Communities built on a shared delusion are one thing, ones built on a delusion that entails harming others are another. I’d be a lot more okay with Christianity if it didn’t so often imply such noxious positions about human rights or whatever.
Ah, was my language too strong? I apologize—my point was simply this: that all too often in discussions of the value of Christian community etc., the political, emotional, and physical harms tied up in the same structures that maintain these communities are elided.
This is why I said “not all Christian communities are like the one I attended.” I cannot think of a single area where “my” church took a noxious position on human rights. It meant that they focused more on certain parts of the Bible (“love your neighbor as yourself” etc) than on other more negative parts.
Well, for one, it sounds like it explicitly condemns homosexuality? Maybe that’s not precisely what you’d call a “position on human rights”, but it still causes harm.
From what I saw, the general sentiment was “we feel like we should believe homosexuality is wrong because it says so in the Bible, but we’re a bit embarrassed about that, so we’re just not going to talk about the issue.” Some churches focus more on that element than others though. (One branch of the Canadian Anglican church, for example, has explicitly declared that they’re OK with homosexual ministers.)
I’m not sure whether that constitutes a position on human rights or not, and whether it’s a noxious position if so.
It is certainly an active refusal to adopt a position I can endorse on a human rights issue. Then again, pretty much everyone I know is in that position with respect to some issue or other.
For my own part, I have difficulty endorsing any community that is incapable of supporting families like my husband and I, and I would not feel welcomed or supported by them.
Thinking about it, I suppose they might be rejecting the idea that my endorsal of a community should be contingent on that community offering support for families like mine.
Which, actually, I agree with; there are lots of communities I endorse that don’t actively support such families. Heck, LW is itself such a community, insofar as it has not getting involved in politics as a virtue, given that the existence of my family is a political issue in the U.S..
It was clear to me that by “community” I meant community of the sort Swimmer963 was talking about, but I can certainly understand if that wasn’t clear to others.
Thinking about it, I suppose they might be rejecting the idea that my endorsal of a community should be contingent on that community offering support for families like mine.
The idea seems reasonable to me; it would be pretty tough to get any of the support benefits of a community if the community explicitly won’t offer you support. :-\
For my own part, I have difficulty endorsing any community that is incapable of supporting families like my husband and I, and I would not feel welcomed or supported by them.
I think that’s a somewhat different kind of support than what swimmer963 was talking about. For a given community to be considered supportive of you, they only have to actively support you. If they hypocritically denounce others who are in the same situation as you but who aren’t part of the particular community, that’s an indication of internal doublethink going on and also a stress on the relationship between you and the community, but I dunno if I’d call it “unsupportive”.
Sure. There’s a reason I talk about support for my family here, rather than support for me.
I mean, something like “Hey, Dave, we think you’re awesome, and it’s a real shame that you’re caught up in this relationship, and we want you to know that whatever we can do to help you get over that, we’re here for you, buddy!” is perhaps supportive of me, but it is certainly not supportive of my family.
(I actually had someone say essentially this to me once, upon discovering that I was queer. We’d met professionally, and she made me a job offer to join her on a startup, and had commented that she was a devout Christian and that was very important to her. I commented in turn that I was indifferent to her religion, but it might make her reconsider the offer upon knowing about my sexuality. Which indeed it did. I thanked her for her concern, let her know that I didn’t consider my family to be at all inappropriate, and offered my assistance should she ever choose to get over her religious affiliation, and we haven’t spoken since. But I digress.)
She believed that the way I lived my life wasn’t in my best interests and wasn’t moral/ethical, and she therefore offered her assistance should I wish to change the way I live my life. She did that without trying to impose herself into my life or take away my freedoms or damage me or etc.
I actually endorse all of that, as far as it goes. The world would be a far better place if more people responded to that situation that way.
And given the number of people in the world who do try to impose themselves into my life, take away my freedoms, damage me, etc. based on their beliefs about my interests and/or the morality of my life (or do the equivalent for people in my reference class), I feel it’s important to calibrate my reaction. If I get bent out of shape by people like her, then I don’t have a way of dealing with people who would, say, beat me up and hang me from a tree, or remove legal protections from my marriage, or force me into a behavior-modification program.
I consider her evaluation of my interests flawed, of course, but that’s just as true of the many people who offered to, or informed me that they were, praying for my recovery after my stroke. And I really appreciated them.
She did that without trying to impose herself into my life or take away my freedoms or damage me or etc. I actually endorse all of that, as far as it goes. The world would be a far better place if more people responded to that situation that way.
I...guess. Maybe I’m just spoiled by living in a country, and belonging to an age group, where the people who are okay with homosexuality say so loudly and the people who AREN’T okay with it don’t talk about that. The church I go to (the Anglican Church of Canada) officially accepts homosexuals into its clergy, and that’s kind of what I’m used to. So to me, a response like hers does seem pretty awful, but not to you because you’re used to worse...
I still think what you said was a good comeback. Not helpful, maybe, but snappy and funny, and it might have made her think...
Don’t get me wrong: in my actual life I don’t have to deal with much of that stuff.
I go to friends’ religious ceremonies with my husband all the time, for example, and nobody blinks… or if they do, they keep it to themselves. More generally, people who don’t consider me a social and moral peer are cordially invited to get the hell off my lawn, and I have enough social power to make that stick, enforced by an awesome community in which my basic humanity is simply never in question. (Well, at least not because of my sexuality. I do get a certain amount of “What planet are you from, Dave?” but that’s different.)
I suspect that if I didn’t have those advantages, I would rapidly lose my sense of perspective.
All of that said, I think it’s the correct perspective, and would remain so even if I lost it. It makes no sense to judge people against my social context rather than their own.
Oh, yeah, that is pretty nasty. I was imagining something more along the lines of “Oh, we support you and you family, you’re not like those other gay families”.
Yeah, I get that sort of thing too, by virtue of not being stereotypically Other in any particularly visible way.
When i was growing up, I got a lot of variants on “Funny, you don’t look Jewish”; when I came out I got a lot of “But you don’t really act gay.” (To which my usual response was “I do, actually. This is how a lot of gay people act. It’s part of our devious plot to trick you into treating us like people.”)
I mostly treat that kind of statement as a good sign, though… a symptom of cracks in the infrastructure.
That is, someone starts out believing that all Xes are Y, and that W is not Y, and then discovers W is an X. If they can avoid concluding that W actually is Y after all (which is the easiest fix), the contradictions in their worldview will start to build up. My usual experience is that after weeks or months or years of continued acquaintance, those people ultimately reject the “All Xes are Y” bit.
I’ve gone through the analogous process myself when breaking down some of my own prejudices, and I appreciate the patience of the folks who helped me through it. It seems only just to pay that forward.
I’m not sure whether that constitutes a position on human rights or not, and whether it’s a noxious position if so.
Of course it constitutes a position on human rights. Human rights are not passive things. They must be actively defended or they simply cease to exist. Tyrannies often begin not with the stripping of rights but simply with a lack of enforcement (Haebius Corpus? Don’t worry, you still have that right—it says so right here on this paper.) until the memory of it fades away.
There are no rights but those we take. When someone expresses doubts that a particular group of humans should be allowed certain rights they are attacking the concept of universal human rights in its entirety. And anyone who is embarrassed into silence rather than at least saying “no, that’s wrong” is implicit in the murder of human rights.
