However, what’s the upper bound on demands made for flourishing if that aspect is codified as a right? I think a more tractable and practical approach in policymaking for determining a set of rights is to codify a set of “disablers” as opposed to a set of enablers.
The universality of such rights notwithstanding, I find it highly inappropriate that the government should be involved in enabling human flourishing outside of ensuring basic human rights. I find this inappropriate because I think actualization of the self is a highly private and individualized matter, whereas the domain of the government is to implement broad and pan-applicable policies. The caveat is that as society gets more complex, so do the basic human rights which need to be ensured to enable productive participation in that society. Everyone needs internet access to participate in a digital economy, for instance.
While I appreciate the thoughtfulness towards an approach to emotional moral philosophy, I think that an emphasis on using emotions as a guide for navigating morals and ethics precludes the judgment needed for seeking a moral truth which may counter an emotional truth. I guess I am unconvinced that there is any necessity at all in imposing emotional guides on morals and ethics, but I do like the list of the ten points that are mentioned—it’s easy enough to imagine how each of those can be stretched to some absurd scenario where governments say-so in those scenarios becomes Orwellian.
Which rights are "basic human rights?" Can you enumerate them? You typed a lot of words but you left this open for interpretation. Is it because there is no "universality" of rights?
For example, clean water? Clean food? Access to clean medicine of verifiable quality and efficacy? Americans with disabilities act sort of rights? Privacy? Religion? Speech? Self defense? Against the government? Ability to bequeath property? Sexual congress? Suicide? To be left alone?
Universal rights have the quality of preventing personal molestation from another. The way I think it’s best to think of someone(s) molesting another is direct interference in their life. But for animals with higher-level cognition, not getting killed or molested is a bit more complex, which is why these types of animals (who resolve their differences through speech) need group-level effects to safeguard their personal safety, like freedom to religion, freedom to speech, and freedom to bear arms, freedom to privacy, and so on.
It’s a tough question, what right is universal and why, and it’s easy enough to draw justifications for why lack of sexual congress may be mentally molesting, and therefore an individual should be guaranteed means to procreation. But the problem with guaranteeing sexual congress for everyone is that it puts undue burden on the provider of such rights. There’s so inherent social or personal benefit in giving someone the right to procreate. But someone trying to procreate should not be actively prevented because doing so would impinge upon their freedom to privacy, at least that’s how I think about it.
> Indeed, Butler’s naively empty politics is especially dangerous for the very causes she holds dear. For every friend of Butler, eager to engage in subversive performances that proclaim the repressiveness of heterosexual gender norms, there are dozens who would like to engage in subversive performances that flout the norms of tax compliance, of non-discrimination, of decent treatment of one’s fellow students. To such people we should say, you cannot simply resist as you please, for there are norms of fairness, decency, and dignity that entail that this is bad behavior.
seems like the framework might be on the verge of being amenable to a compiler/program-behavior-style analysis
(non-sequitur) did you see https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/strange-new-rul... ?
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/courses/15-819O-13sp/resourc...
A concise few pages worth drowning in! (For me))
(p-s: 2 "repulsive fixed-points" of 2 messianics of interest:
PG: the anti-prig
Thiel: the protocolizer as chief optimist/protocolization creditor/secretary of the politburo )
(p-p-s, from the comments: Henry VIII as designer of new kinds of windmills, would have been awesome snack if that checks out, roughly on par with Lawrence of A coming up with a new jet engine)
Lacking the training/experience/talent for things like this I can now only proceed by vague analogy (work on this one and off if I don't get it quite right? Thanks!):
(Fixed points are analogous to steady states?)
(Even nonequilibrium,societal ones would be kind of mediocre imho, (sorry nis0s!))
it would be analogous to a diagram of (estimated likelihood(s) of progress on your favourite heuristic ) vs (memory allocated currently, or more generally, tuples of those 10 historical CA-related variables together with their estimated relevance towards progress) on every subheuristic?
(I'm trying to introduce probabilities to (sigma algebraize?) the program representation)
What you're complaining about is actually the specialization of certain branches of philosophy into their own separate disciplines. A physicist today no longer thinks of himself as a philosopher, except perhaps if he glances at the diploma on his wall. That does not mean that he is not a philosopher in the same sense in which the ancient Greeks used the word, namely as one who loves wisdom, and in which Plato would have understood the term as he pursued not only moral philosophy but also mathematics: Plato would almost certainly see a physicist as a philosopher. Anyone pursuing theoretical knowledge with no direct utility to daily life (unlike, say, pottery or baking) was a philosopher.
