| HN Mirror

While I understand your perspective, I disagree with it.

That gives too much power to society and is a foundation for tyranny in my opinion. More, it means slavery without the right to contest it unless that right is provided by the State, which of course it wouldn't be.

Also fundamentally it doesn't make sense because I clearly have the right to do things if I am doing them and nobody is stopping me.

majormajor 1837 days ago

That's the whole thing, isn't it? Different societies do stop people from doing different sets of things. So "nobody is stopping me" can't be evidence for any "natural" set of rights beyond society, since it would result in wildly different sets of "natural rights" for people in different societies. And a different set outside of a society, where maybe you have the a greater right to light things on fire but a lesser right to not get killed by someone else lighting things on fire.

Here's the thing; I'm operating in the framework I was responding to, where rights come from the state and must be exercised to be real.

If all rights come from society and I have no rights outside those society grants, and I am able to take an action not explicitly outlined as one I have the right to take by my society, and society does not punish me for doing this in any way - how do I not have the right to do it in the first place?

I believe that government is granted powers by the people. I do not believe that people are granted powers by the government. That's the fundamental difference. People can live without the government, the government cannot live without the people.

That means that if the government is acting against the interests of the people, the people have the right to reform the government.

If power comes from the government instead, the people have no right of reform save that granted by the government. This means that if the government doesn't want to be reformed, the people have no justification for reforming it.

As to your right to light things on fire, being killed by others etc - you have the right to kill other people, especially when they are trying to kill you. You may be killed in response, that can happen. That's the incentive for making a society, so people don't kill or rob you. You make a government and grant it your proxy to act in your stead - so you don't get to kill people anymore, but society will do it for you.

I think this is magical thinking about what a government is.

The social contract theory is a just-so story. It's not real. Governments exist because they are a tool for concentrating power and out-compete other social groupings in terms of economic strength and capacity for violence. But good governments want to incentive happy, productive citizens, so they use pre-existing language, or invent new language, to discuss how to achieve that. "Rights" are an example of this.

Governments don't exist from the consent of the governed, but rather from the lack of force sufficiently strong to dissolve them. Just because I don't have this force doesn't mean I have consented to being governed.

> Governments exist because they are a tool for concentrating power and out-compete other social groupings in terms of economic strength and capacity for violence.

Governments exist because single people aren't powerful enough to protect themselves and because people are social, so they group together.

This is more Hegel, but they totally do exist from the consent of the governed because the people do have the power to dissolve them. If the will of the people does not align with the government, over time the government will dissolve. The question is how bad it has to get before that happens.

>Governments don't exist from the consent of the governed, but rather from the lack of force sufficiently strong to dissolve them. Just because I don't have this force doesn't mean I have consented to being governed.

So essentially if a force existed that could dissolve governments, then no governments would exist? Again, I think that force does exist, embodied in the governed as a whole. By the way, you completely do consent to be governed. You can choose to drop out - the problem being that if you do that you leave yourself at the mercy of powerful actors. It's not an optimal state.

You're at the mercy of powerful actors regardless of whether you consent to it. A law will affect me the same way regardless of whether I believe in it. A rock blocking my path blocks it whether I consent to it being there. Maybe I can go around, or maybe I need to move it, but my consent isn't really important. By the way, most governments do not forbid dropping out.

Hegel is doing the continental thing of waving hands and converting a collection of individuals into a People who Consent. But if you have 80% of the people not consenting, but 80% of the power supporting the government, consent doesn't matter.

I think you're also leaving out the possibility of a Nash equilibrium, where nobody likes the government, but there is not a way to coordinate a transition to something better without a high likelihood of something worse.

But in the end I don't think we disagree too much, just some quibbling around the edges. Maybe I'm wrong though.

handrous 1837 days ago

> The social contract theory is a just-so story.

I find this (the liberal employment of just-so stories) to be practically a defining trait of enlightenment-era political thinking. Happy coincidence that their application resulted in systems of government strong enough to survive competition, though I do worry that that had more to do with other factors than with the benefits of liberal democracy, which may be more like peacock feathers than something enduringly fit in a changing environment, and that, especially with a changing technological landscape, the March of Democracy may end up being rather less long-lived than we might have hoped. I gather some cold-war thinkers had similar concerns. That turned out to be OK, more or less, I suppose, for generous values of "OK"—Russia didn't exactly shift toward liberalism afterward the fall of the Soviet Union, for one thing.