When someone expresses doubts that a particular group of humans should be allowed certain rights they are attacking the concept of universal human rights in its entirety.
Some groups of humans are excluded from rights that other humans have, in every legal system. Examples would include minors, convicted criminals, and adults who have been found mentally incompetent. Going further, you have the right to own and dispose of your own property, and I do not share this right to your property. I don’t subscribe to any conception of “universal human rights” that would suggest otherwise.
Those are, in my opinion, all examples of groups that don’t have the power to enforce their rights. They lack the numbers to protect their rights, and lack the ability to draw powerful allies to their cause. Another example of “no rights but those we take.”
Which is exactly why I wish to keep social pressure high for all humans to defend what I consider the most basic rights. Reminding people that rights must be actively defended, and condemning those who shrink away from doing so, is one tactic. I do this because I’m rather attached to the rights I have now, and would like to hold on to them. You do not?
I’m surprised at your reaction. Let me illustrate my examples: for “minors,” think “five year olds.” For “incompetents” think “people in comas.” For criminals...well, just think about convicted criminals. You can’t seriously be arguing that criminals should never be punished. There is no society on Earth that does not restrict the rights of minors, convicted criminals, and adults who have been found mentally incompetent.
I’m not arguing that (see replies to Davids). But I also note that I am not a minor, convicted criminal, or mentally incompetent and therefore expect I may be biased. I certainly don’t trust everything I think, and I note that as long as I’m running on hostile hardware it can be in my best interest to follow certain rules proven to protect me against myself.
Of course you start with biases. We all do. But we seek to overcome these biases in order to become less wrong. So, I ask you, in light of the responses you have received, and as one aspiring rationalist to another: is it not true that some groups of humans must be excluded from rights that other humans have?
No. There may be good reasons for certain individuals to have their rights violated. Entire groups cannot be excluded from the rest of humanity.
I don’t think it’s sufficient to simply note “I may have these biases, and I should seek to overcome them”. This may make one seem less biased without actually changing anything. The rest of the tribe applauds your self-awareness and wisdom, and then continues to preferentially hire white people. Actually overcoming a bias means doing the work of imposing rules we find inconvenient. Rules like “I will not take leadership for the good of the tribe, even when it’s for the good of the tribe” or “I will not exclude groups of humans from certain rights, even when they should be excluded from those rights.”
I buy that human rights might well be an example of how ends don’t justify the means for humans. But what do you mean by ‘groups’. Criminals could be considered to be (maybe even defined as?) ‘individuals whose rights we’re justified in violating’.
It’s trivially true that you could identifiy a set of ‘individuals whose rights we should violate’. They’d also have common qualities such as criminality, insanity etc. So what defines a ‘group’ for your purposes? Is the point simply that you can’t take rights from a whole group based on a undeserving minority?
Yes, I specifically avoid identifying groups who’s rights we can take away because once we do that it becomes very tempting, and very easy, to define anyone you dislike as belonging to such a group. One can quickly find themselves in Ray Comfort territory.
But failing to identify such groups, while permitting ourselves to take freedoms away from individuals (as you do here), isn’t clearly an improvement.
If I trust myself to evaluate individuals justly before depriving them of freedoms, it’s not clear to me why I don’t trust myself to evaluate them justly before assigning them to groups.
Conversely, if I don’t trust myself to deal justly with individuals I dislike, it’s not clear to me why I trust myself to deprive them of freedoms.
It seems to me that this problem is hard enough to require better tools than the ones you seem to be attempting to solve it with.
I think that it’s much harder to prove an individual’s guilt of a crime in a court of law than it is to assign someone to a group.
If I trust myself to evaluate individuals justly before depriving them of freedoms, it’s not clear to me why I don’t trust myself to evaluate them justly before assigning them to groups.
I really hope I don’t live in society where you can deprive someone of freedoms on your own for any reason. :) (or any one person, for the record—I don’t have anything against you personally). I advocate “individual guilt” over “group affiliations” as criteria specifically because it requires much stronger standards of evidence.
As the most egregious example of this—it would be very hard to prove Anwar al-Awlaki has done anything illegal. And yet he’s been condemned to death simply by having the president place him in the group “terrorist”.
So, I guess my hope has been shattered, actually. :( I meant that “I really hope” sentence more as an aspiration statement, really.
I agree with you that some people in the US are being deprived of freedoms without legal recourse because powerful people have declared them to have certain group affiliations, like “terrorist,” and that in many cases this is a mistake.
I also suspect that some people in the US are being mistakenly deprived of their freedoms in courts of law, despite nominal legal recourse, without any particular group affiliation being asserted, because powerful people desire it.
I’d say (90+% confidence) there’s at least an order of magnitude more people in the second group than the first.
At this point I think the discussion gets murky, because legal recourse is often intentionally biased and group affiliation is often implicit. The drug war comes to mind. I’d assert that there’s a lot of overlap and we could reduce the second group a great deal by strengthening popular support of universal rights.
I certainly agree that the group/individual distinction gets murky when you get into the specifics of how societies actually make the choice to grant and withhold freedoms… that’s why I was questioning the distinction in the first place.
I agree that if there were strong and pervasive support for a common understanding of what freedoms people are entitled to by default (which is more or less what I understand by “universal rights”), there would be fewer cases of people being deprived of those freedoms, all else being equal.
It’s not clear to me that all else can be equal, though.
It’s also not clear to me that encouraging everyone to support universal rights, without at the same time encouraging us to support a specific model of universal rights, is anywhere near as effective.
That’s a disturbing page in several ways, but I don’t see anything on it which implies actively violating anyone’s rights, unless you interpret security from proselytism as a fundamental right.
I used it as an example because a favorite tactic of Ray Comfort is to ask someone “Have you ever told a lie?”. Which is tantamount to asking “Are you a human?”. After receiving an affirmative answer he asks “Well, doesn’t that make you a liar? And god says no liar can enter heaven.”
It’s tricky for me to wrap my head around the logic of faith and repentance descended from Calvinism, but there’s some pretty clever Dark Arts in there. “Your salvation-state has been predetermined by God, and there’s nothing you can do about it—but God only assigns salvation to people he expects to join his church and believe really hard. Do you think you’re smarter than God?”
I wonder if Calvinists would be unusually disposed toward one-boxing on Newcomb’s Problem?
Maybe “violating” is the wrong word to use in this context. I would rather say that everyone has certain rights—such as freedom from imprisonment—conditioned on (for example) not violating other people’s rights—as in killing or assaulting them.
P.S. Also, societies deprive minors and the incompetent from some rights for their own protection. I don’t think we want to live in a world in which a slick salesperson could commit a ten year old or an advanced Alzheimer’s patient to an expensive fifty year contract.
And we also deprive everyday people of certain rights for their own protection: the right of free contract is limited. For instance, I can’t sign a contract with a clause saying that if I break it the other party has the right to my unpaid labour in perputuity. Similarly, I can’t sell my organs, at least in this country.
I find talk of rights is often very confused, with no one entirely sure what even they themselves mean by the term, much less the others in the conversation. It may be a good time to taboo the word.