After all the specialization that has happened in academia, the people who still call themselves philosophers constitute a husk of a discipline. They mainly contemplate logic (but not computer programming), epistemology (but not neuroscience or psychology), and morality. Seeing them as the only philosophers, rather than as the one group of philosophers who didn't bother to come up with a new name for themselves, is a mistake.
- Ramsey's work on decision theory and subjective probability: https://personal.lse.ac.uk/bradleyr/pdf/Ramsey.dialectica.pd...
- Russell's Paradox and its impact on set theory: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell-paradox/
- David Lewis' work on signalling games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_signaling_game
- Following up on that, Brian Skyrms' work on signalling, information, and evolution: https://www.codebiology.org/pdf/[7]%20Skyrms%20(2010)%20Sign...
One issue might be that when a philosophical debate ends up solving a more applied problem, the debate is no longer considered philosophical.
Even your viewpoint that a life should be spent creatively “doing” rather than eg farming and praising God, is a direct outgrowth of Nietzschean philosophy.
I would agree that most philosophy is bunk (including the above article) but most books are bad too. Keeping the tradition alive is important though because your entire worldview is built on philosophies you haven’t read.
Concerning mathematics, the idea that numbers and proof are abstracted concepts from the physical world that we can develop didn't really exist before certain key figures in Greece laid down those concepts.
I yet have to see ONE important field like math, physics, engineering, society that is not deeply impacted by philosophical arguments.
> Edit: Typical of HN to downvote unpopular opinions, but it doesn't prove me wrong.
Don't play victim when you are claiming absolute nonsense. It is not the task of HN to prove you wrong. It is your task to prove that you are right.
This is likely what's getting you downvoted - your assertion that others doing what makes them happy is somehow "wrong". You may not find value, or whatever, in it, but others do. Good for them, good for you. To each their own.
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.
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.
Power is not exactly something you can opt out of having to deal with.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
"Though Mill is an advocate of limited government in ways that one might expect given his defense of basic liberties in On Liberty, he is no libertarian. He emphatically rejects the idea that legitimate government is limited to the functions of affording protection against force and fraud (PPE V.i.2). Instead, he thinks that there are a variety of ways in which government can and should intervene in the lives of citizens—sometimes as coercer and other times as enabler or facilitator—in order to promote the common good."
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mill-moral-political/#Lib...
"Mill thinks that the state can and should require parents to provide schooling for their children, ensuring that this kind of education is available to all, regardless of financial circumstances, by subsidizing the costs of education for the poor so that it is available free or at a nominal cost."
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mill-moral-political/#Lib...
I'd be wary of quoting that article like it's some authority. At a glance, it reads as skeptical of Mill. The harm principle is the basis of his thinking and he was very concerned about paternalism. I think it's quite likely he would view CA as an overreach.
What do you mean? What is the thing that utilitarian founders like Mill wanted to promote in the world? How is that not connected to human flourishing?
“The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.”
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt, Sphere and Duties of Government
1: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/1995-07-...
voluntarily? or involuntarily?
My attempts to describe what I think is the logical consequence of that view of rights should not be taken as an endorsement of it.
definitely
> if you have a moral claim over someone else
This is exactly what I think the danger of bad philosophy leads to, people confusedly believing they have a claim to control people just for existing. The right to pursue life do not require an automatic claim to control the life of others merely for existing. The "right" to a certain quality of life does, however imply a belief that it must be provided by some means.
Something can't be "taken" if it's not owned.
Property rights systems exist because people use property to achieve their life's values, and having billions of people argue over how to use land is not enactable (I hope that's obvious).
People's lives are not served by telling billions of people who want to use a plot of land to "fight it out", and thus governments have reasonably enacted systems that gives gives people both physical and intellectual property based off their. efforts.
This isn't to be said that property systems can't be improved, our intellectual rights property system obvious has many ways it could be improved (and it changes as we discover new knowledge). The end goal of these political policies though is to create social systems that allow individuals to maximally pursue their life.
Property systems goals are NOT to give everyone a certain quality of life.
Take a look at even the most communist/anarchist society you can imagine (the kind with people who hate those who own property), and you will see systems of an authority being grasped for that help coordinate use of material means in order to avoid violence. Reality cannot be escaped.
Sure it can, someone can take land in the plain everyday sense that they occupy it and tell others to stay out. But that act, and any attempts to enforce it, is coercive and aggressive. Which proves that any system with property rights, including every libertarian proposal ever made, is coercive. That's ok but it also means that your "is it voluntary?" complaints are futile and self-defeating.
