What Human Rights?

[The Grand Nudger]

I wouldn't know, you'd have to explain the opinion in greater detail, same as you would with a statement of belief - to me, that is-. It's like asking me whether or not the statement "I believe in Steve" is wrong.

It may be...who/what's Steve......

[The Barefoot Bum]

Both of us feel that moral claims -whatever we choose to call them- can have a truth value assigned, yes?

I don't know about Nestor, but I do not agree with that statement. As mentioned above, in the scientific sense, saying that a statement has a truth value is to say that it is potentially falsifiable by observation, experience, or experiment. After more than a decade of study, I have not seen any way to falsify moral truth claims by observation, even in principle.

Again, as noted above, I do not claim that science is the only way of assigning truth values, but I would like to know what it means to assign a truth value to a scientifically unfalsifiable statement, and how we can consistently determine (i.e. know) that truth value.

[The Grand Nudger]

If I told you that eating yellow m&m's was -more moral- than eating red m&m's because my deck speaker was yellow....and it turned out that my deck speaker was actually blue.....then my moral claim has an easily assigned truth value. You -could- use science to show it, you probably wouldn't need to.

(for you, Nestor, the above is unchanged whether we choose to call this claim my opinion or my belief, lol, btw)

[The Barefoot Bum]

If I told you that eating yellow m&m's was -more moral- than eating red m&m's because my deck speaker was yellow....and it turned out that my deck speaker was actually blue.....then my moral claim has an easily assigned truth value.

You are putting us on, no?

[The Grand Nudger]

Are you asking me whether or not I think that eating yellow m&m's is more moral than eating red m&m's?  Of course not, lol?
(eating the red m&m's is clearly the more moral route....because god said so)

[Pyrrho]

Both of us feel that moral claims -whatever we choose to call them- can have a truth value assigned, yes?

I don't know about Nestor, but I do not agree with that statement. As mentioned above, in the scientific sense, saying that a statement has a truth value is to say that it is potentially falsifiable by observation, experience, or experiment. After more than a decade of study, I have not seen any way to falsify moral truth claims by observation, even in principle.

Again, as noted above, I do not claim that science is the only way of assigning truth values, but I would like to know what it means to assign a truth value to a scientifically unfalsifiable statement, and how we can consistently determine (i.e. know) that truth value.

I think that it depends on what you take moral claims to be, which is going off on a different topic.  I posted my opinion on this in another thread a while back:

http://atheistforums.org/thread-34018-po...#pid966697

Since that is an old (and overlong) thread, if you are interested, you can start a new thread about this, which is a topic that seems to come up over and over and over...

My guess is, there will never be much agreement on this topic.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Your god does not exist.  I am not his equal, I am infinitely superior to him...

You have proved the truth of Psalm 14.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Still waiting for you to prove anything beyond your ability to put together banal constructs.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Inalienability just means you can't lose or give the right away - It doesn't mean that violating that right makes it non-existent - That's why we call it a "violation" and it's not acceptable as normal behavior - It doesn't literally mean that in reality you can't see your rights being violated, but that it is an abstractly desirable goal to maintain those rights as fundamental mechanisms for any human to react against oppressive forces.

In that case, freedom is not inalienable. Anyone who has enlisted in the military and lived through basic training understands that when you sign up, you give your right to liberty away, at least temporarily.

And in wartime conscription, such liberty is taken away from you.

The right to liberty does not exist in nature. It is granted by the social contract of societies which hold liberty as a value.

[Mudhammam]

I wouldn't know, you'd have to explain the opinion in greater detail, same as you would with a statement of belief - to me, that is-. It's like asking me whether or not the statement "I believe in Steve" is wrong.

It may be...who/what's Steve......

Let's say we are not speaking in terms of any definite standard of art, but only by means of the level of pleasure or displeasure each of us took away from the experience.

The distinction I'm trying to make is one in which you believe something to be true to the exclusion of contrary claims versus recognizing an opinion of it that happens to be yours but on no basis that you should expect absolute consensus or even agreement.

[The Barefoot Bum]

If we presuppose that things like natural (objective) rights exist, we can on that basis construct as elaborate a theory as we wish, and make it match, to any desired degree of precision, our present intuitions and preferences about social behavior. Much the same is true of theology. 

The question, to me at least, is not whether we can construct such an elaborate theory, but whether the fundamental presupposition is correct. Moreover, if one defines the fundamental presupposition of natural rights so as to match our present intuitions and preferences, then the label of "natural" would seem gratuitous, raising the question as to what the difference is between a "natural" right and a socially constructed or legal right.

The comparison to theology is directly on point. After some study, I have concluded that people invented religion (or, more precisely, that religion socially evolved, with some degree of intentionality) as one social institution among many to reproduce dominance by the ruling class du jour and subordination of the working class. (Did I mention that I've studied Marx extensively?) 

The same is true of "natural" rights. Although Locke's ideas did not appear ex nihilo, he constructed, assembled, and extended his arguments to provide a philosophical justification of capitalism, colonialism, and, arguably, chattel slavery. If relations of domination and subordination are natural (in the same sense that the law of gravity is natural), then there is nothing that can be done about them, regardless of the qualms or suffering of the subordinated; any attempt at overriding natural relations will merely make things worse. (ETA) In Marxian terms, Locke provided a basis for the ideological reproduction of capitalist social relations.

Defined broadly enough, pragmatic, utilitarian, inter-subjectivist ethics, which do not depend on any objective moral truth, seem more straightforward: We should do what we can reasonably conclude with sufficient confidence will increase aggregate happiness or decrease aggregate suffering. And we should do so not because of some objective moral principle, but because it is an observable truth that people want to be happy and want to avoid suffering.

The primary philosophical objections to utilitarianism spring primarily from defining utilitarianism too narrowly. As a descriptive, psychological truth, our subjective feelings of happiness, suffering, and utility are informed not only by our immediate material well-being, but also our feelings of empathy and community, our expectations of the future, both long- and short-term, and our feelings and preferences about such abstract things as justice, fairness, proportion. Additionally, our feelings about utility are informed by our emotions that some consider "negative": anger, jealousy, vengeance, xenophobia, vanity, and the desire for domination and subordination.

Utilitarianism is not a magic bullet, nor is it a "royal road" to ethical truth. Quite the contrary: it is the denial of any such magic bullet. It is simply the stance that rather than engaging in some theological construction of natural rights, which seems always to end up justifying the domination of the ruling class du jour, we must engage with how our social, cultural, political and economic practices, institutions, and psychology affect our well-being, collectively and individually, in all its self-referential, dialectical complexity and messiness.