The Glade 4.0

Yes individual rights have always been based on being a human RD. Rights were written about humans, rights apply to humans, its even called "human rights".

Feeling pain in and of itself does not indicate the thing feeling pain has rights.

Tell me what species you believe should have rights, or tell me where you think the line should be drawn and why?

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

If the writings were only about whites, and they were called "white rights" would that mean only whites would have these rights?

If we encountered wookies or vulcans or any other species generally similar to humans in terms of overall mental capacity, would they have rights? Why or why not?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It would depend. Just as here on Earth you only have the rights that you have the power to enforce. Our laws that give us our rights are enforced by the power of the state. If Elmo's revolution managed to overthrow the authorities then they could institute whatever rights they saw fit since they would be the ones able to enforce them. Rights only exists if you have the power to back them up.

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I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and, the blackest eyes... the devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... evil

That's just ignoring the question. Clearly, rights don't really matter if someone else wants to violate them and you can't stop them. Duh. Everyone knows that; it's plainly obvious or we wouldn't bother to worry about the issue since they would be self-enforcing.

I'm asking according to Elmo's moral system what we would do in that situation. Presumably he wants to act according to his own system so the answer really ought to be something other than "whatever we please unless the Wookies tear our arms off." Similarly, the question is moot if the Wookies bombard us into submission from orbit with turbolasers and then take the whole planet over.

Pointing out that one can simply amass enough force to violate rights simply turns the entire question into a brawl, and gets us nowhere. Elmo did already acknowledge that his system is fine until we encounter other humanlike species; I want to know how he plans to resolve that. I believe that an acknowledgedflaw like that needs to be addressed, especially since it goes to one of his core assertions: rights are inherenet to humans. Well, are they inherent to humans because they are humans, or because humans are sapient moral agents?

Either side of that has its own flaws; inherent rights for humans are simply arbitrarily assigned, while sapience goes down the road of Peter Singer stlye absurd utilitarianism and eventually ends in a society that constantly abuses its members in the name of "increasing happiness" that is really only happiness in the subjective evaluation of the moral guardians in question.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

If you want an example of Aliens having rights (and the strength to enforce them) watch Star Trek.
If you want an example of Aliens not having rights (without the strength to enforce any) watch District 9.

Any alien presence would only have the rights that they could enforce. You think the human race would band together to give aliens rights? ****, we don't even do that for our own people. The USA might give away some places to live (we already accomodate aliens, anyway), but the majority of the world would probably tell them to **** off.

Again, we're not asking what the world would do, we're asking what it should do according to Elmo's or anyone else's moral system.

What we would do would depend a great deal ont he capabilities of the aliens, and their course of action. Since what those might be is just a wild-ass guess what-if situation, it doesn't tell us much of anything.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Aliens would come here to enslave us and freezedry and eat us. We would join underground resistance movements and wage a war of terror upon the filthy lizards.

Or they would come to destroy us and steal all our natural resources. We would form a rag-tag band of castoffs under the command of president of the United States, and a crazy drunk would fly an F-18 into a critical system of their mothership.

Or...the aliens would infiltrate our world's power structures at every level, and only a brilliant pair of FBI agents (one a cute crazed conspiracy theorist, the other a hot skeptical medical examiner) would stand any chance of exposing the truth.

Or the Aliens would turn out to be our ancient mythological gods, and we would be forced into a long war waged through wormhole devices linked to a giant interstellar network.

Hmm. I could go on. In none of these scenarios do I give a **** about rights.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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Hmm, geek-fail moment for me. What's this one a reference to?

Hilarious as this is, it still involves random speculation about what would happen as opposed to what should happen.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Stargate, if I'm not mistaken.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

/forehead smack Oh, of course.

What revolution?

Rights are not defined by force. Rights are a philosophy. Rights can be protected or infringed by force.

Exactly how many times do I have to explain this before everyone understands?

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I've already stated that if a member of a species can make an impassioned plea for its rights then its developed enough to have them. I don't know why some of you are unable to take that and make the tiny logical leap to apply that to alien species. *boggle*

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

You never present theoretical arguments though and you refuse to recognize merits of other arguments. You're all about the practical application. In that, your approach is anti-philosophical.

You're your own worst example of rights as a philosophy.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Nope, I've been down this road before because eventually someone tries to say that rights aren't "real" and this comes up. Happened most about 2 years to 1 year ago and its been rehashed enough. Sorry your memory seems to be going though.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Yes, and every time you go down this road and are asked to defend that position, you will not. You simply say there's no point discussing it. Incidentally, in that, you are right. Your position is based on pure, unsupported conjecture -- it is nothing more than a protoreligon, and unsupportable through logic.



