One vs. the Many

[Mr. Perfect]

Since this has gotten really sloppy we should review the basics.

Freedom and liberty as described for centuries now by western freedom lovers simply means the full exercise of natural rights under the law.

The idea of natural rights is you only have the rights you would have in nature (state of nature) by yourself, ie freedom of conscience, opinion, defense, means of defense, autonomy, the ownership of fruits of your own labor, and so forth. Things that do not exist in nature you do not have a right to, such as health care, or other goods you cannot produce on your own.

So the next point where people here are getting confused is when you introduce more than one person. It's not particularly complicated, recall the definition of freedom and liberty as used here is simply the full exercise of your rights under the law. When you introduce another person they have rights just like you and rights are to be protected under the law.

Rights of individuals in society are determined by voluntary choice, ie your rights protect you from me doing anything to you against your voluntary choice, voluntary choice being defined as choice absent violent threat.

It should be pointed out man in nature is a good way to determine what you don't have a right to and man in society helps you determine what you do have a right to (what others cannot take away).

So yes leftists, you don't have a right to state hc, and that sucks, for you.

lvLZ-M_HS-w

Pretty straightforward.

[Dioscuri]

Since this has gotten really sloppy we should review the basics.

Freedom and liberty as described for centuries now by western freedom lovers simply means the full exercise of natural rights under the law.

The idea of natural rights is you only have the rights you would have in nature (state of nature) by yourself, ie freedom of conscience, opinion, defense, means of defense, autonomy, the ownership of fruits of your own labor, and so forth. Things that do not exist in nature you do not have a right to, such as health care, or other goods you cannot produce on your own.

And the limitation of liability is also construed as a natural right?

Naturally.

[Mr. Perfect]

Since this has gotten really sloppy we should review the basics.

Freedom and liberty as described for centuries now by western freedom lovers simply means the full exercise of natural rights under the law.

The idea of natural rights is you only have the rights you would have in nature (state of nature) by yourself, ie freedom of conscience, opinion, defense, means of defense, autonomy, the ownership of fruits of your own labor, and so forth. Things that do not exist in nature you do not have a right to, such as health care, or other goods you cannot produce on your own.

And the limitation of liability is also construed as a natural right?

Naturally.

Great question, it is an incredibly natural and durable right. It's been around for centuries now, great example.

Say you and I went into business together, and I took the company truck out and demolished it, destroying everything we own in the business.

I think we would both agree that my action should not put your personal wealth at risk since of course you had no control over it. Your loss in this case, your liability, would be limited to whatever you invested in the company. Limited liability may be slightly unfair to you in this case but that is the risk you take when you go into business and we have to deal with reality. Although someone correct me if I'm wrong but you might be able to sue me for damages in some cases. So I think limiting your liability to my actions is perfectly fair.

I think that is a natural remedy everyone is able to live with.

[Zack Morris]

You make it sound as though 'natural law' has a standardized definition. It does not. Your definition is laughably simplistic and totally inapplicable to modern society. It is also inconsistent with many of the positions you advocate. It would be trivial to come up with a whole list of things one would be entitled to do 'in nature', and which do not conflict with your right to 'voluntary choice', such as walking around au naturale, aborting fetuses, and marrying multiple people of the same sex.

Instead of theorizing about what rights man might have defined for himself when the global population consisted of no more than a few thousand nudists, like some sort of tenured U. of Chicago professor, I think it would be more useful to think about rights in a modern context.

[Mr. Perfect]

You make it sound as though 'natural law' has a standardized definition. It does not.

Go try to legitimately rape someone, let me know how it goes.

Your definition is laughably simplistic

I have to speak to my audience.

and totally inapplicable to modern society. It is also inconsistent with many of the positions you advocate. It would be trivial to come up with a whole list of things one would be entitled to do 'in nature', and which do not conflict with your right to 'voluntary choice', such as walking around au naturale, aborting fetuses, and marrying multiple people of the same sex.

Possibly, but tbh it is in my interest to let you make those arguments ad infinitum and tarnish left wing people at large with those kinds of arguments.