The best explanation I’ve found for “right” that seems to apply in the real world is “an extremely strong aversion to punishing acts of X with violence”, which is based off the Desirist model. What that means in practice is that to assert that people have a right to freedom of movement is to say that everyone should have a very strong aversion to punishing free movement with violence. Sometimes a person’s right to free movement will be violated because “a very strong aversion” is not infinite for good reason. When there are enough counter-weighing reasons (the person is assaulting someone, or the person has committed a crime and taking away this freedom will prevent others from committing a similar crime in the future) then that person’s right is violated. But the reasons must be strong reasons, and provably demonstrated, in order to out-weigh a very strong aversion.
And it remains the case that the right still exists. Everyone should still have a strong aversion to restricting the movements of others, even as we acknowledge that in this one case we have enough countervailing reasons to violate that right for this person.
The best explanation I’ve found for “right” that seems to apply in the real world is “an extremely strong aversion to punishing acts of X with violence”.
I don’t think this definition conforms with what most people mean by “rights.” Assume an entirely nonviolent society. You try to vote. I throw your ballot away—nonviolently. What right do you have? I sell you a boat or a car or a house. You pay me money. I take the money and laugh in your face. Nonviolently. What recourse do you have?
Consider the example of criminal law. X has murdered someone. If X (predictably) resists imprisonment, I would say, use violence to subdue X. Would you not? X is in the group of humans who are “convicted criminals.” How does this conform with your original assertion that “When someone expresses doubts that a particular group of humans should be allowed certain rights they are attacking the concept of universal human rights in its entirety?”
This is not how the United Nations, for example, uses the term “universal human rights.”
I don’t see how any of those apply. In the first two, there are no rights on the part of the transgressor. No society recognizes a person’s right to throw away official ballots or to cheat others of their money, so there is no prohibition on using violence to prevent that. Rights never come into the picture at all, so I think we’ve had some miscommunication along the way.
In the third case, we use violence to subdue X not because he belongs to a group, but because we have determined (hopefully in a fair trial) that he has murdered someone. We now have strong enough justification to outweigh our aversion to taking away his freedom. The statement “We should always have an aversion to taking away freedom, but in this case we have important reasons to do so, and here they are” is not anywhere in the same category as “I doubt group Y should have a right to freedom”
On the one hand, a small part of me would like to discuss this further. On the other, I think this is becoming less relevant to the original post. Also—and this is critical for me personally—I’ve got some stuff to do in the real world now. I note that we cannot agree to disagree. But I gotta go. Best wishes (and I mean that totally sincerely, without sarcasm).
I think some of the confusion here might come from the fact that freedom from violence is often cast as a right—in which case we either have to make some awkward exceptions, or to draw an initiation/reaction distinction. This doesn’t seem like an insurmountable hurdle, though; societies frequently do both.
Question: are there other reasons, in your opinion, why the rights of these groups might be restricted? Or is it purely a matter of power?
To put this another way, and to pick a specific example for clarity: suppose on Tuesday, Sam and Pat are both free to walk around the city as they choose. Then on Wednesday, Sam and Pat are put in a cage (or whatever), preventing them from exercising this freedom. They attempt to prevent this, and attempt to enlist powerful allies to prevent it, and they fail.
From your perspective, is it correct to claim that their rights are being curtailed and I deserve condemnation if I fail to defend those rights… for example, if I have the key to that cage and don’t use it to free them?
Or are there additional factors that need to be established to justify that claim?
There are many reasons why certain actions should be taken, such as putting someone in a cage. It may prevent others from doing whatever it was that prompted us to put that person in a cage. However it is still true that in general we are all better off if everyone possesses a love of freedom for all, even if in this individual case the consequences of locking someone up outweigh other considerations. Thus we should respect that their right to freedom exists even as we are violating it, and acknowledge that the world would be a better place if this wasn’t necessary.
That’s all in ideal-world-land though. In practice, it’s just a matter of power. Right now there are war criminals giving book tours and talk-show circuits in the US who are free because they harnessed a great deal of power over their lives. And there are national heroes who are locked away in isolation because they made those people uncomfortable.
For the record, I think there are people in the real world whose freedoms are being restricted, not only because they lack the power to prevent it, but because a variety of other conditions apply that I endorse restricting people’s freedoms for… much like what you say of ideal-world land.
To say that more succinctly, I think there are people in the real world whose freedoms are being justly restricted. I gather we disagree about this, which is fine… I’m content to leave it there.
I certainly agree with you, though, that power is a critical factor, and that there are people in the real world who are being made to suffer unjustly, and that there are people in the real world who are unjustly benefiting.
I’m trying to understand your last few posts. Do you believe that human rights SHOULD BE universal, but in fact ARE only for those who take them? Or does ‘universal’ here mean something like ‘with the inherent ability to claim and enforce them’? Because I’m not sure why it would be fundamental that criminals would be unable to enforce their rights?
Because of this, I’m not sure if you think we should defend rights for criminals, minors and/or the mentally incompetent as well as for homosexuals.
As a side point, you say that you encourage others to defend rights because you’re attached to your own rights. Is this a case of valuing them in others because you do in yourself, or a matter of your own rights being safeguarded by a society that defends rights in general?
As I said to TheOtherDavid, there are sometimes reasons to take actions that violate others rights. There are more such reasons for violating the rights of minors/criminals/mentally incompetant than for homosexuals and so I’d put more energy into preventing the violation of rights against homosexuals. In fact I think there’s so few reasons for violating the rights of homosexuals that I view it as an affront to civilization and to myself as a civilized human to do so.
As a side point, you say that you encourage others to defend rights because you’re attached to your own rights. Is this a case of valuing them in others because you do in yourself, or a matter of your own rights being safeguarded by a society that defends rights in general?
OK: so rights are universal over all people, but they’re not inalienable, in that you sometimes have good reason for violating them. I’m not sure whether that always reflects our approach, especially for minors: is it that we think they have rights such as voting, contract etc. but we violate this right due to some risk or danger? Or do we simply not hold that they have those rights?
On the sidepoint: fair enough. Presumably it’s mostly valuing them in others, as if you want to defend your own rights than doing so by encouraging a general culture of defence of rights is very indirect and the net effect to you personally would presumably be much smaller than simpler accruing greater wealth/power/knowledge.
Hm… I’ve never fully thought out the situation with minors. This probably would have occurred to me earlier if I had children of my own.
I want to say that I’m not sure that very young children can be considered fully human in the same way as adults, but this raises several red flags, not the least of which is the problem of determining when a person counts as “human” or not. I think rather than dig myself into a hole that I’m not sure I even support, I’d rather default back to my previous position -
Minors have rights at the same point that anyone else has rights: once they have the power/allies to assert and defend those rights.
The position in general does deserve some more pondering.
I suppose that depends on whether the ‘basic rights’ include things like voting and contract, that you might consider distinctively rights of citizens.
To be honest, I never know how to take human rights language. Some people treat it as morally factual that people have certain rights, whether these are upheld and exercised or not. For me, ‘rights’ has to refer to a sort of social contract. We say that people have the ‘right to life’ because it makes certain decisions more difficult to take than if we just said you had to do what was best for your citizens in general.