Even without our understanding a word of their language, dolphins make more of an impassioned plea for such rights than humans. In fact, humans, overall, make more compelling arguments against human rights than for them. Actions speak louder than the rhetoric of the occasional revolutionary.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

And as I've pointed out ANY MORAL ARGUMENT can fundamentally be called the same thing. Any statement that you Taly say "should" be done is as pointless as as you feel mine is yet you argue yours without such self-critique.

So no, I do not call this debate pointless - it has a point if that it is only to show how you yourself if you take this tactic must ultimately nullify your own argument.

So once again we've journeyed with you ranting and raving, using logical fallacies and insults and ended up with you claiming that all discussion (even your own philosophy) is unsupported conjecture. That truly gets us nowhere. Instead of holding yourself to reasoned discourse including biological and logical evidence (because of course that will lead to the conclusion you've already qualified as "wrong") you eventually end up at the point where you argue against arguing in order to preserve that last bit of your mind that still fears to have to change itself.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

The only "moral argument" I've made is that morals are relative. This is not about what "should" be done. This is about what is most advantageous to society, and the current definition of "person" under the law. I have specifically said your position easily could be enshrined in law, if enough people supported it. However, prosperous cultures move away from such positions because they are detrimental to their society.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Which is itself a moral argument as it assigns a preferred value for measurement, ie what "should" be the measuring criteria.

No it is not about the law. If it were there wouldn't be any discussion. You're relying on DE's old (and thankfully mostly abandoned tactic) of taking a discussion about what should be and trying to talk about what is and that just doesn't fly.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

That's like arguing that natural selection is a moral argument as it assigns a preferred value for mutations, and what "should" be survival criteria. It's not about what "should" be done.



Hopwin, at the very least, is arguing that a fetus is a person by both law and science. That's where the majority of my arguments on this topic have been directed.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Natural selection is not done by advocating its "the best" practice because nature itself cannot advocate and thus is not a moral actor.

You are - and you are advocating that something is "the best" way to judge things - which is an argument based on philosophy - pragmatism in particular.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

No. I am not advocating "the best" way to judge something, I am advocating the way it will be judged. Societal rules, law, philosophy...all these things are part of natural selection -- social evolution is a real thing, and while there are always hiccups, the most advantageous laws are the ones that survive. Nature tends to adopt that which benefits, and crush that which does not. Nature truly does decide "the best" way to do something in any given scenario, based on what works and therefore continues, or what doesn't and therefore dies out. Nature is the only absolute authority on anything.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I disagree that the most advantageous laws survive. Exactly how is pot being illegal advantageous? Exactly how is restricting ballot access advantageous?

No, laws don't reflect what the right thing is to do and no they don't usually move towards that end (quite the opposite in fact) however we have been discussing what SHOULD BE not what IS. And what SHOULD BE is a moral discussion. I understand you can't compete with my argument in that regard so you've started this idiotic distraction but I'm not going to participate in it with you any longer. When you want to counter arguments with reason go ahead - until that time I will not expect any reasonable discussion with you on this subject as you've never shown a willingness to even engage in one. And before you bring it up - I am not the only one who sees this from you in this thread.

Good day.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I'm arguing what will prevail, not what should be, or what is.

What "should be" is just an opinion. One can use logic to frame that opinion, but that's just for internal consistency. In the end, it's purely subjective. You favor granting rights to inanimate lumps of protein at the expense tyranny for individual persons. I favor freedom for people, period. (Including that inanimate lump of protein...since I favor consistency across the board. Induce labor and try to help it survive outside the womb. It has the freedom to live or die on its own.) But again, these are opinions.

Everything else I have argued has not been "opinion." It is logic and fact and science. Our laws have always protected "persons," not "human life." This is the way it is. To use the current constitution to protect a fetus or embryo or zygote, one must first define "person" in a way that protects them. The law currently does not do this. I get it, you want to change this. As i stated, that's certainly viable. I don't think it will happen, though. The impetus for such opinion is tradition -- tradition from religion, from superstition, adopted in an age when our species still needed rapid population growth to flourish. Religion is dying -- humanity no longer needs it. The embers of it are still glowing hotter in America than in most places, so your position gains some occasional traction in the USA, but it will not last. As religion's fire cools, so does most of the backing for your position. You are fighting a losing battle.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █