Hooker, to whom Locke often refers to approvingly [“the ‘judicious’ Hooker”]:
“For to make nothing evident of itself unto man’s understanding were to take away all possibility of knowing anything. . . ”
Which comes to think of it, describes some of our modern know-it-alls to a “T,” negating everything, affirming nothing.
But that’s just CK’s point. The point of the Declarers’ choosing to say they hold those truths to be self-evident in that instance was not the preservation or advancement of knowledge and understand of the ontology of rights, human equality, or the other things the document treats; rather the point was simply politics. As philosophy, it’s corrupt.
Why is the Constitution not also then bankrupt? Philosophically, it may be. What is ha(s/d) going for it is that it (i/wa?)s the effective law of out our country.
I think we can state pretty definitively that the as-ratified original Constitution was deeply flawed on at least 3/5ths of a score.
What is ha(s/d) going for it is that it (i/wa?)s the effective law of out our country.
Does it’s ratification process and the lack of ever having replaced it count?
James (and Pat, for that matter),
That was obviously a very poorly put together sentence by me. If I understand correctly what you took me to be calling into question about the legal status of the Constitution, I was not intending to call that into question. Those parenthetical thoughts were just meant to be nods to the idea that we’ve strayed over time from being constrained by the limits in the Constitution, beyond even the flexibility given by reasonable interpretation, calling to question (maybe?) its current status as “effective law.” But I was saying that it is at least ostensibly that, certainly was actually so at some point, and presumably still is. I was just distinguishing it from the Declaration in saying that, whatever the ontological status of the pre-existing natural rights that it protects, once it does so, those ones it does protect become legal rights, which are social realities of some form or other and hence of more directly comprehensible ontology (in my view).
And Pat, I wasn’t saying that the list of rights it protected was complete or incomplete by any substantive standard, but only that by doing so using the force of law thereby creating legal rights, it brought into existence a kind of thing that the Declaration, by merely referencing naturally existing rights, did not.
I think I agree with this, assuming I understand it, which I think I do.
Same.
To an extent, I grant these nuances about phrasing, the function of the Declaration as a political but not philosophical speech act, and the possible compromises the signers made, but I fail to see why this matters here. The subjective “we hold” expression makes sense as a political speech act, but this speech still makes a philosophical point even if the document is not a philosophical treatise. The sentences are about both the act of holding and what is held, and the document itself has become part of the nation’s philosophical history.
“Self-evident” truths are not by definition obvious or easily accessible, and it’s pretty common for asserted self-evident truths to be contested.
Once it’s a little bit pregnant with politics, it ain’t philosophy no more. The political document alludes to philosophy and exploits philosophy, but is not philosophical. I’m not sure what a nation’s philosophical history would be, except probably not philosophical: It would be cultural, historical, susceptible to archeology. So I don’t agree that the the “we hold” statement makes a philosophical point. To make a philosophical point is to make a point philosophically. The document alludes to what the author refers to as self-evident truths. Philosophy might seek to determine what “self-evidence” could mean in relation to “truth” and what holding truths of whatever type or any type as self-evident might imply, but self-evident truths are not philosophical truths. Philosophy is generally the refusal to accept any claim of self-evidence.
Now, it could be that Judicious H’s standard on self-evidence won’t hold up very well on close examination, and I’m not sure that it really tells us how TJ expected his assertion to be taken. In this connection, also in relation to your colloquy with TVD, also in relation to the OP and my own response to it, we tend to over-simplify before moving on, as is the norm, to all sorts of possibly totally irrelevant complication. We (including you and me both in this here discussion) tend to refer to the specified “rights” as self-evident, when what’s held to be self-evident in the document are “these truths,” not the “rights.” The “truths” are unfolded as a series of relatively complex “that” clauses of which we tend to focus on the first and second – “that all men…” and “that they are endowed…” – the latter being the one that gets to “rights” after the interposition of the endowing Creator.
Everybody’s two favorite clauses are followed by two more: “That to secure those rights…” and ” That whenever any Form of Government…” These self-evident truths are obviously much more complicated than “the Sun is hot” or “my little dog is cute.” Nor are they definitional or tautological in the way of “all bachelors are unmarried.” I’m not clear exactly what you mean by “analytically true” in this context, but, assuming you’ll tell me if it somehow encompasses my discussion, it does seem to me anyway that by “self-evident” TJ meant some more like “necessary” or “essential” or “basic,” “obvious to any well-intentioned and clear-sighted, reasonably well-educated English-speaking grown-up.”
It could be that, because we know that the early moderns were very concerned with natural right, and because “self-evidence” looks like an assertion of “naturalness,” we are eager to join it to that object – “rights” – several clauses distant and use it as a kind of formal equivalent for “natural,” as though “self-evidence” would be the unique spontaneous and instantaneous process by which the natural – natural world, natural law, natural rights – would make itself apparent to us.
