Natural Rights: Objective, Subjective and Volition
I often have people say Natural Rights do not exist. Then they point to something like the Earth and state the Earth is a sphere – that is real, the mass of the Earth is real and can be measured, but the Right to Property or the Right of self ownership are not real, they don’t exist in nature and there is nothing natural about them. A similar complaint is that Natural Rights are subjective, while the mass of the Earth is objective.
I'm in a Grammar Nazi mood tonight.
"The Marxists attacked Locke based on the idea that people lived groups." - missing an "in".
"This means that man most own himself" - should be "must"
On more meaningful matters, I think you went off on a tangent here. If I ask the question "How do I know Natural Rights really are a thing and not just some fiction I cooked up in my own head...", how do I put that to the test?
You say there is this comparison between something like mass of Earth or shape or earth, and say it comes down to people confusing Volition with Subjectiveness. I'm not getting that. I agree there is a difference between those things, but I don't really think a denier in Natural Rights is saying "Ah hah - so you decided to look into whether Natural Rights exist. The very fact you're doing that makes it subjective!" If people are making this argument, well, I guess the comparison you lay out with Euclidian geometry may have some value. But I suspect you're not really addressing the root cause of the objection.
In my opinion, it comes down to how you really put this to the test. Since you brought up Euclidean geometry anyway...the way I was taught geometry is you first must start with statement you will accept without proving - the postulate. You obviously try to have as few of these as possible. Through logic, you can build up theorms which are in small steps, statement by statement, proven true by eventual regression to the postulates.
In order for something like Natural Rights to actually be proven to exist to a critic, it seems something like the above is needed. If you agree, what do you imagine the postulates are? What can be said as a postulate that no reasonable person could disagree with?
On a separate matter, can you enumerate all the Natural Rights?
The postulate - actually observation was clearly stated. It is that you own yourself. Everything else follows like Geometry. Locke showed it was not a postulate, but based on what a man owns in a state of nature. Metaphysically he owns himself if he is alone and owns his creations. It is really pretty straight forward.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjectivis...
"Subjectivism is the philosophical tenet that 'our own mental activity is the only unquestionable fact of our experience'. The success of this position is historically attributed to Descartes and his methodic doubt. Subjectivism accords primacy to subjective experience as fundamental of all measure and law."
When dbhalling writes on his blog that Euclidean geometry deals with facts that are not empirical — e.g., that parallel lines remain parallel indefinitely — he unwittingly comes down on the side of philosophical subjectivism: Euclid's statement about parallels was not verified by perception (and can never be so because no two material lines in reality remain parallel indefinitely), but was verified by a cognitive act of intellect alone, and therefore represents a kind of fact that not only resides in consciousness only, but depends for its own existence on the prior existence of consciousness.
In that sense, the statement about parallels is subjective — philosophically subjective — yet it has nothing to do with one's conclusions being influenced by feelings.
"Euclid's statement about parallels was not verified by perception (and can never be so because no two material lines in reality remain parallel indefinitely), but was verified by a cognitive act of intellect alone, and therefore represents a kind of fact that not only resides in consciousness only, but depends for its own existence on the prior existence of consciousness."
Suppose you're right. Suppose unlike EG, which has analogs in the physical world that we can test, the notion of Natural Rights was made up out of whole cloth or people's emotions. If we proceed logically from the axioms of Natural Rights and we cannot derive contradictory results from the axioms, what's wrong with that? What's wrong with using our emotions to select a set of axioms and proceeding logically from there?
A non-sequitur. EG can be true for every person even if each person's mental activity is the only unquestionable fact of his or her experience.
Observe that Descartes starts his system by using “error” and its synonyms or derivatives as “stolen concepts.”
Men have been wrong, and therefore, he implies, they can never know what is right. But if they cannot, how did they ever discover that they were wrong? How can one form such concepts as “mistake” or “error” while wholly ignorant of what is correct? “Error” signifies a departure from truth; the concept of “error” logically presupposes that one has already grasped some truth. If truth were unknowable, as Descartes implies, the idea of a departure from it would be meaningless.
