Comment by awayyyythrow
6 years ago
There are no rational arguments for my cause if it involves whether I should exist or have rights. I want rights because I want them. How would a rational argument even work?
6 years ago
There are no rational arguments for my cause if it involves whether I should exist or have rights. I want rights because I want them. How would a rational argument even work?
This line of reasoning is utterly ruined for me by people who equate the mildest form of criticism with "people are saying insert group shouldn't exist".
How can you "mildly criticize" what people are? By definition debating about people's identity implies there's a possibility said identity doesn't exist/can't exist. There's no rational argument that's going to change a person's gender or sexuality for example.
Once we're there it's an impossible juncture. There's no answer to the sceptic's demand "how do you know?" without some how sharing our subjective experience. Might as well spend your days asking a bat what it means to be a bat.
I see you haven't spent any time in the 'rationalist' community.
"people are saying insert group shouldn't exist" is a good-faith and sober characterization of much of that group. Human Bio-Diversity (HBD, i.e. 'scientific' racism) is a very popular topic in the community.
Scott doesn't go there, obviously, but somehow the rhetoric wends it's way there over and over and over and over and over again in the 'community'.
All moral/ethical debate is of this form, at least for a broad-enough definition of "rights". Since moral debate does seem to exist in the real-world, the argument that it cannot would seem to be quite wrong. And in fact moral debate might even be strategically useful, if only as a way of searching for shared Schelling points (i.e. focal/coordination points) that can be more easily defended even in a stricter 'political' sense.
"if you help defend my existence and rights, I'll help defend yours".
The idea that it's irrelevant and that we needn't know or care what motivates other people when presenting an argument is a pervasive issue with the public conversation. It reduces opportunities for compromise and lessens our chance of learning when we're wrong.
Well, clearly there are classes of people we do think shouldn't exist. I think there shouldn't be any murderers for instance and I support policies of putting people who commit murder in jail so as to stop it. I'm also entirely fine with people having gay sex and I'd strongly oppose laws against that. But between those two there are gray zones where we really do need to have rational arguments about whether some groups should exist or not.
> There are no rational arguments for my cause if it involves whether I should exist or have rights. I want rights because I want them. How would a rational argument even work?
This is a pretty important question, although I don't know how well it applies to specific causes. On the other hand, there are reasonable questions we can ask about rights themselves whose answers are not easily reconcilable. For example:
1. Are rights discovered or invented?
2. If discovered, where do they come from?
3. If invented, can you "uninvent" them?
4. If invented, by what process?
I read a bit about postmodernism recently. I think the difference between yourself/Scott and the 'X studies' traditions is that they're not into classically philosophical arguments like you're making here. It's all about implied power relationships, the identity of speaker and listener are as important, maybe more important, than the content.
Whereas for you and Mr SSC, the identity is to be studiously ignored in favor of only focusing on the argument, to treat it fairly.
So everyone is using wildly different metrics and then wondering why their interlocutors seem crazy.
Rights are mostly won in a power struggle. For that, the idea of the rights has to be conceived first, and made the point of the struggle. This can be seen as "invention".
Then rights can be rationalized and tweaked a bit so that parties with comparable power do not step on each others' toes, and become allies. This can be seen, more roughly, as "discovery".
Rarely rights are granted by the more powerful to a less powerful because of moral / religious reasons. E.g. the anti-slavery movement in the US had a significant religious component, based on the idea that God created people equal.
More often a more powerful party gives a less powerful party some rights because they need an ally and want to prevent a full-on power struggle. I think women's suffrage had a significant component of this in many places.
Powerful and oppressive parties can definitely "uninvent" rights; look at any totalitarian regime for examples. Say, communist regimes often revoke the right to freely trade. Most oppressive regimes gladly uninvent the right to congregate, and usually the right to free speech. They tend to frame these activities as harmful and unnatural. Regaining them usually involves a power struggle; see above.
Frederick Douglass pithily summed it all up with “no struggle, no progress” / “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”