So, your argument (ignoring the appeal to authority) is:
1.Social rights can be reduced entirely to obligations on others.
Dubious. Ignoring that maybe the value to the person granted the social right could outweigh the obligation to others, or that the holistic effect on the system might be greater than its reduced parts.
2. Social rights need to be enforced by those with power.
3. Supporting and legitimizing social rights means supporting and legitimizing a specific source of power that will enforce them.
The jump from 2 to 3 is not entirely clear to me. I think it's a valid stance to be critical, and even unsupportive of any given source of power enforcing social rights, while being fully supportive of the right itself.
4. The ones who end up in positions of power are the most ruthless and power-hungry.
5. Those people being in positions of power is so bad that it outweighs any benefit from the original cause, 1 + 2.
Overall, I'd say the critical flaw of your argument is that it's too reductive and assumes that everything very neatly follows linear, simple paths of power.
In addition, I think you can replace the "social rights" in point 2 with any law, and you will have the same points 3, 4, and 5.
I have had to interact with more than a few predators (socio/psychopaths) so make sure to incorporate them into your responses. Also, be sure to include people with different cultural values when you are working through this.
1. List me some social rights that do not require other people to honor their existence.
2. Because there will be people who do not honor other people's rights, how would you try to get them to do so? There are, afaik, no "unalienable rights" recognized across all human societies and all members therein--if you can provide some, not just aspirational, I'd love to be corrected.
3. You actually use the word "legitimizing". Who codifies and enforces laws? Who informs, persuades, coerces people to honor other people's rights, the laws explicating the consequences of those rights and the punishments for infringement? Who restrains or removes the recalcitrant from harming the rest of society?
5. The concern of how much power we have to relinquish to powerful people to support the N+1 right is the question.
0a. You missed the biggest flaw in my analysis in that I did not show that there is a correlation between the number of rights/obligations and the power given to an executive to enforce them. If just honoring one social right requires power concentration, how much more power is required for allowing other social rights?
0b. Is there a way to restrain the power of the executive enforcing social rights so that they do not have enough power to dishonor them themselves?
-- your last point about replacing social rights with laws is spot on. One good purpose for laws is to support social rights. Once we have laws, we have to have policing and courts and punishment and rehabilitation. We will also have lawmakers and lobbyists because the law is never in final release.
> Anytime someone talks about social rights, I always get worried because social rights are nothing more than obligations on the rest of us to provide or allow the one with the right.
We may have different definitions of social rights then. Often society can imbue someone with a right that has no obligation on anyone else at all, other than not to violate that right, which I am happy to empower a democratic government to defend.
we do not have the definitions of social rights then.
What we may have, is a different experience with people who will violate other people's "rights" through either inattention or malice. We also have cases where "rights" collide because of cultural differences (e.g., you may feel that you have the right to make fun of my religious figure and I feel that I have the right to decapitate you for doing so)
I personally view social obligations as part of the cost of living in a modern society. Without that obligation it's quite hard to realize most benefits civilization can offer.
Power is not exactly something you can opt out of having to deal with.
One of those social obligations required to be able to benefit from living in society is to ensure good governance. This part is often left out, providing fuel for nonsensical anarchist and libertarian arguments.
> This part is often left out, providing fuel for nonsensical anarchist and libertarian arguments.
It is my perspective that, since you do not choose the society you are born into (including the rights it grants you and the obligations it imposes on you) that the only justifiable system of power is one that you can influence and change.
However, you can reject this framing early on. You can make an argument that, since you do not choose the society you are born into, there is no justifiable moral argument in having other's decisions about rights and obligations imposed upon you.
This leaves plenty of room for anarchist and libertarian arguments, even if the outcomes would be worse in every other way, and even if this way of life could only exist for short periods before those who have chosen to organize systems of power eradicate it. For those who have landed on this argument, there is no moral or just universe which gives someone else power over them.
> You can make an argument that, since you do not choose the society you are born into, there is no justifiable moral argument in having other's decisions about rights and obligations imposed upon you.