Instead of theorizing about what rights man might have defined for himself when the global population consisted of no more than a few thousand nudists, like some sort of tenured U. of Chicago professor, I think it would be more useful to think about rights in a modern context.

I like the Bill of Rights, unadulterated.

[YMix]

The idea of natural rights is you only have the rights you would have in nature (state of nature) by yourself, ie freedom of conscience, opinion, defense, means of defense, autonomy, the ownership of fruits of your own labor, and so forth. Things that do not exist in nature you do not have a right to, such as health care, or other goods you cannot produce on your own.

Ownership of the fruits of your own labor is a right in nature? Freedom of opinion? Since when? What kind of nature are we talking about.

[Enki]

Wrong. You claimed that primitive nomads were "truly free" and the we're less free. I pointed out that primitive nomads would have been killed if they tried going in 90% of America (or anywhere), simply because there were other people roaming around, who were armed.

Way to miss the point entirely. Thank you for illustrating agreement with me as an argument. You're right, primitive nomads would be killed and WERE KILLED en masse by the earlier settlers of America. So yes,

Similarly, in your example attempting to rape someone you simply assume that you can effortlessly overpower them and any of their allies. Not something to be taken for granted now, or ever.

Ahem, that was YOUR example, not mine. My example was about where you can sleep.

In other words, your assumed "free state" never existed, and as long as more than 1 person is alive in the world, never will.

The notion of a 'free state' is of course an oxymoron.

Yes, with the net result so far being a massive increase in freedom, especially in Western democracies.
Civilization can (but need not) hugely boost freedom, just as it can (but need not) hugely boost totalitarian control.

Define freedom? I know a whole lot of people who would disagree with your perspective on this.

Nothing is preventing you from attempting to sleep wherever you want, just as nothing was preventing some nomad from trying to lavender in front of the tent of a band of angry Apache warriors. That's not to say that either is a terribly good idea.

Nothing is preventing me? There are no laws about tresspassing?

In other words, ignore the fact that Enki just gave the debate away by basically defining his concept of freedom as "unrestricted power to enforce his whims over others". No, i don't think I will.

Ok, you are not equipped to have this discussion starting from first principles. You have an ideological axe to grind and will not budge from your position of personal bias. Understood.

[Zack Morris]

and totally inapplicable to modern society. It is also inconsistent with many of the positions you advocate. It would be trivial to come up with a whole list of things one would be entitled to do 'in nature', and which do not conflict with your right to 'voluntary choice', such as walking around au naturale, aborting fetuses, and marrying multiple people of the same sex.

Possibly, but tbh it is in my interest to let you make those arguments ad infinitum and tarnish left wing people at large with those kinds of arguments.

This statement would only make sense if 'left wing people' were arguing in favor of your idea of natural law.

I like the Bill of Rights, unadulterated.

The Bill of Rights grants an indeterminate number of rights to the people because it is both subject to interpretation and includes an amendment explicitly endowing people with the ability to claim more rights beyond those explicitly stated.

[Zack Morris]

The idea of natural rights is you only have the rights you would have in nature (state of nature) by yourself, ie freedom of conscience, opinion, defense, means of defense, autonomy, the ownership of fruits of your own labor, and so forth. Things that do not exist in nature you do not have a right to, such as health care, or other goods you cannot produce on your own.

Ownership of the fruits of your own labor is a right in nature? Freedom of opinion? Since when? What kind of nature are we talking about.

Right. Even if we restrict the discussion to human social behavior, people are social animals and are not born with ownership rights. They are born into the jurisdiction of parents and a community. Mr. P's entire premise is incorrect. It's the oldest trick in the book: make a hypothetical argument about something that doesn't exist and extrapolate all sorts of crazy ideas to justify anything you'd like. The best part of it is that it seems self-consistent so long as you do not dig too deeply into the core postulates.

Someone smarter than me can probably show that this is an example of Goedel's incompleteness theorem at work.

[Enki]

and totally inapplicable to modern society. It is also inconsistent with many of the positions you advocate. It would be trivial to come up with a whole list of things one would be entitled to do 'in nature', and which do not conflict with your right to 'voluntary choice', such as walking around au naturale, aborting fetuses, and marrying multiple people of the same sex.

