You can believe in evolution. You can believe in human rights. Not both.
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Simon Paynton 7 years, 9 months ago.
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August 14, 2017 at 3:03 am #4169
He’s using the argumentum ad absurdum (following an argument to an absurd conclusion) to show that the belief in human rights is illogical and unsustainable.
Seems like part of a “teach the controversy” ploy in that he doesn’t give an answer (in this video) but may be trying to convince people that evolution doesn’t help solve the riddle of what are human rights. I could be wrong… I didn’t research what he says elsewhere. At least, it’s fodder for creationists to hang on to.
Meanwhile yeah — whether he’s pushing a creationist agenda or not — human rights are a human construct, and regardless of when in time we decide to evolutionarily define ourselves as “human”. And if we say God constructed human rights, we’re still really saying that people who are in a position to “authoritatively” define God and His Will are still the only source of such rules. People historically latch on to their incumbent authorities.
I.e. with or without God, every group of people almost always merely default to the human-constructed law that’s in effect when and where they grow up.
August 14, 2017 at 7:10 am #4171“He’s using the argumentum ad absurdum (following an argument to an absurd conclusion) to show that the belief in human rights is illogical and unsustainable.”
– this doesn’t follow. At most, he’s arguing against some absurd definition of human rights, but this doesn’t invalidate the whole concept of human rights.
August 14, 2017 at 7:34 am #4173It is hard to beat the UN explanation for how mankind arrived at the notion of rights … the preamble to the charter says this about human rights:
- they are the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
- disregard and the contempt of human rights results in terrible and barbarous acts by men
- enshrining human rights in law prevents men having recourse to rebellion against tyranny and oppression
- rights promote the development of friendly relations between nations
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This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by
David Boots.
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This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by
August 14, 2017 at 5:27 pm #4177It seems to me that ‘rights’ are a part of ‘club membership’. If you sit around a Kava bowl with a Fijian tribal family, you will discover that your local ‘rights’ are far different from what you have come to expect in your western domicile. If you spend any length of time in any place other than your own, this becomes apparent very quickly.
In the U.K., for example, your rights include rights to free healthcare. That’s a basic, unshakable right. In most European countries you have the right to a minimum of three weeks paid leave. There are no universal rights for which you can’t find a community that does not accept them.
August 14, 2017 at 6:31 pm #4182That is very True Strega, but it seems like he’s pushing for the idea that somehow there should be some exclusion in a society- not treating people the same. It’s really a different kind of oppression wrapped up in intellectual bs.
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This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by
Strega. Reason: to fix formatting
August 14, 2017 at 6:43 pm #4183Yes I saw, Belle. Once people get hung up on the term ‘universal’, I’ve noticed they like to apply it as often as possible. On this planet, we have no automatic rights, as there is no autonomy to provide or police them. In different communities, people can create rights as a part of their community only if they have a form of policing and a form of judiciary.
There is probably some negative correlation between people who think rights are ‘human rights’ and the number of different societies they’ve lived in.
Odd isn’t it, that as soon as you create rights, you have to protect them. If rights were so natural and universal, they would not need to be constantly defended.
August 15, 2017 at 12:13 am #4185Oh, I think human rights should be universal…. I just know they aren’t, and will never be, until we make it so. The people must demand these rights or they will never be.
August 15, 2017 at 1:03 pm #4186The thing is with rights is that over time, they have been extended to more and more groups. This is part of the moral and ethical progress of the world, that Steven Pinker talks about. The right to being treated with respect is becoming more and more universal.
@strega – “Odd isn’t it, that as soon as you create rights, you have to protect them.”
– that’s not odd at all. Not giving people rights is just a symptom of the human in-group out-group behaviour (where out-groups are seen as non-people), and also some groups wanting to hang on to power at the expense of other groups. It’s also a symptom of straightforward human brutality.
Ultimately human rights means to treat people with respect and dignity – this should not be a strange or alien idea.
August 17, 2017 at 1:03 pm #4187His point is that if you follow those qualities to their logical conclusion, it becomes absurd. Sure we can comfortably apply those stipulations to ourselves, to people one or two centuries ago, even thousands of years ago, but if you keep going back it starts becoming untenable
That is a potential factor with much, if not all, of our concept of morality and justice. The various ‘trolley car’ scenarios demonstrate that there is a lot of areas where trying to define moral concepts eventually leads to logical inconsistency. Bringing ‘god’ into the picture doesn’t help, because he can’t seem to make up his own mind about much of this, but, like a politician, he generally sides with the views of whichever group he is talking to.
Ultimately there is no purely logical case for morality, but nonetheless it is deeply part of our set of complex social instincts. As an allegory, consider your spam filter on email. Each time you get a spam, you can create a rule to block future instances, but as the number of rules grows, some directly contradict one another, some filter out stuff that they shouldn’t and some spam still gets through. In our evolution, certain social behaviors contributed to survival, and these were reinforced through selection. But that’s absolutely no guarantee that those behavioral rules are logical or consistent.
August 17, 2017 at 2:38 pm #4188The thing is with rights is that over time, they have been extended to more and more groups. This is part of the moral and ethical progress of the world, that Steven Pinker talks about. The right to being treated with respect is becoming more and more universal….
Ultimately human rights means to treat people with respect and dignity – this should not be a strange or alien idea.
Human rights should always be a lean basic set, but applied to all people. But expansions of the basic ‘life, liberty and pursuit of happiness’ often starts trimming freedom moving the government into places where it simply does not belong. It’s the ‘expanded’ human rights that some are pushing for that are leading to some of the push to re-implement blasphemy laws. Everyone should have freedom to live their life as they choose, but to enforce ‘respect’ and require others to approve (or pretend to) starts to trample on other peoples’ rights to conscience. Giving people a ‘right’ to income (as opposed to charitable help, which is a gift, not a right) means you need to confiscate from someone else.
No one has a ‘right’ to anyone else’s approval. Religious folks are free to disapprove of me, to consider me an evil person, and I have the same right toward them. That’s how freedom works.
August 17, 2017 at 8:00 pm #4189@notsimple – “trying to define moral concepts eventually leads to logical inconsistency.”
– it certainly does not. I don’t know why you say this. Morality has a very clear and logical structure. Some of the details, the twigs on the tree, are still to be worked out, but the tree itself is very well defined.
“The various ‘trolley car’ scenarios”
– I don’t see that the trolley car scenarios teach us very much at all that is useful.
“Ultimately there is no purely logical case for morality,”
– Hell yes there is. Morality just uses its own logic – the logic of thriving, which has certain well-defined, consistent properties.
“as the number of rules grows, some directly contradict one another“, “that’s absolutely no guarantee that those behavioral rules are logical or consistent.”
– consider the concentric “circles of concern” attached to the individual:
myself
my family
my friends
those with whom I collaborate
my group
the worldEach of these has a separate morality associated with it. That is a large source of the contradictions. Also, fairness is a balancing act between each person’s individual interests, so we can have conflict or dilemmas here too.
It’s interesting how, as people become more morally enlightened, it seems to be that they start to ignore the rules of their culture and become more like Jesus, whose morality was largely culture-free – he didn’t give a fuck what society said he should do. The morality of Jesus comes from the first evolutionary phase when we lived in small groups, and culture did not exist. He may have said, he comes to deliver the Law, or whatever – but that’s rubbish, he just tore up the rule book and started again.
August 17, 2017 at 8:45 pm #4190Simon PayntonParticipant
@notsimple – “trying to define moral concepts eventually leads to logical inconsistency.”– it certainly does not. I don’t know why you say this. Morality has a very clear and logical structure. Some of the details, the twigs on the tree, are still to be worked out, but the tree itself is very well defined.
“The various ‘trolley car’ scenarios”
– I don’t see that the trolley car scenarios teach us very much at all that is useful.
“Ultimately there is no purely logical case for morality,”
– Hell yes there is. Morality just uses its own logic – the logic of thriving, which has certain well-defined, consistent properties.
Not fully. Was the US Civil War moral? It gained freedom for many people. It killed many many thousands of others. How do you weigh the killing vs the freedom? You mention circles of concern, and this is a valid view, it’s baked into our evolution… but people like Singer suggest that to be moral you must equate every person on the planet to the same level as your own child, that it would be moral to give up the life of your child to save two in Africa.
We (including myself) basically accept that causing pain, or even death is wrong. But it’s basically a postulate. We may point out that its a matter of not doing to others what we don’t want done to us… but even that is just an axiom, we believe it, and base arguments on it, but it is not provable. The same can be said about harming animals.
Is killing a willful murderer morally OK? Can your logically defend your position or does it not go down to internal gut feelings? In some places, births of children with Down syndrome are just about zero, because the are generally aborted when the problem is detected. Some people consider this morally tolerable, others feel it’s just eugenics.
Jesus (if he actually even said those things) did not come up with a consistent moral structure. Mainly just tossed around a few nice sounding things but had no logical structure. Loving your enemies, turning the cheek, abandoning your family, giving away your possessions (as well as your family’s future) and becoming a pauper to enter the kingdom of the heavens don’t seem to be all that enlightened.
August 18, 2017 at 3:48 pm #4192@notsimple – “Was the US Civil War moral? It gained freedom for many people. It killed many many thousands of others. How do you weigh the killing vs the freedom?”
– this is really a question of consequences. Every set of consequences is a mixed bag of good and bad. I think the moral aspect very much belongs to how people behave – if we know something is going to lead to a bad outcome, and we don’t need to do it, it’s immoral. Presumably, each side in the Civil War was mainly made up of good people – a representative sample of the human race. But their priorities were different. The people in favour of slavery only valued themselves and their own group. The people against slavery had a wider circle of concern. So, according to that model, the second group were more ethical. I think that morality is attached to actions rather than consequences.
“people like Singer suggest that to be moral you must equate every person on the planet to the same level as your own child, that it would be moral to give up the life of your child to save two in Africa.”
– only a psychopath would think like this: a robot with no human feelings. And that’s what Peter Singer is. (check out the tuk-tuk lecture*.) The evolution of morality can be traced back to individual thriving, surviving and reproducing, and inclusive fitness.
“even that is just an axiom, we believe it, and base arguments on it, but it is not provable.”
– you’re right, and this comes down to the fact/value divide: the “is/ought” problem. We have to make a conscious choice in our basic axioms, and the best choices are those which align with our highest values: thriving, surviving and reproducing.
Morality is a logical system, but it’s probably unique among logical systems, and therefore, it’s not like mathematics. It’s more like biology: it follows logical rules, but the way it plays out is messy. That’s why there’s so much room for ambiguity and difference.
“Is killing a willful murderer morally OK? Can your logically defend your position or does it not go down to internal gut feelings?”
– I can logically defend a position based on human rights, and justice. So, if there’s no need to kill the willful murderer, don’t. Just lock them up for punishment, rehabilitation, making good for the victims, and public protection.
“In some places, births of children with Down syndrome are just about zero, because the are generally aborted when the problem is detected. Some people consider this morally tolerable, others feel it’s just eugenics.”
– like Peter Singer. He “doesn’t care” that the whole world thinks he’s a monster.
“Jesus (if he actually even said those things) did not come up with a consistent moral structure.”
– if I’m correct, it was Jesus who came up with “love God, and love your neighbour as yourself”. This is THE coherent moral framework of kindness and fairness, although stated in a fairly crude way. On this framework you can build just about the entire edifice of morality. Precisely, it can be stated as “each person affected by your actions is to receive the maximum benefit and minimum harm available to them”. This is a combination of 1) the maximising ethic of the pressure to thrive; 2) the general principle of concern for others. Not everything that came out of Jesus’ mouth was necessarily the greatest idea in the world; however, this fact doesn’t invalidate his general approach.
* tuk-tuk lecture: I can’t find it, and don’t really want to. He was using a video of a little girl getting squished by a tuk-tuk to illustrate some academic point about caring about strangers. He played it back over and over – squish, squish, squish. To him, it was like watching a cat drink a saucer of milk.
August 19, 2017 at 3:53 am #4193It is hard to beat the UN explanation for how mankind arrived at the notion of rights … the preamble to the charter says this about human rights:
they are the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
disregard and the contempt of human rights results in terrible and barbarous acts by men
enshrining human rights in law prevents men having recourse to rebellion against tyranny and oppression
rights promote the development of friendly relations between nations
There’s no argument there that people are born with rights, but rather that we should make sure people get and have them and that they are secured.
The US Declaration of Independence and other documents makes the claim that we are born with such rights, have them like or not (inalieability), and that all men have the same rights in the same way for all time. (Remember that the US Founding Fathers didn’t write the Declaration in a world aware of evolution, that mankind changed over time and came about from lower creatures.)
I no longer have the time I used to have to reply to many people, but from what I see, no one is contradicting the philosopher’s claims, really, but end up by ways various and roundabout of agreeing that while we need such rights and might deserve them, they are not as many believed rights we have rather than get by being human beings.
August 19, 2017 at 3:58 am #4194That is very True Strega, but it seems like he’s pushing for the idea that somehow there should be some exclusion in a society- not treating people the same. It’s really a different kind of oppression wrapped up in intellectual bs.
That’s about as far from what he’s saying as it’s possible to be. He’s a philosopher simply asking a philosophical question about whether the notion that humans are somehow born with inalienable rights makes intellectual sense. Period.
Even if he had a political agenda of some sort (which I doubt) it would be immaterial to the philosophical question which is about what’s true and what’s false.
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