You do not choose to be born, so that argument is nonsensical on its face and leads to absurd antinatalist conclusions. Instead, each person should work to their own benefit. You can benefit more by living in a society than by living on your own as long as you set up society in such a way that you benefit from it instead of suffer from it. That means accounting for externalities, preventing abuse of power, raising the next generation to also be civically minded, the whole nine yards.
> You do not choose to be born, so that argument is nonsensical on its face and leads to absurd antinatalist conclusions.
I don't agree with this - you can accept existence as a fact (the universe, your birth, the scale doesn't matter) and that giving birth to another person is morally good or, at worst, morally neutral, without any impact whatsoever on the argument. Or, put simply, these two things can be true simultaneously:
* I am alive, and this is good.
* The history of humanity and my society places constraints on me, which I do not agree with, and gives me rights, which I do not value, and this is bad.
However, we may come to an impasse, as I don't find "taken to its logical conclusion" arguments, or the paradoxes they can impose, to be particularly persuasive.
> You can benefit more by living in a society than by living on your own
I agree with this, however there is a mountain of assumptions under this statement which could be argued infinitely. Even if we accept it as true...
> as long as you set up society in such a way that you benefit from it instead of suffer from it. That means accounting for externalities, preventing abuse of power, raising the next generation to also be civically minded, the whole nine yards.
... it is a rational/reasonable argument that what you just described is impossible, and we end up back somewhere near the beginning. Simplified (a lot):
* I am alive, and this is good.
* I live in a society, which is good.
* Society is unjust and unfair, which is bad.
* It cannot be made just and fair, which is bad.
* Thus I should be able to leave without relinquishing my existence.
> giving birth to another person is morally good or, at worst, morally neutral
The libertarian argument is that you made a person without their consent, and now they have the burden of deciding whether they want to continue to live, and this is unjust.
> However, we may come to an impasse, as I don't find "taken to its logical conclusion" arguments, or the paradoxes they can impose, to be particularly persuasive.
My own arguments may be taken to their logical conclusion without encountering a reduction to absurdity.
> Even if we accept it as true...
We don't have to accept this as a postulate. We can observe empirically that specialization and trade with others benefits the participants. Then not everyone has to be a doctor, a shelter builder, a farmer, etc. (none of which they can even do competently without a teacher).
> Society is unjust and unfair, which is bad
This step is doing a lot of work. If you believe it is unjust that you were brought into this world without consent, sure, but that idea of justice is absurd. The idea of justice divorced from the idea of benefit ultimately leads to the absurdum. Fairness is not an end goal in itself but one of many means to achieve mutual benefit, which satisfies the primary goal of personal benefit.
> The libertarian argument is that you made a person without their consent, and now they have the burden of deciding whether they want to continue to live, and this is unjust.
I understand that is a libertarian argument and it is one that I fully disagree with. However, I do not think you have to make this argument for the others to hold true, which is the point I was trying to make.
> We can observe empirically that specialization and trade with others benefits the participants. Then not everyone has to be a doctor, a shelter builder, a farmer, etc. (none of which they can even do competently without a teacher).
What is the empirical evidence that a specialist is more fulfilled in life than a frontier settler who needed to be all of the things you mentioned?
One of the assumptions I avoided arguing in the "mountain of assumptions" is that we could measure the human condition in such a way as to say something is better than another, or that something that is better for one is better for all.
> This step is doing a lot of work. If you believe it is unjust that you were brought into this world without consent, sure, but that idea of justice is absurd.
My point in the first argument is that you can separate the idea that being born is just or unjust from the argument that being born into a social system is just or unjust. I think someone reasonably believe three of those combinations:
Birth : Society
Just / Just
Unjust / Unjust
Just / Unjust
It is fair that this separation is only possible due to a bit of a game I'm playing by centralizing the relative "justness" from the perspective of the individual. I think if you take a purely individualistic approach to this, you can separate things by what are changeable and what are not, as well the reality of nature vs. social construct. Someone was born, that cannot be changed. They are constrained by the natural laws of the universe, that cannot be changed. However, the social constructs that they live within can be changed.
The outcome may be different if we shifted the perspective to, say, the parent, where you could argue that their decision to conceive was unjust. Or to the system as a whole.
I think this is a valid approach given that we are discussing such an individualistic philosophy.