I’ll offer as a speculative point, not backed by research or even much reflection, that it’s more likely that TJ & Crew were at the same time much more and much less sophisticated than that. They didn’t doubt that much of what they believed about themselves and the world was utterly natural in the classic, positive sense – conforming with the design of nature or the intentions of nature’s god. Since they saw human beings as naturally rational in a rational world, it was utterly “natural” that human beings would form government based on the consent of the governed, and that the governed would begin from a position of natural equality, etc. Transferring their worldview in the modern day requires some seemingly unnatural substitutions and interpolations. Instead of “natural” or “self-evident” – the particular social-political context of particular social-political statements – we might say “pre-supposed” or “definitional” or some such…
(sorry, garbled the last sentence – easiest for now just to drop the part about “the particular social-political… statements”)
To make a philosophical point is to make a point philosophically.
If I were in a philosophy class or delivering a philosophical lecture or writing a philosophical text, then yes; and while I agree that the DOI isn’t a philosophical document in this strict sense, it still has philosophical significance. The self-evident truths that are said to be held express the philosophical idea “that all men are created equal, endowed with rights, etc.” Again, I agree that the writers and signers weren’t “doing philosophy” in a strict sense, but they incorporated a philosophical idea into their political speech act.
I’m still not following you on the separation of “self-evident” and “rights.” Yes, the term “self-evident” is attached to “truths,” but what are these truths? The “that” clauses.
I mean by “analytical” statements such as “All bachelors are unmarried,” where the predicate is contained in the subject, so the truth is evident in itself. I wouldn’t call the DOI statements analytical in this way.
“Sacred and undeniable” was Jefferson’s original text. Franklin suggested “self-evident.” The below excerpt curiously repeats Mr. Cupp’s use of “All bachelors are unmarried.”
Regardless, I quite agree with the Franklin biographer that rights require God, as previously noted in this thread.
http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/07/ben_franklins_selfevident_decl.html
Walter Isaacson, in his Franklin biography, explains how the amply padded founding father and Renaissance man arrived at “self-evident.”
The idea of “self-evident” truths was one that drew less on John Locke, who was Jefferson’s favored philosopher, than on the scientific determinism espoused by Isaac Newton and on the analytic empiricism of Franklin’s close friend David Hume. In what became known as “Hume’s fork,” the great Scottish philosopher, along with Leibniz and others, had developed a theory that distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact (such as “London is bigger than Philadephia”) and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition (“The angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees”; “All bachelors are unmarried”). By using the word “sacred,” Jefferson had asserted, intentionally or not, that the principle in question–the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights–was an assertion of religion. Franklin’s edit turned it instead into an assertion of rationality.”
He should have stuck with “undeniable”; at least it’s a word.
Could be Hume’s the one who invited the bachelors to the party in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part IX. It was then taken up by Kant, and Quine used it again in a seminal work. It boggles the mind to consider how many bachelors have found themselves incidentally considering their own marital status in philosophy classes around the world oh these many years.
Also housekeeping – my longer comment above implies 4 thats, when there are of course 5 – Masonic conspiracists will want to note the fact, as well the division into 3 philosophical truths and 2 social-political truths.
“By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.”— Socrates
This reminds me of something my grandma once told me, when other family members were giving me a hard time about being unmarried at what they saw as an advanced age:
‘Son, wait a long time to get married. If she’s the right one, you’ll be happy that you found her after all this time.
And if she’s the wrong one, well, you won’t have to live with her so long.”
I miss my grandma.
Well this IS where we disagree, but maybe we can agree on some kind of formulation. Maybe, the DOI has no philosophical significance at all of its own, adds nothing to philosophy, but refers to philosophy or contains a philosophical residue. If you consider the philosophy or philosophical discussion to which it refers to be “bad philosophy,” there I disagree, though that’s not the same as saying that I consider that discussion to be a complete account of the whole or perfect wisdom or some such.
I think TVD’s latest very helpful addition on how they got to “self-evident” buttresses the point I made inadequately clearly: “Self-evident” apparently has more to do with philosophical politics – Franklin’s desire to give the goings-on a rationalist rather than religious cast – than with a strict philosophical statement on the origin of rights. Somewhat buttressing my speculative point, Isaacson seems to suggest that Jefferson just wanted a strong word for just how basic the truths were. If you called it “bad philosophy” just in the sense of not having been written in a philosophically sound manner, I might agree with you, but still I call it “politics” that shouldn’t be taken as philosophy. In that case, maybe we’re both right, if not both bachelors.
There is a remaining question, possibly more significant to your stronger “bad philosophy” claim, which you’ve carried over from the prior post and repeated at numerous points in this thread, as to the non-existence of rights. As you summarize the position, following MacIntyre, in the OP:
To put a Hegelian turn on the question, right can also be described as the existence of freedom. In that sense, to ask whether rights exist is very much like asking whether existence exists. Put differently, right is the or any mechanism or means by which freedom takes objective or positive form.