It’s very difficult to condemn a country for ‘not pursuing policies that evidence suggests maximises the freedom and quality of life of its citizens’. Doing so involves all sorts of sub-arguments and complexities. Whereas saying ‘they torture people’ at least gives you a clear point of objection, even if the fact and justification are both subject to argument afterwards.
Kudos on the ‘I’ve never fully thought the situation through’, btw. Remarkably rare words on the net.
What about people who simply are silent, but not necessarily embarrassed?
I mean, there are lots of people in the world whose rights are being deprived, and I am silent about most of them most of the time. So is pretty much everyone I know. I don’t know all of our emotional motivations, but our silence is demonstrable.
If that means we’re all implicit in the murder of human rights and the spread of tyranny, I can accept that, but it’s not clear that there’s any grounds for singling out Swimmer’s community for special treatment (which I understood to be the original context) on that basis.
I don’t spend every minute decrying all the injustices of humanity, but if someone I know says in my presence that muslims are violent I at least let them know of my disapproval. Maybe that’s a contributing factor to Swimmer’s non-believing friends seeming grumpy and judgmental.
Actually I like it when people frankly correct other people’s incorrect opinions. The negativity I’m talking about is more on the line of ‘I hate this job, I’m so bored, my family is so stupid, I’m so sick of school’ and also comments like ‘That kid has the biggest head ever, I bet it makes her sink to the bottom of the pool’ or ‘seriously, why do fat people keep coming here and buying chips? They should just die.’ This is the kind of negativity I see a LOT less of in Christian circles. Atheists may also be more likely to correct people’s opinions, being more contrarian, but it’s not something I’ve noticed personally.
I’d be a lot more okay with Christianity if it didn’t so often imply such noxious positions about human rights or whatever.
I find it interesting that atheists begin by condemning religious people over human rights. However, when they start working out their own theory of ethics, they’re perfectly willing to disregard human rights as long as they can find a “rational” reason for it.
I smell a false dichotomy. Condemning religion (or some particular set of religions) on human-rights grounds and then advocating a theory of ethics which disregards or doesn’t contain a notion of human rights is of course inconsistent, but it’d take a remarkable lack of introspection to do that.
Inconsistency’s a common symptom of naive ethics, of course, but for the sake of clarity let’s restrict ourselves to talking about people who’ve put actual thought into their ethical opinions. In that case, it seems more likely that the horns of the alleged contradiction don’t coexist but rather belong to non-overlapping sets of beliefs, which simply happen to share the trait of nontheism. Perfectly reasonable: religious disbelief doesn’t require you to subscribe to notions of human rights, much less a single consistent set of human rights, and there are plenty of nontheist schools of thought that don’t. Nor does it require you to endorse the ethical opinions of all other atheists.
Atheism is not a unified ideology. Treating it as one leads to some extremely wrong conclusions.
Condemning religion (or some particular set of religions) on human-rights grounds and then advocating a theory of ethics which disregards or doesn’t contain a notion of human rights is of course inconsistent, but it’d take a remarkable lack of introspection to do that.
Read the sequences on cognitive biases. People, including yourself, are a lot less introspective then you seem to think.
Atheism is not a unified ideology.
The problem is people making atheism part of their identity, and therefore being reluctant to criticize fellow atheists. And then going no true Scotsman on the ones that are obviously wrong, so you don’t have to learn from their mistakes.
A certain lack of introspection in the general population doesn’t make blanket accusations of hypocrisy any more reasonable, particularly when the opinions at issue are entirely irrelevant with regard to the class you’re accusing. If Alice the Atheist believes in a particular inalienable human right, accuses theists of ignoring it, and goes on to espouse a moral philosophy which rejects that right in some circumstances, that makes her either a bad rights theorist or a bad moral philosopher, but not a bad atheist—and I remain unconvinced that there are many well-informed Alices out there.
Sure, there’s some some arguments-as-soldiers thinking going on among atheists. That’s never too hard to find in a closely fought ideological battle. But there’s a vast gulf between “atheists identified as such are unlikely to call each other out on their particular ideological inconsistencies” and “atheists, as an unqualified class, are hypocritical in this particular way that has nothing to do with atheism”.
I’d be interested in discussing the matter with anyone who did so. It doesn’t seem to me that either depression nor a lack of wonder follow from atheism, so I’d be curious about their inferential path.
I’d be interested in discussing the matter with anyone who did so. It doesn’t seem to me that either depression nor a lack of wonder follow from atheism, so I’d be curious about their inferential path.
Well a lot of people have that impression of atheism, not entirely without justification as the OP demonstrates.
Religion is also not necessarily boring, although a lot of people have that impression.
Ey said condemning, not disagreeing with. Their moral errors tend to be much more dangerous than their epistemic ones, though that could easily change.
That’s because the more rational amongst us have stopped putting up with people killing other people on purely religious grounds.
Is apostasy still a crime punishable by death? It used to be. So was homosexuality.
Thousands of innocent women were tortured and some even burned at the stake for so-called religious “crimes”.
People were still killing each other for reasons they’d consider “rational” back then too… but getting rid of any reason for irrational killing is, I think, a step in the right direction—one brought about by rational, enlightenment thinking.
When we can get rid of the rationalised, non-religious reasons too, then we’ll really be onto something good.
That’s why we argue against thing like communism and fascism in addition to thing like Christian and Islamic fundamentalism. The danger posed by religion are discussed here more often because the average LessWronger meets Christian fundamentalists more often than communists or fascists and because studying Bayesian epistemology makes us especially able to see the flaws in many common religious arguments.
The danger posed by religion are discussed here more often because the average LessWronger meets Christian fundamentalists more often than communists or fascists
So how many people were killed by Christian fundamentalists during the last century?
Not all Christian, but see http://whatstheharm.net/religiousfundamentalism.html : 2370 people are known to that website and there are surely many more who have been unable to access medical treatment, killed themselves, been killed, etc. because of Cristian fundamentalists.
However, while your question asked about people being killed by fundamentalists, that is not the biggest problem. After all, the million of Ukrainians who starved to death in the USSR were not killed by communists, but by communism.
Christian fundamentalism preaches a general distrust of science and scientists. This seems like it would reduce the number of people who become scientists. I was going to look up a statistic to see if exceptionally fundamentalist groups were exceptionally underrepresented in science, but I found something even more strongly supporting of this idea. From that article: “Among scientists, as in the general population, being raised in a home in which religion and religious practice were valued is the most important predictor of present religiosity among the subjects. . . . It appears that those from non-religious backgrounds disproportionately self-select into scientific professions. This may reflect the fact that there is tension between the religious tenets of some groups and the theories and methods of particular sciences and it contributes to the large number of non-religious scientists.”
How many people were killed by every invention not created, every disaster not predicted, and every disease not cured by all the children of fundamentalists who did not study science?
Upvoted for evidence, but it appears to me that the figures given at the top of the page are a running tally for all sources of harm the site tracks, not for religious fundamentalism in particular. The same numbers show up if you look up, say, GPS devices.
Would you count people who contracted HIV because their religion forbid condom use?
Can you think of any such scenario that doesn’t involve other actions forbidden by the same religion?
(The only thing I can think of would be spouses of patients who contracted HIV via transfusion and who would have used condoms if it hadn’t been for the religious prohibition. But how many of those have there been?)