> The idea of justice divorced from the idea of benefit ultimately leads to the absurdum. Fairness is not an end goal in itself but one of many means to achieve mutual benefit, which satisfies the primary goal of personal benefit.
Hmm, I'm having a hard time working through this argument. Could you expand on it?
> What is the empirical evidence that a specialist is more fulfilled in life than a frontier settler who needed to be all of the things you mentioned?
The evidence is that a specialist can live to do the things they like about frontier living. The lone frontier settler is doomed to die early. If you're dead, nothing matters. This is the same problem with the libertarian obsession with "freedom." Yes, you can be free to shoot your machine guns and explode your bombs and pollute the air, and your neighbor can be free to shoot their machine guns and explode their bombs and pollute the air, but now neither of you will be able to do these things as long as if you came to an agreement to restrict where and when these are allowed.
> One of the assumptions I avoided arguing in the "mountain of assumptions" is that we could measure the human condition in such a way as to say something is better than another, or that something that is better for one is better for all.
Each individual can measure this themselves by understanding how long they'll live to do the things they want to do. It is not necessary that something that is better for one is better for all, but individuals will make social pacts that ensure their own benefit, and there is nothing you can do to stop it by making definitions of "justice" divorced from the reality of each person seeking their benefit, only to participate in it in a logical way.
> Hmm, I'm having a hard time working through this argument
Perhaps the last sentence of my previous paragraph is clearer. Striving for "justice" is unworkable, and definitions of justice that prevent others from making rules for you are especially so. Each person is working for their own benefit, and the only reasonable thing to do is to work with society under that assumption to make sure you benefit too. This means making governments that prevent others from crushing you under their boot, that help others in society gain abilities that you can benefit from, etc.; not dismantling governments that do that.
I think social rights are great. I’m glad I don’t live in the 70s when I could be jailed for being gay. But I also feel like this is all bunk.
As soon as the government takes control of something it must be quantified and standardized. It immediately turns abstract goals like “increase opportunity for poor children” into easily tracked and digestible goals like increasing test scores or spending more money.
Let’s be honest, the reason that being gay legal today is not because the government enforced it. It’s because the opinion of the populace changed over time and the government had to capitulate. In the same way I feel like social change of other kinds cannot be top-down from the government. If they can barely be trusted to fill potholes why should I expect they would successfully foment complex social changes?
>As soon as the government takes control of something it must be quantified and standardized. It immediately turns abstract goals like “increase opportunity for poor children” into easily tracked and digestible goals like increasing test scores or spending more money.
Title IX would like to have a word with you.
This prohibited sex discrimination in education and athletics, which enabled womens sports among other things.
The drive for easily tracked goals is not inherent in government, it is an artifact of current political process.
> The drive for easily tracked goals is not inherent in government, it is an artifact of current political process.
While I agree with your intent, I think this is incorrect. The need to quantize things is inherent in taking power over them - via government, corporate management, community groups, whatever. A large section of humanity's challenges can be translated back to what we choose to measure, how we measure it, when we measure it, what goals we set for it, etc. It is why we argue over statistical "facts" so much.
Seeing Like a State is a great book diving into this topic if you haven't read it. It diverts into a more depressing view of government efforts, but I have yet to find a good refutation of this particular topic, although I would be pleased to encounter one.
I do feel like title IX suffers from the same problem that gay marriage did, insofar as it was a “win” that was very quantifiable, easy to implement, and almost comically far off from the kinds of change that was being asked for. Great, women can play college football, but what about addressing women-specific concerns, or funding programs that are heavily preferred by women?
I absolutely am not arguing against title IX, only to say that it is actually a great example of the kind of sterilization and heavy handedness that happens when the government gets involved.
An even better example to your point though might be the ADA. A giant pain in the ass to every business owner and contractor, but ultimately great for society.
> social rights are nothing more than obligations on the rest of us
I don’t agree here. It is not a zero sum game, everyone can win with social rights.
I have read some Bertrand Russel, albeit many years ago now, and from what I remember he certainly did not argue against social rights, on the contrary.
Do you have a reference to work by Bertrand Russel that argues for your point?