Possibly, but tbh it is in my interest to let you make those arguments ad infinitum and tarnish left wing people at large with those kinds of arguments.

This statement would only make sense if 'left wing people' were arguing in favor of your idea of natural law.

No Mr. Perfect is appealing to superstition. His entire point and he makes this all the time, is that stupid people who he as deemed as being intellectually incapable of viewing an intellectual discussion of the nature of our beliefs will ultimately view any discussion of such as a threat to their core beliefs and thus infuse them with cognitive dissonance and a hatred of those making the arguments.

He's right, but it's not going to win him anything, this is the natural order of the modern era, the war between the unleashed modern intellectual class versus the average every day person and their deeply held core beliefs.

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

We have to be the only culture on the planet that seriously questions whether or not there is a collective that the individual is responsible to.

I never know how to understand you. You are an ardent, hard-core, militant individualist when it comes to things you want to be left alone on - like the right to smoke herb despite the community thinking it's a bad idea - but just as ardent a collectivist when you see something you want - like free health care.

[Enki]

We have to be the only culture on the planet that seriously questions whether or not there is a collective that the individual is responsible to.

I never know how to understand you. You are an ardent, hard-core, militant individualist when it comes to things you want to be left alone on - like the right to smoke herb despite the community thinking it's a bad idea - but just as ardent a collectivist when you see something you want - like free health care.

The community doesn't think smoking herb is a bad idea. A cabal of people who wanted to manufacture consent made it that way. There was a hardcore marketing campaign to get people to fear marijuana that was filled with absolute lies.

But if you are reducing it all to opinion, then that makes sense why you don't understand. Me smoking herb doesn't harm the community, at least it doesn't harm the community more than enforcement of prohibition harms the community.

Free healthcare on the other hand would be great for the economy (it could be partially funded by taxing legal marijuana) it would remove the market friction that the employer mandate creates and would reduce costs. The two things simply are not comparable. It's not a matter of 'wants'. You reduce everything to this idea of selfish wants. I want to live, naturally. It's not just about free healthcare. I have pretty good health coverage. But growing up I saw my family reduced to poverty because of a few health issues. I want to see a safety net where people are not reduced to poverty just because they get sick. A safety net that keeps small treatable illnesses from becoming life-shattering events for whole families.

So my individualism is actually very easy to suss out. Let me do things I want to do that don't harm the community in any significant way. And my collectivism is equally easy, create a glass floor that will make it so that no one has to choose between food, shelter and healthcare. The money the government spends could EASILY provide all of the bare minimum necessities that our people need, but we spend it on the murder budget instead. Real homeland security is not worrying that the flu is going to kill you.

It's actually pretty simple when you get down to it.


I'll make a list for you:

Things I should be free to do:
1) Surf in the hurricane
2) Smoke Marijuana
3) Be naked

Things society is not responsible for:
1) Sending EMS personnel to save me when I surf in a hurricane
2) Providing marijuana for free
3) Stopping people from being naked.

Things society is responsible for
1) No one should be homeless
2) No one should be malnourished
3) No one should die of a treatable disease.

Now, in every case, these are ideals. But to me a civilized society should aspire toward these ideals. Maximize freedom wherever possible, but the onus of society, the reason it exists at all is to sustain human life.

[Enki]

Surfing in a Hurricane

I figured people may address the issue of providing healthcare to people who make poor choices. So lets talk about that. If I break myself surfing in a hurricane and am able to drag myself to the hospital, should the hospital treat me? Yes, the hospital should. Why should the hospital treat me, but EMS should not save me from the waves? Well, that's easy, because at the hospital they are equipped do that. If EMS comes to save me from surfing in the hurricane, it endangers the EMS responders who could be responding to people who are victims of circumstance, not someone who is out trying to experience life.

Life is about experience, we should allow people to experience life to the fullest degree that they possibly can, and society is a safety net. The safety net allows us to reach higher and achieve even greater potential. This is Taboo's argument that civilization increases freedom. It does to a certain degree. Because someone invented surf boards I am free to surf in a hurricane. Society has increased my freedom.