However, there are people who’ve contracted HIV because condoms were forbidden, and personally didn’t do anything contravening the religion’s rules.
Catholics are not generally considered fundamentalists. ETA: now that I’ve read more of the thread, it seems that you’re using “fundamentalist” to mean people who don’t care about the effects of their beliefs. Is there a difference between that and being a consistent deontologist?
Can you think of any such scenario that doesn’t involve other actions forbidden by the same religion?
Yes:
1) a totally innocent married woman who has kept herself “pure” with only her husband… and contracts HIV because he is unfaithful
2) a woman who is raped by an HIV positive person (religious or otherwise)
3) a man who kept himself “pure” for marriage, only to discover that his now-wife hadn’t “kept herself for her husband” and contracted HIV during her own pre-marital sex
4) a person who converted to the religion later in life… and had unprotected sex before they converted
5) some poor young thing who contracts it during unprotected oral sex because they’re told that “it’s not really sex” and therefore not considered “impure” by their religion’s standards
6) a person who shares needles with somebody else… no prohibition against opiates in the bible mate
...I’m sure I could go on.
Argument from personal incredulity is generally not a strong stance to take.
It seems like you misunderstood my question. I asked about examples of HIV transmission scenarios that: (1) would be prevented by the use of condoms, and (2) don’t involve any actions (by any of the parties involved) that are also prohibited by all the major religions that prohibit condom use. I don’t see a single item on your list that meets both conditions.
I’m not sure how useful it is to search for sexual transmission scenarios within a reference class populated entirely by the chaste.
Well, originally I suggested one scenario that would seemingly fall under this. I’m genuinely curious if someone can think of any others. Your suggestion of the Shiite temporary marriages is a good one, though based on some casual googling I just did, it appears that condoms are permitted by this particular religion.
Actually I disagree. scenarios 1 through 5 are all about sexual acts that do not involve condom-use, but through which an otherwise “innocent” person could contract HIV.
Scenario 6 involves a person who contracts HIV and could then go on to spread said infection to his/her otherwise innocent partner due to the restrictions on condom use, but yes, does not directly describe the infection due to forbidden condom usage. I should have mentioned Mr 6′s wife instead—at which it too becomes relevant.
AFAICT, they are all relevant to the current question.
As to part 2:
The fact that some of the acts involve other people who are not following the “purity laws” of the religion makes no difference—in each scenario, the person getting infected has followed all the laws correctly. That’s the point.
Forbidding condom use does not necessarily protect the people that follow the rules.
Surely the ‘any actions (by any of the parties involved)’ isn’t relevant for casting blame/responsibility here? Christianity recognises, or rather emphasises, that people do constantly fall short of the values, and encourages repentence and continuing to follow the same rules.
I don’t know whether churches would advise a repentent person who had cheated or had sex before marriage to then be celibate within their marriage. But if they tell them to keep having sex without protection then that specific action can be blamed for the results. A system of behaviour that relies on being universalised to make any sense is flawed. One encouraged by a religion that is fully aware that people constantly fall short of its commandments could be regarded as culpable.
I don’t know whether churches would advise a repentent person who had cheated or had sex before marriage to then be celibate within their marriage. But if they tell them to keep having sex without protection then that specific action can be blamed for the results.
Only if they tell them to keep having sex without protection even if you have an STD. Or, perhaps, forbid testing for STDs.
It wasn’t my intention to make or imply any value judgments and blame assignments in this context. I just asked if someone can think of a scenario that meets these conditions, as a mere question of fact and logic.
As in somebody gets AIDS from their first partner (who gets it from whatever, depending on how far back we count as ‘parties involved’: perhaps a cheating grandparent or if that still counts then transfusion etc.)
Only if you let me count the people who contracted HIV because they disregarded religious prohibitions against homosexuality on other side of the equation.
(Though I don’t expect it to make much relative difference either way, it would probably also be a good idea to include lynchings of homosexuals, if only to preempt the obvious complaint.)
Here are some numbers. Note the incidence among children and women, for whom the predicate “disregarded religious prohibitions against homosexuality” evaluates to false in, I’d expect, nearly all cases.
Only vaguely relatedly: in my callower youth, I enjoyed asking biblically inspired homophobes what grounds they had for sanctioning lesbians, since the go-to verses (Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13… also Romans 1:27, though that’s less relevant for Jews) were so clearly targeting behavior among men. The sheer bewilderment in their responses was oddly enjoyable.
I count a lesbian couple with one child among my best friends.
I remain doubtful that there is a large incidence of female HIV positives who would not have been positive had they adhered to religious strictures against homosexuality. The HIV-homosexuality links is (according to this page) specific to the US, not to the rest of the world. There is a base rate fallacy at work.
Sure, but I’m guessing that Morendil was alluding to the lack of explicit prohibitions on female-female sexual acts in holy texts among the Abrahamic religions. This does not, of course, stop them from being considered a sin and the practitioners punished accordingly.
All three of them had a “sex == penetration with penis” mindset which made even acknowledging lesbians an “outside the box” problem.
The Christian bible, at least, does not have any explicit prohibition against female homosexual acts, just warnings against sexual immorality without female-female acts given as a specific example (Romans 1:26-27 would probably be the closest). I believe the same holds for Judaism and the Torah, with the Talmud and other rabbinical rulings against it (though nowhere near the same degree as male homosexuality—no death sentences). AIUI, The Quran is in a similar position to the Bible -- 4:15 can readily be read to condemn female homosexual acts, but the words are somewhat generic so it can also be read instead as condemning other female sexual immorality. Hadith is practically silent—it condemns “effeminate men” and “masculine women”, as well as those who wear clothing traditionally used for the other sex, but again no explicit prohibition. There is a large body of Islamic jurisprudence however, and although the mentions of female-female sex are still rare, it is clear that it is forbidden under Sharia as it has been interpreted most places.
(Though I don’t expect it to make much relative difference either way, it would probably also be a good idea to include lynchings of homosexuals, if only to preempt the obvious complaint.)
I pointed out to you before that this was people taking him daring to consider a lose-lose hypothetical (a trolley problem) and then using the fact he’d answered a lose-lose hypothetical against him. You didn’t answer further at the time.
Hm. Well, I’m certainly a person on this blog who has argued—recently, even—that human life isn’t a terminal value.
But it isn’t clear to me that I’m someone “perfectly willing to disregard human rights as long as they can find a “rational” reason for it.”
And if I were convinced that not terminally valuing human life reliably leads to disregarding human rights, that would encourage me to rethink my stance on the terminal value of human life. (Though I have to admit, I find such a connection implausible.)
Can you unpack the relationship a little more clearly for me?
Not to mention all the number of people on this blog arguing that human life doesn’t have terminal value.
There are many who don’t consider it the only terminal value. That is, there are other things that can be traded off against maximizing human life. (This is in accord with most religious treatments too. What price life on Earth if it prevent going to heaven?) Those few who don’t consider it a terminal value, often have very important instrumental values for the protection of human life. Is this distinction that important when it leads to largely the same actions and decisions?
No idea who this person is… but it doesn’t actually answer the question—I think we were after examples where rationality causes people to disregard human rights, not just an example of a person who may have rationalised something to themselves.
Also—don’t forget that rationalisation != rationality. There are a lot of posts on this site about that very misunderstanding.
