<p>yeah boston 1993 has it down. word up brother. your a republican right? haha or at least when it comes to financial issues. i agree</p>
<p>@HarveyLewis what the hell? are you saying nobody has the right to own anything? yeah lets all just go steal and take whatever we want. hell why should I work for money when I can just go jack some other guys house and food? if everyone thought that way wed all be ****ed</p>
<p>in the amount of time it takes to actually steal something from someone, that same person could have enrolled in a school or asked someone if they could work a little for some money. its pathetic how people take the easy way out sometimes and steal things, instead of do it the morally correct way and actually work for it</p>
Humans label rights - rights are proper social limits - what men are prohibited from doing to each other in a civilized society. We simply label it for our convenience, as we do with numbers, letters, and concepts. If men have a right to life, then the right to property is its implementation in reality.
Example: The law of identity is true, regardless of whether humans recognize it.</p>
Eh, I'm a consequentialist libertarian. I think I'll probably register as a Republican when the time comes, just because I'd like to be a politician when I'm older. The current GOP is screwed up in quite a few ways though.</p>
<p>^^^The "law of identity" is still a human concept and relies on a human perception of the universe. To say that a "thing is itself" is saying something that is constrained in human language and the human experience.</p>
What did you just say? The law of identity is: A = A. An object is the same as itself. This is either (a) a terrible attempt at a refutation or (b) a terrible attempt at humor. Either way, your response was terrible. You didn't respond to anything else I said anyway.</p>
<p>Second of all, truth isn't contingent on human perception. Things aren't the way they are because we see them that way. We see them that way because they are that way. Our labeling and conceptualization of the law of identity is human - the truth codified by that axiom is not.</p>
<p>Plus, that's a complete dodge on the argument concerning the metaphysical necessity of rights in a civilized society.</p>
Rights = proper social limits. If men want to live together, they can't kill each other just for the hell of it. Of course men could live in a society without rights. Do he know what a society like that is like? It's animalistic. Brutish. Violent. Death, all over the place. It's a state of paranoia, every man fearing the hand of his neighbor. Morality is a code designed to help man live, and to do so happily. Rights are a moral sanction of what a man may be free to do - a way of stopping a mob from tearing through every minority in its way.</p>
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[quote]
Really? I had no idea!
The law of identity has nothing to do with 'rights'.
Well done, you completely avoided my argument and attacked my example as my rights argument. That would be called a straw man.</p>
Well I'm so glad that you think so highly of yourself.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Second of all, truth isn't contingent on human perception. Things aren't the way they are because we see them that way. We see them that way because they are that way. Our labeling and conceptualization of the law of identity is human - the truth codified by that axiom is not.
[/quote]
That makes an awful lot of metaphysical assumptions. Have you ever been in posession of non-human perception? How do you know that truth is external to human perception, that the idea of truth itself is not inherently reliant on a human perception? We say that the law of identity is a law because it is useful/pragmatic to do so. Saying that it holds truth outside of human perception and does not rely on humans is debatable.</p>
<p>"metaphysical necessity"...say what?</p>
<p>I'm not even debating that part of your argument in any case.</p>
1.) Reality exists outside of the realm of human perception. Wishful thinking doesn't change the way things are. Even if I manage to convince myself that a pile of money is sitting in front of me, it changes nothing.</p>
<p>2.) You're again using the adjective "human" as if to denote some higher level of consciousness - something roughly akin to a deity. What you're ultimately doing is making the argument that, because the human mind is fallible, abandoning it to agnostic mysticism will somehow make it infallible.</p>
<p>3.) The law of identity doesn't exist because it's "pragmatic". It exists because our consciousness identifies the fact that a table is a table - a TV a TV - a computer a computer - and humanity, humanity.</p>
<p>4.) Go jump off of a building. Perhaps it's only our human perception that the ground is there, and that we'll die by hitting it. If you're right, you can come back and tell me about it. If you're wrong, then it's not much of a loss. =P</p>
<p>P.S. You're also throwing us into a logically fallacious cycle of infinite regression of the form "but how do you know X".</p>
<p>P.S.S. If you're trying to pull the metaphysical subjectivism argument based on "human perception", I'd like it noted that there's no logical reason why our perception would be distorted unless some "higher power" deliberately set it to be that way.</p>
Rights aren't "defined" by humans, though. Based on a proper metaphysics, there are certain things which a human requires to exist. We label as "rights" that which is required by man's existence. That's why rights are "proper social limits". Men have to live a certain way within reality. In a society where men wish to coexist in a way proper to their nature as rational beings, rights must be respected. The fact that rights aren't always respected doesn't change whether they are, in fact, proper social limits given man's rational nature.</p>
<p>Example: 1 + 1 =2.
Even if we take away the labels (and humans, for the sake of convenience), that will still be true. In the same way, removing the label "rights", those metaphysical preconditions (and the necessity of the respect thereof) will continue to exist, even if we refuse to recognize them.</p>
<p>In fact, it's the very presupposition of the "subjectivity" of rights in contemporary society that's led to tyranny in the past, and social instability in the present (coupled with the tendency toward statism which we're currently seeing, given the advent of greater state control in the areas of civil liberties and economics alike). The day that you argue that rights aren't metaphysical absolutes (labels or not) is the day you sentence the entire human race to misery, slavery, and death under the whip of his "brothers".</p>
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[quote]
No, it's called refuting a bad example. And you really like your logical fallacies, don't you?
You didn't refute anything though. =P And yeah, I suppose I prefer logically valid arguments to logically fallacious arguments.</p>