Yes, we will have to see. I think my own attachments to liberal values don't provide much guidance for how humanity will be best served. But I hope whatever emerges or wins out does it somehow by making people live meaningful lives, and not by leading us to something like Derek Parfit's repugnant conclusion.

handrous 1837 days ago

Where this loses me is: 1) I don't think "it's inconvenient" (that is, it empowers tyranny) is a compelling argument for or against the truth of something, and 2) I don't see how this, in fact, affects the practice or existence of tyranny one way or the other. The reason I think it matters is because I think it's harmful when people get really hung up on some set of rights that they believe are proven from a hypothetical argument (as the "state of nature" argument is—often this ends up being heavily centered around individual property rights, as in Locke) and draw a hard line between those and any other liberties that others might like to admit to the ranks of "rights". I don't really think I'm more or less able to defend against tyranny if rights "exist" (huh?) in a "state of nature" that doesn't actually reflect anything like the apparent "natural" state of humanity, which seems to have been communal and societal since, quite likely, before we were H. Sapiens yet.

My practical objection is, in particular:

> More, it means slavery without the right to contest it unless that right is provided by the State, which of course it wouldn't be.

You can contest whatever you want, if you're able. The hypothetical "source" (huh?) of your rights doesn't matter. You can make a moral argument against slavery even if "state of nature" reasoning about rights were 100% for-sure convincing-to-everyone proven to be wrong. It's irrelevant. If someone's contesting slavery and you convince them that the "natural rights" conception is bunk, they can... still contest slavery. It doesn't matter a bit. It's a label to convey that we're very serious about something and think others should take it very seriously, too, and so far as that goes it's useful and important.

>Where this loses me is: 1) I don't think "it's inconvenient" (that is, it empowers tyranny) is a compelling argument for or against the truth of something

Oh, ok. But what about the part where it exists without society? In the US, for example, our laws are mostly reactionary. It's built on the common law system, and things change over time as they encounter new situations. So rather than creating a law to create the new, the law is created in response to the new.

>2) I don't see how this, in fact, affects the practice or existence of tyranny one way or the other.

Do you not see that in practice or in theory? Because in practice sure, it's hard - the concept of rights stemming from the individual is mostly an enlightenment one and that's only a few hundred years. That said, countries that follow that principle have not had a tyrant lead them for more than a few years over that period either, while countries where rights come from the state have had tyrants or monarchs. That doesn't really prove anything but if you go into the theory, one system supports centralized power and the other supports decentralized power. Which is better for consolidation and control by a smaller group?

>The reason I think it matters is because I think it's harmful when people get really hung up on some set of rights that they believe are proven from a hypothetical argument (as the "state of nature" argument is—often this ends up being heavily centered around individual property rights, as in Locke) and draw a hard line between those and any other liberties that others might like to admit to the ranks of "rights".

Could you make an example? I'd be surprised that someone can be for natural rights and be against say the existence of a right to free expression, for instance.

>You can contest whatever you want, if you're able.

Sure, my point is that it makes you more able. People want to be on the side of justice and morality and it's important to have deep foundations for individual rights to assist in preventing the government from succeeding in its attempts to usurp them. Governments always try to usurp people's rights, but it's harder to do when individuals know it's happening. I think it's better to be suspicious of the government when it increases its own power. If you believe your rights come from your government then when the government limits your potential actions you are less likely to object - you'd sound ridiculous. I believe it's these minor objections that lead to larger movements and allow for change without direct and bloody revolution.

This part, for example: If someone's contesting slavery and you convince them that the "natural rights" conception is bunk, they can... still contest slavery. It doesn't matter a bit.

That's true but if that happens it stays a single person contesting slavery with no real basis in ethics. Why do they want to deprive people of their property in contravention of existing rights and laws? Why not have slavery outright, actually, in that case? What's wrong with it? Is it only wrong because the state currently says so? I don't think so - I think it's wrong for a lot of reasons but at its core, a person owns themselves, always. As a result they cannot be fully owned by another.

handrous 1837 days ago

> That said, countries that follow that principle have not had a tyrant lead them for more than a few years over that period either, while countries where rights come from the state have had tyrants or monarchs. That doesn't really prove anything but if you go into the theory, one system supports centralized power and the other supports decentralized power. Which is better for consolidation and control by a smaller group?