As you probably know, Hegel is the philosopher who is always right but, or because, never understood. Still the point might still be visible: That right is neither merely the negative and abstract freedom-from of individuals; nor merely the “recta linea” or conformation to the “simply true” at the origin of the word itself and to the most fundamental notions of “naturalness” (this stick is as straight as this other stick); but also and, for Hegel, absolutely crucially “freedom in and for itself.”
Here’s the relevant paragraph from Elements of the Philosophy of Right:
I like this passage in this discussion and am devoting attention to it here also because it articulates a relationship of freedom to the “holy” that doesn’t rely on the kind of invocation of a God concept that must immediately strike the non-believer as mythological. So maybe, if (and only if) you read sympathetically and carefully, you can perhaps make out the structure of a meeting between TVD’s faith of the fathers and a more typically modern and secular sensibility, between sacred and rational, that might even make our bad and too political founding philosophy look a lot better.
In Hegel Christianity and God are idealized in such a way so that a higher or potential non-distinction between atheism and monotheism can be made out. On the other hand, each perspective seems always on the verge of collapsing into the other – too religious for the rationalists, too rationalistic for the believers. Still, the very fact that it’s our friends at marxists.org who provide the passage for easy cut and paste makes it even better as religious rescue work esp. for TVD: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/printrod.htm#PR30
Thx, CK—for all this. My studies still insist to me: no God, no rights. As we see, the two least dogmatically Christian of all the Founders, TJ and BenF, ran into the same wall with this one.
And chose to walk around it. “Sacred and undeniable” is at least more honest than “self-evident.” [I have worked long and hard on where Franklin came up with “self-evident.” The Thomist Anglican Rev. Richard Hooker remains my best guess.]
If I may cut to some of the chase per this here wonderful Cupp blog, modernity [incl modern experimental psychology] questions the very idea of “freedom,” i.e., free will. Perhaps we’re just the sum of our conditioning and synapses.
The question of heaven and hell came up here in our Journeys in Alterity. I, in my characteristically moderate way, suggested that Hell might exist, but that it be empty. Universalism, “universal reconciliation,” apokatastasis—all might allow for a Hell, but perhaps even Mao , Stalin or Hitler might choose God’s forgiveness over eternal torment.
Everybody gets offered a Get Out of Jail Free card. You just have to say thank you.
If there is a God, and if he does give us free will in choosing heaven or hell [or perhaps annihilation, another interesting theological option], then surely human rights as some question of “freedom” carries backward from our ultimate disposition.
If the moment of our deaths has meaning [when we choose our eternal fate], then surely that freedom is reflected in how we live this life as well.
For if it’s not, I’m going to spend my next vacation hunting down and killing the handful of jerks who are a misery around the LoOG. This would be justice, not revenge. We all dig justice.
@Tom:
“….modernity [incl modern experimental psychology] questions the very idea of “freedom,” i.e., free will.” Calvinism also questions the idea of free will, while additionally keeping responsibility for all depravity on the sinner from before time. Variations of the determinism theme have proponents whether a god is involved or not. And if these were my only two choices, I’d take experimental psychology: freedom from freedom and some fun too.
“…no God, no rights.” If you believe in the Christian God, then perhaps you also believe that God is revealed in that which He/She made. I had to look it up (it’s been a while), but: “For since the creation of the world his invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse (Romans 1:19,20). Which, as I remember from my background, was generally taken as just another reason to schlep people to hell without second thought, but perhaps the broader issue is that if common grace is also grace, there is enough echo/redundancy as well as general structure in the created system to discover such things as identities and healthy functions without the specific need to bring obeisance to a god.
It is interesting that you would pursue justice here only if you were convinced there will be no justice after death.
Hi Patricia. I was just riffing, really. I don’t do soteriology in public. Or revelation.
Some people here at Kyle’s blog were troubled by the idea of Hell so I passed along that hell might be empty.
You mention Romans 1, which is a scriptural argument for “natural law,” that God reveals himself through nature without scripture. Around the time of the American founding, it was argued even further that if there were no God, there still could be a natural law.
http://americancreation.blogspot.com/2009/04/primer-on-natural-law.html
As for Jean Calvin, I’m an outsider and a neophyte; my interest is mostly in Calvinism’s influence on the American Founding.
As for justice, I still can’t get anyone to help me with the suspicion that mercy is in conflict with it. Since Christianity is far more about mercy than justice, attempts to mutate what used to be called Christian charity into “social justice” fail miserably in my view.
I’ve enjoyed your comments here. Cheers.
Interesting also to consider that in our time we have achieved a special kind of confusion over this ironclad analytic truth, since the same man can now be a bachelor in Mississippi and yet a married man at the same time. Not sure if that makes him an extraordinary gentleman or not.
TVD @ https://ordinary-times.com/kylecupp/2012/08/the-trouble-with-self-evident-human-rights-an-example/#comment-4406
So if you just explain God, or “God” (how important is the word?), then we’ll understand what you mean by rights?
Hell yeah, CK. Thx for asking.
@Kyle
I agree with your statement about rights in your OP and also about the impossibility of resolving the abortion question solely by reference to rights.
stuckey williams