At 02:18 PM 10/14/2000, you wrote:
>Dear Chris
>
> >If the alleged rights of one "human being" can be used to
> > totally deny the rights of another human being, the concept
> > of rights itself is reduced to logical nonsense -- . . . .
>
>It's a violation of human rights to require child support payments? <G>
Chris
In some cases. <G>
>(some) People with Alzheimer's and ALS are the mental and/or physical
>equivalent of the unborn. OK to kill them?
Chris
If they are living *inside* your body and you don't want them there.
>It's your use of "totally" which causes the problem. Compare a 9 month
>pregnancy with the old 2 year military draft. Pregnancy worse than boot
>camp?
Chris
Military conscription *is* a form of slavery. But, it has nothing to do
with which is worse. It has to do with the basic requirements for civilized
social living. Abortion, in many cases, may be *immoral*, but that doesn't
mean it should be *illegal*.
bill
>Personally, I deny the concept of human rights and subscribe to social
>contract theory.
Chris
But, without a concept of rights, there can't be any real contracts at all.
The idea of rights, if only in an implicit form, is a necessary basis for
the concept of a contract.
This does not mean, of course, that we cannot have something like a social
contract as a means of contributing to the protection and recognition of
rights.
Rights derive from the recognition that it is contrary to one's interests
to initiate the use of force against other people (something that most
people do not recognize in their political activities, even if they do in
their personal interactions with others), that one undermines one's *own*
life when one decides that one is "above" the "law" of civilized social
living. It produces alienation from other human beings, from the "human
family," that will not be made up by the expected gains made by violating
rights. The ultimate costs to one's happiness and well-being are almost
inherently greater than whatever one might gain by such means.
The right winger who seeks to make abortion illegal and the liberal who
seeks to tax everyone to pay for abortions are both acting on a double
standard. Each is implicitly claiming the right to be free to use force
against others, but reject the idea that *they* should be subjected to the
use of force (as is indicated by their reaction when you try to *stop* them
from using force). They want the "freedom" to take away the freedom of
others, and as such, basically reduce their position to the
self-contradictoriness of holding a double standard, one for themselves and
one for others.
The only way that I know of to eliminate the double standard without
renouncing the initiatory use of force is to reject the idea of principled
social living altogether. This is no help, of course, since human needs do
not depend on one's beliefs. But, it does eliminate the double standard.
The objectivity of human needs, in this area as in any other, is why the
claims that naturalism leads inevitably to moral and social problems is
bull-drivel. Morality depends on the objectivity of human needs, not on the
whims of some ill-defined and generally nonexistent supreme being, or on
the whims of "society," or on the whims of the individual. Some forms of
naturalistic belief *do* lead to moral and social problems, but this hardly
makes naturalism as such the cause of such problems. Naturalism, as such,
is only a basic metaphysical position. Christianity, on the other hand,
always causes problems because it rests on the rejection of cognitive
objectivity and rational epistemology in favor of faith, which leads to a
failure to properly recognize and accept one's objective needs and thus to
acting destructively. Often, a person will be prevented from acting
horribly by an *implicit* recognition of the reality of one's needs, but
this is unreliable.
Far from being the *cause* of moral and social problems, naturalism (at
least methodological naturalism) is a *necessary* aspect of most fully
solving them.
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