Not to mention all the number of people on this blog arguing that human life doesn’t have terminal value.
Sorry I don’t understand what you mean by that sentence. Perhaps you could explain?
AFAICS the people on this blog argue quite strongly that life is very important and that we should try very hard to improve and prolong human life.
I haven’t seen anything that would fit that description, so far as I can remember.
Are you referring to all the people who think the value of a human life has more to do with the mind contained in it than the base pairs of its DNA? That’s not really the same as saying “human life doesn’t have terminal value”.
Communities built on a shared delusion are one thing, ones built on a delusion that entails harming others are another. I’d be a lot more okay with Christianity if it didn’t so often imply such noxious positions about human rights or whatever.
Ah, was my language too strong? I apologize—my point was simply this: that all too often in discussions of the value of Christian community etc., the political, emotional, and physical harms tied up in the same structures that maintain these communities are elided.
This is why I said “not all Christian communities are like the one I attended.” I cannot think of a single area where “my” church took a noxious position on human rights. It meant that they focused more on certain parts of the Bible (“love your neighbor as yourself” etc) than on other more negative parts.
Well, for one, it sounds like it explicitly condemns homosexuality? Maybe that’s not precisely what you’d call a “position on human rights”, but it still causes harm.
From what I saw, the general sentiment was “we feel like we should believe homosexuality is wrong because it says so in the Bible, but we’re a bit embarrassed about that, so we’re just not going to talk about the issue.” Some churches focus more on that element than others though. (One branch of the Canadian Anglican church, for example, has explicitly declared that they’re OK with homosexual ministers.)
I’m not sure whether that constitutes a position on human rights or not, and whether it’s a noxious position if so.
It is certainly an active refusal to adopt a position I can endorse on a human rights issue. Then again, pretty much everyone I know is in that position with respect to some issue or other.
For my own part, I have difficulty endorsing any community that is incapable of supporting families like my husband and I, and I would not feel welcomed or supported by them.
I’m unclear on why the parent has been voted down. Can someone who has downvoted it please explain?
Thinking about it, I suppose they might be rejecting the idea that my endorsal of a community should be contingent on that community offering support for families like mine.
Which, actually, I agree with; there are lots of communities I endorse that don’t actively support such families. Heck, LW is itself such a community, insofar as it has not getting involved in politics as a virtue, given that the existence of my family is a political issue in the U.S..
It was clear to me that by “community” I meant community of the sort Swimmer963 was talking about, but I can certainly understand if that wasn’t clear to others.
The idea seems reasonable to me; it would be pretty tough to get any of the support benefits of a community if the community explicitly won’t offer you support. :-\
I think that’s a somewhat different kind of support than what swimmer963 was talking about. For a given community to be considered supportive of you, they only have to actively support you. If they hypocritically denounce others who are in the same situation as you but who aren’t part of the particular community, that’s an indication of internal doublethink going on and also a stress on the relationship between you and the community, but I dunno if I’d call it “unsupportive”.
Sure. There’s a reason I talk about support for my family here, rather than support for me.
I mean, something like “Hey, Dave, we think you’re awesome, and it’s a real shame that you’re caught up in this relationship, and we want you to know that whatever we can do to help you get over that, we’re here for you, buddy!” is perhaps supportive of me, but it is certainly not supportive of my family.
(I actually had someone say essentially this to me once, upon discovering that I was queer. We’d met professionally, and she made me a job offer to join her on a startup, and had commented that she was a devout Christian and that was very important to her. I commented in turn that I was indifferent to her religion, but it might make her reconsider the offer upon knowing about my sexuality. Which indeed it did. I thanked her for her concern, let her know that I didn’t consider my family to be at all inappropriate, and offered my assistance should she ever choose to get over her religious affiliation, and we haven’t spoken since. But I digress.)
That is...fairly horrible. Good comeback though.
(shrug)
She believed that the way I lived my life wasn’t in my best interests and wasn’t moral/ethical, and she therefore offered her assistance should I wish to change the way I live my life. She did that without trying to impose herself into my life or take away my freedoms or damage me or etc.
I actually endorse all of that, as far as it goes. The world would be a far better place if more people responded to that situation that way.
And given the number of people in the world who do try to impose themselves into my life, take away my freedoms, damage me, etc. based on their beliefs about my interests and/or the morality of my life (or do the equivalent for people in my reference class), I feel it’s important to calibrate my reaction. If I get bent out of shape by people like her, then I don’t have a way of dealing with people who would, say, beat me up and hang me from a tree, or remove legal protections from my marriage, or force me into a behavior-modification program.
I consider her evaluation of my interests flawed, of course, but that’s just as true of the many people who offered to, or informed me that they were, praying for my recovery after my stroke. And I really appreciated them.
I...guess. Maybe I’m just spoiled by living in a country, and belonging to an age group, where the people who are okay with homosexuality say so loudly and the people who AREN’T okay with it don’t talk about that. The church I go to (the Anglican Church of Canada) officially accepts homosexuals into its clergy, and that’s kind of what I’m used to. So to me, a response like hers does seem pretty awful, but not to you because you’re used to worse...
I still think what you said was a good comeback. Not helpful, maybe, but snappy and funny, and it might have made her think...
Don’t get me wrong: in my actual life I don’t have to deal with much of that stuff.
I go to friends’ religious ceremonies with my husband all the time, for example, and nobody blinks… or if they do, they keep it to themselves. More generally, people who don’t consider me a social and moral peer are cordially invited to get the hell off my lawn, and I have enough social power to make that stick, enforced by an awesome community in which my basic humanity is simply never in question. (Well, at least not because of my sexuality. I do get a certain amount of “What planet are you from, Dave?” but that’s different.)
I suspect that if I didn’t have those advantages, I would rapidly lose my sense of perspective.
All of that said, I think it’s the correct perspective, and would remain so even if I lost it. It makes no sense to judge people against my social context rather than their own.
Oh, yeah, that is pretty nasty. I was imagining something more along the lines of “Oh, we support you and you family, you’re not like those other gay families”.
Ah, I see.
Yeah, I get that sort of thing too, by virtue of not being stereotypically Other in any particularly visible way.
When i was growing up, I got a lot of variants on “Funny, you don’t look Jewish”; when I came out I got a lot of “But you don’t really act gay.” (To which my usual response was “I do, actually. This is how a lot of gay people act. It’s part of our devious plot to trick you into treating us like people.”)
I mostly treat that kind of statement as a good sign, though… a symptom of cracks in the infrastructure.
That is, someone starts out believing that all Xes are Y, and that W is not Y, and then discovers W is an X. If they can avoid concluding that W actually is Y after all (which is the easiest fix), the contradictions in their worldview will start to build up. My usual experience is that after weeks or months or years of continued acquaintance, those people ultimately reject the “All Xes are Y” bit.
I’ve gone through the analogous process myself when breaking down some of my own prejudices, and I appreciate the patience of the folks who helped me through it. It seems only just to pay that forward.
Of course it constitutes a position on human rights. Human rights are not passive things. They must be actively defended or they simply cease to exist. Tyrannies often begin not with the stripping of rights but simply with a lack of enforcement (Haebius Corpus? Don’t worry, you still have that right—it says so right here on this paper.) until the memory of it fades away.