Leonard Peikoff, “‘Maybe You’re Wrong,’”
The Objectivist Forum, April 1981, 9
Aynrandlexicon.com
These Meditations (Descrates) begin by attempting to doubt everything, and to build up from that to those few things which we can know with certainty. The result is an idea of the human as essentially spiritual, but temporarily connected to a material body, which knows that its perceptions are valid because God is no deceiver. And how do we know about God? Because we couldn't have even the concept of so perfect a being unless God had put it into us, like the mark of the craftsman on his work.
But isn't this no more than saying that "I know what I know", and justifying this by saying "one of the things I know is a benevolent God" in a pointlessly circular process of introspection? Possibly so, but the Meditations may still be seen as a foundation of modern philosophy inasmuch as it, as with all the best philosophy, properly asks the right questions for its time, questions which we are only now discovering how to answer.
Descartes was extraordinarily honest, at least by the standards of his time, in circulating the manuscript of The Meditations for comment and publishing a set of "Objections and Replies" alongside the text. These are actually larger than the original book and are rarely reproduced today, but I've included a precis of the dialog with Thomas Hobbes to give a feel of the whole. http://sqapo.com/descartes.htm
The point of the article was not about philosophical subjectivism, but subjectivism as commonly used and just because something is volitional does not make it subjective, which people argue all the time.
Not quite. That's what Leonard Peikoff implies about Descartes; not what Descartes implies. This is the usual Peikovian Standard Operating Procedure (which he learned from his mentor) of misquoting, misparaphrasing, and in general, mischaracterizing all philosophers with whom one disagrees.
dbhalling: "It is not a non-sequitur and you failed to prove so."
One can't "prove" a non-sequitur since a non-sequitur refers to something that DOESN'T exist, — i.e., a conclusion that necessarily follows from premises and is relevant to the argument — and one can't "prove" the non-existence of something. Your previous conclusion about Euclide was both irrelevant and unwarranted, ergo, it was a non-sequitur by definition. It is your responsibility to prove the necessity of your conclusions and to remain relevant to the argument; since you did neither, it was merely my responsibility to point out to everyone else how fatuous it was.
dbhalling: "Descartes was extraordinarily honest, at least by the standards of his time, in circulating the manuscript of The Meditations for comment and publishing a set of "Objections and Replies" alongside the text."
Which makes him more intellectually honest, both in his time and in ours, than Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff, neither of whom circulated anything for the sake of comments and objections. In fact, when one attempts to comment and object to something by Rand or Peikoff, one is almost immediately accused of 1) committing an ad hominem, 2) harboring a malevolent sense-of-life, or 3) suffering from an irrational psycho-epistemology.
dbhalling: "The point of the article was not about philosophical subjectivism, but subjectivism as commonly used..."
Oh, no, that won't do at all. Whenever someone uses the word "altruism", they mean "altrusim as commonly used" (i.e., benevolent concern for the welfare of others; generosity; etc.), and not "philosophical altruism" as enunciated and systematized by Auguste Comte.
If you're going to insist on the strict philosophical definition of "altruism" in other discussions, you should also insist on the strict philosophical definition of "subjectivism" in this discussion.
thou: "TROLL"
See what I mean?
You low-double-digit-IQ Objectivist wannabees are just so predictable.
Regarding non-sequiturs, it's obvious you're just plain wrong. In ordinary usage — which was *my* usage in the above context (the context you failed to grasp), "non-sequitur" embraces both the formal logical notion of a conclusion not validly following from premises and the informal common-sense notion of RELEVANCE to the subject matter.
Your previous remarks regarding Euclidean geometry and what it putatively "rejects" and "requires" is a perfectly clear case in point of something both invalid AND irrelevant to what was being discussed.
Remarks, by the way, that were as ignorant as they were silly.
Congratulations! You've won the much coveted Leonard Peikoff Award for outstanding unintelligibility in philosophical discussion. I know you will display it proudly on your mantelpiece.
If you can't prove something is a non-sequitur then it is meaningless term. OF COURSE you can prove something is a non-sequitur, which is defined as in formal logic, is an argument in which its conclusion does not follow from its premises. This shows you are not serious. You are not interested in logic. Your goal here disrupt, divert and obstruct any rational discussion. You must of studied at the foot of the Jay Carney school of PR.
You of course decided without showing that Peikoff was off base. In fact it is clear that Subjectivism is nonsense philosophically, which was shown above.