> Property rights systems exist because people use property to achieve their life's values
What's your empirical evidence for that claim? The actually existing legal construct of property in countries around the world, and in international treaties, in fact serves a whole range of goals. In every prosperous country on earth there is room for both private property and taxation for public provision. In empirical studies of life satisfaction and happiness the top is consistently dominated by democratic countries with extensive welfare states funded by taxes https://happiness-report.s3.amazonaws.com/2024/WHR+24.pdf#pa...
Government-imposed.
> government
Also known as a mere bunch of people who enforce their decisions using monopoly on violence.
> by yourself without infrastructure like plumbing, roads, schools and hospitals to educate and heal your employees, a strong legal system to enforce property rights…
Surely a government cannot do it by itself either? Who’ve decided that the decision should be deferred to them and not me or someone else? Oh, right, it was decided using the infrastructure and processes imposed by the government.
The only realistic alternative to “it’s not truly yours” is not global horizontal fair decision-making, it is a bunch of bureaucrats making decisions on behalf of (ie instead of) other people. That’s a road to serfdom paved by well intentioned naïve people.
The people through the process of democracy, where you also have a say as a voter and potential candidate. Property rights is a legal construct, created by the state. A technology if you will. Part of the rules of that construct is that property can be taxed for public provision purposes.
“The process of democracy” is hand waving. There is a complex web of institutions and traditions that reinforce themselves. What country would be more “democratic”: the one where people can vote for one of several handpicked candidates or the one where they can impose their will through community organizing and strikes? The one where billionaires own media and put forward their agenda or the one where the media landscape is dominated by self-sustained media co-ops?
> Property rights is a legal construct
That’s the main issue I have with your view. Property rights are a construct as much as the legal system is a construct, democracy is a construct, the state is a construct and “the rules” you appeal to are a construct. There is no any primacy of the state and the government.
If you want to know what Nussbaum has to say about it, you should probably read them yourself.
“Property” is most definitely a social aspect of reality. It does not water down its usefulness, or moral rationale, to recognize that any view of property beyond “things you can physically defend without help from others” involves social agreements and efforts.
I don’t think dismissing others good points out of hand is the best way to communicate your own ideas.
Human beings benefit so much from social agreements it is profound. This is not news to game theorists, but some people seem to find it to be a bitter instead of sweet pill.
The question for the animal which creates exponentially more value for itself via many and varied social constructs, than any other animal, is to optimize positive sum social structures (in form and depth), and avoid and mitigate negative sums. Not deny their obvious existence or that our own existence (and freedom) as individuals and a species would be significantly curbed without them.
If you have "collective efforts" you want funded or built, you're free to ask people voluntarily to put their lives, children, families etc. on hold for whatever cause you think is important that I don't see that you have insight into.
There's nothing stopping you.
So true.
But at some level, people who live together have to be able to make some decisions together.
The top level of that is what we call “government”.
It complicates things that governments are as prone to dysfunction as any other structure. And that governments are often weakest at the job of improving themselves.
This is getting a bit abstract.
The specifics of what a government taxes and for what matter. The line would be only to tax for things that generate a net positive expected sum for all citizens, and only in cases where the positive sum is significant and only achievable as an agreement at the top level of society. And these systems are monitored and adapted or cancelled based on their actual, not envisioned, impact.
There isn’t going to be a general answer to the question of whether taxation is good or bad. Only cases where the net benefits are positive and negative. Real or imagined.
I share the view that blind redistribution does not deliver positive returns in reality or in any sober theory.
But the societal level returns we get, from real (not unmeasured, not just imagined or ideologically assumed) surpluses of common efforts, are a legitimate source for funding those efforts.
Such collective efforts are already underway. One is called the United States, a system where the legal construct property is bounded and compatible with taxation for public provision. The US is a club of people who have banded together for common goals and with democracy as a tool for updating the system. If you don't want to be part of that club then leave.
“Democracy” is often used as a general term for governments that in some sense are a delegation of citizen power. Even though a pure democracy would remove the delegation.
As a practical matter, the US model has devolved into a party-duocracy. Power at all levels has nearly completely centralized at the national level of each majority party. Of which there are only two. The extreme minimum of choice even for a Republic.
https://mattbruenig.com/2015/10/01/capitalism-is-coercive-an...
> Nussbaum wants to establish the capabilities as rights to which citizens, in all nations, are entitled
This is such a blatantly big-L Liberal political position, that I have to laugh, even as a liberal myself. Pretending this is philosophy rather than policy seems a bit silly.
Personally, I think it makes more sense to frame these "capabilities" as benefits rather than rights. For example, do all people have a right to health care? No, because, in the extreme, it leads to logical contradictions with other rights. (E.g. Doctors being forced to provide care at gunpoint.) However, it makes perfect sense as a benefit that a wealthy government decides to provide for its citizens.
In the same vein, people do not have a right to a fair trial--in the extreme, this would lead to a contradiction with other rights (e.g. judges being forced to practice law at gunpoint).
> I have to laugh, even as a liberal myself.
Probably not as much of one as you think.
Could be avoided by restating it as "a right to be tried fairly or otherwise not tried". The right of the citizen to have crimes against him investigated and brought to justice, that's another matter.
Healthcare, on the other hand, is not necessarily the government’s domain because people have the freedom to live unhealthily if they want. There is no law which says you must keep yourself healthy. How do you even measure that for different people? For what it’s worth, I think people should get universal healthcare because populations getting sick impacts productivity.
In 25 states, if you are pregnant, it is against the law to be unhealthy, specifically but not limited to substance abuse.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
So, what?
edit: here, HN, the literal stat:
> From 2000 to 2015, the number of states with these punitive policies increased more than 2-fold from 12 to 25, and the number of states requiring health care professionals to report suspected prenatal drug abuse to child protective services or health officials increased from 12 to 23
and i know a policy isn't a law but the word punitive is right there, so
I think a better counter example to my “there’s no law which requires health” statement are anti-smoking stipulations against people born after a certain year. So essentially, anti-smoking laws do make an assumption that you’ll get unhealthy if you smoke, and therefore you shouldn’t. However, policymakers can say that you’re not obligated to healthcare as a right because there are different laws which are already protecting your health, and they would be right in their own place.
The reason I think universal healthcare makes policy sense is that health outcomes are dependent on randomness. Someone can have bad genetics, or be born into environmental conditions which impact their health, both things which are random and not under personal control. I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave national productivity up to randomness, especially when environmental factors like pollution can have deterministic effects, like worsening population-level health outcomes. For a country as big as the US, healthcare should be left to the states to decide, but most states will find that providing healthcare will result in better productivity (I think).
this is just twisting definitions. The law can't remove the fetus if the person carrying it is abusing drugs (or whatever), so the law applies to the person carrying the fetus. That is a "law that says you can't be unhealthy" and the reason is "because it hurts the fetus".
we also put people that have pica disorder into mental hospitals, because they eat things that are not healthy.
We have that (compulsory jury duty).
A better example might be that your right to a jury trial conflicts with my right to freedom of movement, but the government explicitly resolves that contradiction by making it a crime to avoid jury duty.
What about the victims' right to justice and to be secure against violations of their rights (bodily integrity and health, property, freedom of movement and flourishing)? If there are no judges and all the criminals are left to roam the streets, they are free to continue victimizing anyone they choose. Seems to me that these rights have a lot of mutually incompatible features. You can't provide for one person's rights without compelling action from another.
That happens, you believe?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/canada-jorda...
only if you assume that all rights are simple and absolute. But why think that? Rights as legal constructs come with various limitations and interactions, as specificed in laws and regulations. For example the notion of property rights is legally compatible with taxation in every democracy on earth. Nussbaum's project is concerned with the philosophical arguments for what underlying principles should guide the construction and specification of such legal rights.
Opinions about the proper structure and role of government have been part of philosophy since at least Plato's "Republic."
To address your ordered list, steps A and B are completely wrong, these things aren't "good" nor do we "want" them. They are innate qualities of humans and thus governments must respect and uphold them.
No, she is making it sound that way, not me.
One of Nussbaum’s tenets is “It is the task of governments to provide citizens with capabilities to flourish.” She also wants to “establish the capabilities as rights to which citizens, in all nations, are entitled.” One of these capabilities/rights is “Bodily health (being able to have good health, including reproductive health, and adequate nourishment and shelter).” Some of the others are even more unrealistic, such as the right to a “normal human lifespan”.
I don’t know how to interpret that other than as the right to get stuff from the government.
The real work of governance and legislation requires carefully negotiating trade-offs between competing priorities in an ever-changing world.