I'm not comfortable relying on continued belief in a conception of rights that I don't think has great grounding in reason, to safeguard against tyranny. At best it seems a slightly-helpful convenience with an uncertain future, useful primarily as a tool of propaganda. That's not nothing, admittedly, and I wouldn't begrudge anyone using it for that purpose.

> Could you make an example? I'd be surprised that someone can be for natural rights and be against say the existence of a right to free expression, for instance.

The simplest thing to point out would be that natural-rights adherents have a tendency (I've noticed) to be hostile to any kind of "positive" right, seeing them, pretty much categorically, as strictly at-odds with capital-R Rights that can be derived from the State of Nature thought experiment (or similar). These positions tend toward incoherence, irrespective of the truth-value of the State of Nature argument itself, in their more mainstream form (supporting e.g. the right to a trial and judgement by one's peers despite that pretty clearly involving some positive rights to other people's time, or that the claim that others cannot choose to give up rights for any reason is itself a positive right) or else, in an effort to maintain coherence, toward reducing anything too close to a "positive" right to a business transaction in order that positive gain might always be voluntary (IMO "voluntary" in this context is on such a sliding scale that here applying as if it were concrete and absolute amounts to sophistry, but that's a whole other topic). This latter at least has some promise so far as its reasoning goes, but I'd prefer to see its application succeed somewhere far away from me before I'd entertain becoming an advocate for it.

Either way, I don't like absolutism regarding Natural Rights which have been granted this elevated status as the outcome of a thought experiment. If we could, hypothetically, somehow, have 99.9% as much liberty to free speech and, as a result, everyone's quality of life would be 10x greater because this minor infringement would enable all sorts of huge benefits, of course I'd be all for that—I'm choosing exaggerated figures and treating these as precisely measurable for ease of illustration, but my point is that I favor treating infringement on what are commonly agreed upon as rights with a high degree of skepticism but not treating them as a suicide pact, as it were... because I simply don't think they're special, and that their utility is what justifies their protection, not the reasoning that led to their selection.

In the end, I'm simply more interested in and find more compelling the conservation or creation of liberties, of all sorts, that make life nicer and more practically free for most people. Whether these are or are not Rights that can be derived from a state-of-nature line of reasoning is of little concern to me. I do think that the sets of rights arrived at by the usual names in that movement are a damn good starting point, however I think that has more to do with the whole thing being an exercise in motivated reasoning than with the thought experiment proving anything fundamentally true about human freedom. I see the derivation from the state of nature as a side-show, and the rights so-arrived-at are what are worth consideration (and acceptance or rejection, either one—I don't think we're obligated to accept them, because, again, I don't think they have some kind of reality [what would that even mean?] beyond what we decide to give them).

> That's true but if that happens it stays a single person contesting slavery with no real basis in ethics. Why do they want to deprive people of their property in contravention of existing rights and laws? Why not have slavery outright, actually, in that case? What's wrong with it? Is it only wrong because the state currently says so? I don't think so - I think it's wrong for a lot of reasons but at its core, a person owns themselves, always. As a result they cannot be fully owned by another.

I do not think natural rights are the only—or even a particularly good, because, again, I judge them to be built on shaky ground—way to arrive at an ethical argument against slavery, so I don't think their absence removes all ethical basis for arguing against slavery.

Actually, this right here lets me illustrate part of my whole point here: "[...] a person owns themselves, always. As a result they cannot be fully owned by another." Great! So why worry about slavery? A person owns themselves, always. Always.

So that right "exists", because someone wrote down an argument from the state of nature that demonstrates that it does. Wonderful. Does that free a single slave? No. Applied as propaganda, perhaps it does. But that "right" "existing" has no power whatsoever to free a single person. Only turned into action, in a relevant context, is it of any value. We choose to manifest it as a kind of reality, but it exists not at all per se.

Let me put it this way: if the state of nature argument had happened to yield that people can be owned and owning people is a right (again, I think the whole thing's motivated reasoning, so this isn't even slightly implausible, IMO, if you put it in the hands of someone who wants that outcome they may find a path that's every bit as solid as, say, Locke's) would we be compelled to accept that? It's a right, so it must be ethical and fine? I say hell no. And I don't think any other rights that fall out of the argument deserve special protection or deference except so far as they're useful and we judge them Good.

The positive/negative rights question is interesting, I'm gonna read a few things and think about this.

well said