Marijuana on the other hand, is barely harmful, has few major negative health side effects, but we spend billions of dollars trying to keep people from smoking it. You can make the argument that being stoned makes you less productive as a member of society. This is also true. But do you know what else reduces productivity? Grinding poverty. If you addressed the grinding poverty with that money devoted to keeping people from smoking pot, you might make more people productive members of society than there are people getting too stoned to reliably produce for society.

Architectural metphor time: The safety net is the foundation of society. Then you have the walls that protect us from the elements. Surfing in the hurricane, smoking pot, that's the ornamentation, the gargoyles, the encrusted columns, the frescoes and the like. Society should be providing the basic foundation so that everyone can enjoy the finer things in life. But there is no obligation to provide the finer things.

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

The community doesn't think smoking herb is a bad idea. A cabal of people who wanted to manufacture consent made it that way. There was a hardcore marketing campaign to get people to fear marijuana that was filled with absolute lies.

None of that matters. Every community has a different method of making its rules. The method we use has decided that it is unacceptable.

[Enki]

The community doesn't think smoking herb is a bad idea. A cabal of people who wanted to manufacture consent made it that way. There was a hardcore marketing campaign to get people to fear marijuana that was filled with absolute lies.

None of that matters. Every community has a different method of making its rules. The method we use has decided that it is unacceptable.

Ok, so to you, opinion and belief are all that matters.

To me it's rooted in the actual physicality of human life.

[Ibrahim]

Ownership of the fruits of your own labor is a right in nature? Freedom of opinion? Since when? What kind of nature are we talking about.

For certain Christians, "natural law" basically means Judeo-Christian law. Islam is a little different, where natural law meant the law of nature, which needed to be corrected by God's law. Existentialist philosophy rejects both notions and have different meanings again. In a North American context if somebody is talking about Natural Law nine times out of ten they mean Christianity.


I was initially quite confused about all this in my first History of Law class.

[Ibrahim]

The community doesn't think smoking herb is a bad idea. A cabal of people who wanted to manufacture consent made it that way. There was a hardcore marketing campaign to get people to fear marijuana that was filled with absolute lies.

None of that matters. Every community has a different method of making its rules. The method we use has decided that it is unacceptable.

Ok, so to you, opinion and belief are all that matters.

To me it's rooted in the actual physicality of human life.

All societies make their laws in roughly the same way, which is through consensus. Purely coercive societies are inevitably short-lived. Belief is a means of achieving this consensus (e.g. the divine aspect of kingship in monarchical societies). What you two are really touch on, and what is really interesting about human politics, is where the tipping point is in forming that consensus. Marijuana prohibition is interesting precisely because it sits right on the edge of one of those tipping points.

Back back to radical freedom anyone can certainly smoke marijuana any place or time they want.

[Ibrahim]

I figured people may address the issue of providing healthcare to people who make poor choices. So lets talk about that. If I break myself surfing in a hurricane and am able to drag myself to the hospital, should the hospital treat me? Yes, the hospital should. Why should the hospital treat me, but EMS should not save me from the waves? Well, that's easy, because at the hospital they are equipped do that. If EMS comes to save me from surfing in the hurricane, it endangers the EMS responders who could be responding to people who are victims of circumstance, not someone who is out trying to experience life.

This is the interesting philosophical debate about public health care, how much responsibility it confers to citizens in terms of protecting their health. Yet the issue is settled in every other developed nation on Earth, and it has been decided that the medical system will patch you up no matter what stupid thing to do/eat/drink/etc. Which is not to say that is therefore the "right" answer, but it seems to be the consensus.

Life is about experience, we should allow people to experience life to the fullest degree that they possibly can, and society is a safety net. The safety net allows us to reach higher and achieve even greater potential. This is Taboo's argument that civilization increases freedom. It does to a certain degree. Because someone invented surf boards I am free to surf in a hurricane. Society has increased my freedom.

I hadn't thought of it in this sense, in that society presents more options of things to do. I'm not sure if this equates to an increase in freedom, in the phyisophical sense, but its worth consideration.