Beyond that though, it is reasonable in our world for citizens of a state to view affordable access to a minimal standard of medical care as a bedrock right afforded to all citizens, and to build their state around this assumption. The same can be said of access to education, or legal representation or access to clean water and energy. It is then incumbant upon the legislating body to provide for those rights, which enter conflict the second there's a budget to consider.
The fact that positive rights are "leftist" in some parts of the world reflects a degree of deep ideological incoherence and immaturity in those parts, more than anything, I think.
Also I can't for the life of me understand why we'd craft policy in some kind of timeless vaccuum. We don't live in a timeless vaccuum. Some of us are fortunate enough to be born into states with stable, well-established educational, judicial, transportational, financial, medical (etc. etc.) infrastructure that is substantially owned and operated by the state or state-regulated monopolies. It's pretty natural to view fair and equitable access to these as baseline rights.
You don't have a right to "freedom from harm" if that means not hearing any speech you don't like.
You do have a right not to be shot, but "gun ownership" by itself does not conflict with that right. Being shot by someone who owns a gun does, but then the rights violation is the shooting, not the gun ownership.
> If you don't think there's a right to freedom from harm that competes with those other rights, I don't know what to tell you.
Your position, that all rights are inherently in conflict with each other, means nobody really has rights; what you call "rights" are really just at the mercy of the legislature:
> The real work of governance and legislation requires carefully negotiating trade-offs between competing priorities in an ever-changing world.
No, the real work of governance and legislation requires protecting the basic rights that everyone has to have to have a free, civil society, and stopping there. A government that has more power than that has too much power.
Your position reminds me of the old saying: no one's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
> The fact that positive rights are "leftist" in some parts of the world reflects a degree of deep ideological incoherence and immaturity in those parts, more than anything, I think.
It reflects a degree of deep ideological incoherence and immaturity on the part of leftists who advocate for such "positive rights", yes. That's a recipe for eternal conflict. Which is indeed what leftism of that variety leads to.
What's your empirical evidence for thinking that such a setup is better and that going further than that brings "eternal conflict"? Since all prosperous democratic countries in e.g. north america and europe combine private property with taxation for public provision that goes beyond what you desire. Furthermore in empirical studies of life satisfaction and happiness the top of the list is consistently held by countries with extensive welfare states funded by taxes[0]. How does that square with your claim?
[0] https://happiness-report.s3.amazonaws.com/2024/WHR+24.pdf#pa...
What if you gave the same happiness survey to people in Saga period Iceland, which had no government at all?
Or to people in some of the American colonies in the late 1600s and early 1700s, such as Pennsylvania, which had governments, but those governments did virtually nothing?
The fact that all first world countries today have governments with vastly more power is no evidence at all that such a system is the best. All it means is that that's the only kind of system that's being evaluated for first world countries. It's easy to place first if you're the only one in the race.
> The fact that all first world countries today have governments with vastly more power is no evidence at all that such a system is the best.
It is some evidence. Since if a system with a less extensive state that offers less of public services like schooling, infrastructure and health care is what is really better for people, why haven't people made it happen already? See here also my previous point that gradual steps towards such system should, if they are really an improvement for people, show up as higher scores in happiness surveys. Absence of that trend is some evidence against your claim.
Yes. Which means it's impossible to use such reports to make general claims about what kind of government is better.
> if a system with a less extensive state that offers less of public services like schooling, infrastructure and health care is what is really better for people, why haven't people made it happen already?
Because "people" can't make it happen in societies where the government controls all those things. Governments have huge advantages over private providers in terms of protecting themselves from competition, without having to actually provide better service.
And even with all those advantages, people still do try to opt out. If government-run schools in the US, for example, were really so great, there wouldn't be so many people trying to get their kids into private schools, or home schooling. But because such people still have to pay taxes to support public schools, those options are only open to the affluent. And schemes like school vouchers to try to level the playing field somewhat never gain any real traction because politicians don't have to answer to the people as a whole, only to special interests--and teachers at government-run schools are a huge special interest.
> gradual steps towards such system should, if they are really an improvement for people, show up as higher scores in happiness surveys.
Only if they exist to be surveyed.
Are subjective. People's responses will be relative to what they're used to and what possibilities they see for their lives. These studies give no evidence at all that you could not have people whose subjective satisfaction and happiness was just as high, or higher, in a country with a minimal government along the lines I've described. They also give no evidence that such a country could not do as well or better in objective terms.
People report how well they experience their lives as going. Not perfect, people can be mistaken and you might now better than them how happy they really/objectively are I suppose. But then again, do you have any better empirical evidence in support of what you proposed? If not how confident can you really be about it?