There are no rights but those we take. When someone expresses doubts that a particular group of humans should be allowed certain rights they are attacking the concept of universal human rights in its entirety. And anyone who is embarrassed into silence rather than at least saying “no, that’s wrong” is implicit in the murder of human rights.
Some groups of humans are excluded from rights that other humans have, in every legal system. Examples would include minors, convicted criminals, and adults who have been found mentally incompetent. Going further, you have the right to own and dispose of your own property, and I do not share this right to your property. I don’t subscribe to any conception of “universal human rights” that would suggest otherwise.
Those are, in my opinion, all examples of groups that don’t have the power to enforce their rights. They lack the numbers to protect their rights, and lack the ability to draw powerful allies to their cause. Another example of “no rights but those we take.”
Which is exactly why I wish to keep social pressure high for all humans to defend what I consider the most basic rights. Reminding people that rights must be actively defended, and condemning those who shrink away from doing so, is one tactic. I do this because I’m rather attached to the rights I have now, and would like to hold on to them. You do not?
I’m surprised at your reaction. Let me illustrate my examples: for “minors,” think “five year olds.” For “incompetents” think “people in comas.” For criminals...well, just think about convicted criminals. You can’t seriously be arguing that criminals should never be punished. There is no society on Earth that does not restrict the rights of minors, convicted criminals, and adults who have been found mentally incompetent.
I’m not arguing that (see replies to Davids). But I also note that I am not a minor, convicted criminal, or mentally incompetent and therefore expect I may be biased. I certainly don’t trust everything I think, and I note that as long as I’m running on hostile hardware it can be in my best interest to follow certain rules proven to protect me against myself.
Of course you start with biases. We all do. But we seek to overcome these biases in order to become less wrong. So, I ask you, in light of the responses you have received, and as one aspiring rationalist to another: is it not true that some groups of humans must be excluded from rights that other humans have?
No. There may be good reasons for certain individuals to have their rights violated. Entire groups cannot be excluded from the rest of humanity.
I don’t think it’s sufficient to simply note “I may have these biases, and I should seek to overcome them”. This may make one seem less biased without actually changing anything. The rest of the tribe applauds your self-awareness and wisdom, and then continues to preferentially hire white people. Actually overcoming a bias means doing the work of imposing rules we find inconvenient. Rules like “I will not take leadership for the good of the tribe, even when it’s for the good of the tribe” or “I will not exclude groups of humans from certain rights, even when they should be excluded from those rights.”
I buy that human rights might well be an example of how ends don’t justify the means for humans. But what do you mean by ‘groups’. Criminals could be considered to be (maybe even defined as?) ‘individuals whose rights we’re justified in violating’.
It’s trivially true that you could identifiy a set of ‘individuals whose rights we should violate’. They’d also have common qualities such as criminality, insanity etc. So what defines a ‘group’ for your purposes? Is the point simply that you can’t take rights from a whole group based on a undeserving minority?
Yes, I specifically avoid identifying groups who’s rights we can take away because once we do that it becomes very tempting, and very easy, to define anyone you dislike as belonging to such a group. One can quickly find themselves in Ray Comfort territory.
But failing to identify such groups, while permitting ourselves to take freedoms away from individuals (as you do here), isn’t clearly an improvement.
If I trust myself to evaluate individuals justly before depriving them of freedoms, it’s not clear to me why I don’t trust myself to evaluate them justly before assigning them to groups.
Conversely, if I don’t trust myself to deal justly with individuals I dislike, it’s not clear to me why I trust myself to deprive them of freedoms.
It seems to me that this problem is hard enough to require better tools than the ones you seem to be attempting to solve it with.
I think that it’s much harder to prove an individual’s guilt of a crime in a court of law than it is to assign someone to a group.
I really hope I don’t live in society where you can deprive someone of freedoms on your own for any reason. :) (or any one person, for the record—I don’t have anything against you personally). I advocate “individual guilt” over “group affiliations” as criteria specifically because it requires much stronger standards of evidence.
As the most egregious example of this—it would be very hard to prove Anwar al-Awlaki has done anything illegal. And yet he’s been condemned to death simply by having the president place him in the group “terrorist”.
So, I guess my hope has been shattered, actually. :( I meant that “I really hope” sentence more as an aspiration statement, really.
I agree with you that some people in the US are being deprived of freedoms without legal recourse because powerful people have declared them to have certain group affiliations, like “terrorist,” and that in many cases this is a mistake.
I also suspect that some people in the US are being mistakenly deprived of their freedoms in courts of law, despite nominal legal recourse, without any particular group affiliation being asserted, because powerful people desire it.
I’d say (90+% confidence) there’s at least an order of magnitude more people in the second group than the first.
At this point I think the discussion gets murky, because legal recourse is often intentionally biased and group affiliation is often implicit. The drug war comes to mind. I’d assert that there’s a lot of overlap and we could reduce the second group a great deal by strengthening popular support of universal rights.
I certainly agree that the group/individual distinction gets murky when you get into the specifics of how societies actually make the choice to grant and withhold freedoms… that’s why I was questioning the distinction in the first place.
I agree that if there were strong and pervasive support for a common understanding of what freedoms people are entitled to by default (which is more or less what I understand by “universal rights”), there would be fewer cases of people being deprived of those freedoms, all else being equal.
It’s not clear to me that all else can be equal, though.
It’s also not clear to me that encouraging everyone to support universal rights, without at the same time encouraging us to support a specific model of universal rights, is anywhere near as effective.
Eek… Who writes this stuff? This is definitely the negative side of Christianity, although hopefully not an influential sect...
That’s a disturbing page in several ways, but I don’t see anything on it which implies actively violating anyone’s rights, unless you interpret security from proselytism as a fundamental right.
I used it as an example because a favorite tactic of Ray Comfort is to ask someone “Have you ever told a lie?”. Which is tantamount to asking “Are you a human?”. After receiving an affirmative answer he asks “Well, doesn’t that make you a liar? And god says no liar can enter heaven.”
It’s tricky for me to wrap my head around the logic of faith and repentance descended from Calvinism, but there’s some pretty clever Dark Arts in there. “Your salvation-state has been predetermined by God, and there’s nothing you can do about it—but God only assigns salvation to people he expects to join his church and believe really hard. Do you think you’re smarter than God?”
I wonder if Calvinists would be unusually disposed toward one-boxing on Newcomb’s Problem?
Maybe “violating” is the wrong word to use in this context. I would rather say that everyone has certain rights—such as freedom from imprisonment—conditioned on (for example) not violating other people’s rights—as in killing or assaulting them.
P.S. Also, societies deprive minors and the incompetent from some rights for their own protection. I don’t think we want to live in a world in which a slick salesperson could commit a ten year old or an advanced Alzheimer’s patient to an expensive fifty year contract.
And we also deprive everyday people of certain rights for their own protection: the right of free contract is limited. For instance, I can’t sign a contract with a clause saying that if I break it the other party has the right to my unpaid labour in perputuity. Similarly, I can’t sell my organs, at least in this country.
You’re saying some individuals should have their rights violated? What do you think a “right” is?
I find talk of rights is often very confused, with no one entirely sure what even they themselves mean by the term, much less the others in the conversation. It may be a good time to taboo the word.