[Nonc Hilaire]

Ownership of the fruits of your own labor is a right in nature? Freedom of opinion? Since when? What kind of nature are we talking about.

For certain Christians, "natural law" basically means Judeo-Christian law. Islam is a little different, where natural law meant the law of nature, which needed to be corrected by God's law. Existentialist philosophy rejects both notions and have different meanings again. In a North American context if somebody is talking about Natural Law nine times out of ten they mean Christianity.


I was initially quite confused about all this in my first History of Law class.

There are many definitions or aspects of natural law. Goes back to the Stoics, but it really isn't my field. Locke is a good secular, western starting point. So is Kant.

For Christianity; Aquinas and the ST is the best discussion. I would track it back to the Noachide law; natural law certainly precedes Mosaic law.

Natural law does not mean Christianity, even in Christianity. Ref. Romans 1, where the law is inscribed even on the hearts of pre-Christian nonbelievers. Civil and human rights all have a natural law basis, as does the validity of contract law.

[Enki]

So what are my natural rights? Just give me the ones that cannot be abridged by a cougar.

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

So what are my natural rights? Just give me the ones that cannot be abridged by a cougar.

Lately Tinker has been subscribing to the Tony Soprano school of ethical philosophy, in which he states that he is doing you a favor by not burning down your house or attacking you with a knife. Since he is going out of his way to allow you to keep your house and your life, you really have no right to get upset when society takes a piece of something you only have because Tinker has been kind enough not to destroy it.

He really said this.

[Ibrahim]

Ownership of the fruits of your own labor is a right in nature? Freedom of opinion? Since when? What kind of nature are we talking about.

For certain Christians, "natural law" basically means Judeo-Christian law. Islam is a little different, where natural law meant the law of nature, which needed to be corrected by God's law. Existentialist philosophy rejects both notions and have different meanings again. In a North American context if somebody is talking about Natural Law nine times out of ten they mean Christianity.


I was initially quite confused about all this in my first History of Law class.

There are many definitions or aspects of natural law. Goes back to the Stoics, but it really isn't my field. Locke is a good secular, western starting point. So is Kant.

For Christianity; Aquinas and the ST is the best discussion. I would track it back to the Noachide law; natural law certainly precedes Mosaic law.

Natural law does not mean Christianity, even in Christianity. Ref. Romans 1, where the law is inscribed even on the hearts of pre-Christian nonbelievers. Civil and human rights all have a natural law basis, as does the validity of contract law.

Certainly the history of the concept is complex and varied, but in modern American usage it is almost inextricably tied to Christian theology. At one time there was more consideration given to the Classical conception of the term, but that was before the "culture wars" really started to heat up.

[Ibrahim]

So what are my natural rights? Just give me the ones that cannot be abridged by a cougar.

Lately Tinker has been subscribing to the Tony Soprano school of ethical philosophy, in which he states that he is doing you a favor by not burning down your house or attacking you with a knife.

You're confusing freedom with ethics with freedoms. Anyone is free to do those things, though that doesn't even address the desirability or ethics of doing so.


Though you have defended the ethics of killing people and destroying their houses on this forum. Your only quibble on that front can be contextual. Which people killed, which house burned.

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

Though you have defended the ethics of killing people and destroying their houses on this forum. Your only quibble on that front can be contextual. Which people killed, which house burned.

You disagree with this?

[Enki]

Western society has been founded on the mass slaughter of indigenous populations only to bleat about property rights for the procured land. The extractive and exploitative system built upon slavery and genocide across the entire planet is couched in moralizing terms while anyone who questions the basic symptoms of that culture is accused of advocating rape and murder.

This system crushes lives and the beneficiaries love those benefits. It is criminal for one person to own millions of fallow acres of land while others cannot feed themselves. Yet we are told property is sacrosanct. Pardon me if I think human life is more important than property. The notion that property trumps human life is a might makes right attitude. The only natural law is the law of tooth and claw. Society creates the rest. Property rights are law of the jungle with a moralizing veneer.

Your property was taken by rape and murder at some point.