> These studies give no evidence at all that you could not have people whose subjective satisfaction and happiness was just as high, or higher, in a country with a minimal government along the lines I've described.
They don't prove that it is impossible, true, but if your proposed setup really was so much better wouldn't gradual steps towards it also be somewhat better in ways that made people report greater life satisfaction and happiness? And wouldn't then that show up in the ranking so that the top scoring countries would be those that come closest to (or least far from) your ideal? But that's not what we're seeing, the top scorers have the most extensive welfare states. That's some evidence against your claim.
> They also give no evidence that such a country could not do as well or better in objective terms.
What's "objective terms"? Do you mean longevity? Health outcomes? The top scoring countries in terms of happiness score very high there too.
Note also that you claimed that all systems going further than what you suggested would have "eternal conflict", which sounds really serious and awful and thus would realistically affect how people report how well their lives are going. Isn't the report evidence against that claim of yours?
Refusing to think critically and insisting "muh absolute rights must be real" isn't an argument, it's a (peculiarly male, American, sad) fantasy. Yeehaw, cowboy fantasy land.
I made no such claim. Of course any right can be violated, since rights aren't laws of physics, they're agreements that citizens of a civil society make with each other in order to be able to build wealth through cooperation, specialization, and trade. And people always have the ability to violate agreements. That doesn't mean they should, it just means they can. And of course there are always people who do. But that doesn't mean there has to be conflict between the rights themselves. It just means there are always at least some people who refuse to respect other people's rights, and we have to have some kind of plan for dealing with them.
> Your inability to articulate them cogently
I don't know where you're getting that from, since the old saying I mentioned already contains the basic answer: life, liberty, property. (I might also add the pursuit of happiness, from the Declaration of Independence.) But it's true that it's easy to misunderstand what those rights mean, particularly "liberty", and to think that they must be in conflict because, for example, my "liberty" has to include the right to take your life if I feel like it. But that's nonsense, and there is plenty of literature in philosophy, ethics, and political science expounding a proper concept of "liberty" that includes the obvious point that your right to liberty does not include violating the rights of others.
> Refusing to think critically
Is exactly the problem with people who can't understand how there can be a set of basic rights that aren't in conflict, because they can't, for example, imagine any concept of "liberty" that isn't "I can do whatever I feel like".
You are entirely correct.
Nussbaum is a reactionary hack whose main goal is to pick and prod away at anyone with a moral stance because she has none. She is like Ayn Rand insofar as her philosophy is just a thin veneer to justify her misanthropic contempt for others that is always translated directly into political vitriol.
That her work is approachable for the layperson seems to be the biggest compliment I see toward her in here, and I remind people that simplicity is not always superior, sometimes it actually is just the product of a simple mind.
Perhaps. It would be nice to see some explanation for that statement (as someone unfamiliar with her). It's not very effective right now, in a thread and article full with praise for her.
Someone already posted a link to her excellent 1999 New Republic essay (https://newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody) where she criticizes Judith Butler – today this criticism seems more valid than ever and extremely prescient:
> Indeed, Butler’s naively empty politics is especially dangerous for the very causes she holds dear. For every friend of Butler, eager to engage in subversive performances that proclaim the repressiveness of heterosexual gender norms, there are dozens who would like to engage in subversive performances that flout the norms of tax compliance, of non-discrimination, of decent treatment of one’s fellow students. To such people we should say, you cannot simply resist as you please, for there are norms of fairness, decency, and dignity that entail that this is bad behavior. But then we have to articulate those norms--and this Butler refuses to do.
Your whole comment here is extremely uncharitable and it exhibits the very simple-mindedness that you criticize.
But furthermore, the framing of rights seems pretty flimsy. Some people like to assert that rights are god given, but people can neither agree whether god exists nor what rights any particular god would "give" if so, and so for a political body that wishes to confine itself to that which is collectively plausible, the only justification for rights left is that they promote the common good. But if that is the case, then we ought to be open to any sort of thing which promotes the common good and the discussion of negative or positive rights seems at best a useful shorthand for certain perspectives.
In practice rights are just whatever the masses can demand from the powerful and while it might be the case that imagining that they are god given or obvious in their nature is helpful from a like propagandist point of view, as a person who prefers to think clearly, I can't countenance the self delusion.
I'm curious if anyone has explored applying Nussbaum's theory directly to AI development frameworks. What would her capabilities list look like for artificial intelligence? Could this be a more productive framework than current alignment approaches?