The best explanation I’ve found for “right” that seems to apply in the real world is “an extremely strong aversion to punishing acts of X with violence”, which is based off the Desirist model. What that means in practice is that to assert that people have a right to freedom of movement is to say that everyone should have a very strong aversion to punishing free movement with violence. Sometimes a person’s right to free movement will be violated because “a very strong aversion” is not infinite for good reason. When there are enough counter-weighing reasons (the person is assaulting someone, or the person has committed a crime and taking away this freedom will prevent others from committing a similar crime in the future) then that person’s right is violated. But the reasons must be strong reasons, and provably demonstrated, in order to out-weigh a very strong aversion.
And it remains the case that the right still exists. Everyone should still have a strong aversion to restricting the movements of others, even as we acknowledge that in this one case we have enough countervailing reasons to violate that right for this person.
I don’t think this definition conforms with what most people mean by “rights.” Assume an entirely nonviolent society. You try to vote. I throw your ballot away—nonviolently. What right do you have? I sell you a boat or a car or a house. You pay me money. I take the money and laugh in your face. Nonviolently. What recourse do you have?
Consider the example of criminal law. X has murdered someone. If X (predictably) resists imprisonment, I would say, use violence to subdue X. Would you not? X is in the group of humans who are “convicted criminals.” How does this conform with your original assertion that “When someone expresses doubts that a particular group of humans should be allowed certain rights they are attacking the concept of universal human rights in its entirety?”
This is not how the United Nations, for example, uses the term “universal human rights.”
I don’t see how any of those apply. In the first two, there are no rights on the part of the transgressor. No society recognizes a person’s right to throw away official ballots or to cheat others of their money, so there is no prohibition on using violence to prevent that. Rights never come into the picture at all, so I think we’ve had some miscommunication along the way.
In the third case, we use violence to subdue X not because he belongs to a group, but because we have determined (hopefully in a fair trial) that he has murdered someone. We now have strong enough justification to outweigh our aversion to taking away his freedom. The statement “We should always have an aversion to taking away freedom, but in this case we have important reasons to do so, and here they are” is not anywhere in the same category as “I doubt group Y should have a right to freedom”
On the one hand, a small part of me would like to discuss this further. On the other, I think this is becoming less relevant to the original post. Also—and this is critical for me personally—I’ve got some stuff to do in the real world now. I note that we cannot agree to disagree. But I gotta go. Best wishes (and I mean that totally sincerely, without sarcasm).
I think some of the confusion here might come from the fact that freedom from violence is often cast as a right—in which case we either have to make some awkward exceptions, or to draw an initiation/reaction distinction. This doesn’t seem like an insurmountable hurdle, though; societies frequently do both.
Question: are there other reasons, in your opinion, why the rights of these groups might be restricted? Or is it purely a matter of power?
To put this another way, and to pick a specific example for clarity: suppose on Tuesday, Sam and Pat are both free to walk around the city as they choose. Then on Wednesday, Sam and Pat are put in a cage (or whatever), preventing them from exercising this freedom. They attempt to prevent this, and attempt to enlist powerful allies to prevent it, and they fail.
From your perspective, is it correct to claim that their rights are being curtailed and I deserve condemnation if I fail to defend those rights… for example, if I have the key to that cage and don’t use it to free them?
Or are there additional factors that need to be established to justify that claim?
There are many reasons why certain actions should be taken, such as putting someone in a cage. It may prevent others from doing whatever it was that prompted us to put that person in a cage. However it is still true that in general we are all better off if everyone possesses a love of freedom for all, even if in this individual case the consequences of locking someone up outweigh other considerations. Thus we should respect that their right to freedom exists even as we are violating it, and acknowledge that the world would be a better place if this wasn’t necessary.
That’s all in ideal-world-land though. In practice, it’s just a matter of power. Right now there are war criminals giving book tours and talk-show circuits in the US who are free because they harnessed a great deal of power over their lives. And there are national heroes who are locked away in isolation because they made those people uncomfortable.
OK, thanks.
For the record, I think there are people in the real world whose freedoms are being restricted, not only because they lack the power to prevent it, but because a variety of other conditions apply that I endorse restricting people’s freedoms for… much like what you say of ideal-world land.
To say that more succinctly, I think there are people in the real world whose freedoms are being justly restricted. I gather we disagree about this, which is fine… I’m content to leave it there.
I certainly agree with you, though, that power is a critical factor, and that there are people in the real world who are being made to suffer unjustly, and that there are people in the real world who are unjustly benefiting.
I’m trying to understand your last few posts. Do you believe that human rights SHOULD BE universal, but in fact ARE only for those who take them? Or does ‘universal’ here mean something like ‘with the inherent ability to claim and enforce them’? Because I’m not sure why it would be fundamental that criminals would be unable to enforce their rights?
Because of this, I’m not sure if you think we should defend rights for criminals, minors and/or the mentally incompetent as well as for homosexuals.
As a side point, you say that you encourage others to defend rights because you’re attached to your own rights. Is this a case of valuing them in others because you do in yourself, or a matter of your own rights being safeguarded by a society that defends rights in general?
As I said to TheOtherDavid, there are sometimes reasons to take actions that violate others rights. There are more such reasons for violating the rights of minors/criminals/mentally incompetant than for homosexuals and so I’d put more energy into preventing the violation of rights against homosexuals. In fact I think there’s so few reasons for violating the rights of homosexuals that I view it as an affront to civilization and to myself as a civilized human to do so.
Both.
OK: so rights are universal over all people, but they’re not inalienable, in that you sometimes have good reason for violating them. I’m not sure whether that always reflects our approach, especially for minors: is it that we think they have rights such as voting, contract etc. but we violate this right due to some risk or danger? Or do we simply not hold that they have those rights?
On the sidepoint: fair enough. Presumably it’s mostly valuing them in others, as if you want to defend your own rights than doing so by encouraging a general culture of defence of rights is very indirect and the net effect to you personally would presumably be much smaller than simpler accruing greater wealth/power/knowledge.
Hm… I’ve never fully thought out the situation with minors. This probably would have occurred to me earlier if I had children of my own.
I want to say that I’m not sure that very young children can be considered fully human in the same way as adults, but this raises several red flags, not the least of which is the problem of determining when a person counts as “human” or not. I think rather than dig myself into a hole that I’m not sure I even support, I’d rather default back to my previous position -
Minors have rights at the same point that anyone else has rights: once they have the power/allies to assert and defend those rights.
The position in general does deserve some more pondering.
I suppose that depends on whether the ‘basic rights’ include things like voting and contract, that you might consider distinctively rights of citizens.
To be honest, I never know how to take human rights language. Some people treat it as morally factual that people have certain rights, whether these are upheld and exercised or not. For me, ‘rights’ has to refer to a sort of social contract. We say that people have the ‘right to life’ because it makes certain decisions more difficult to take than if we just said you had to do what was best for your citizens in general.
It’s very difficult to condemn a country for ‘not pursuing policies that evidence suggests maximises the freedom and quality of life of its citizens’. Doing so involves all sorts of sub-arguments and complexities. Whereas saying ‘they torture people’ at least gives you a clear point of objection, even if the fact and justification are both subject to argument afterwards.
Kudos on the ‘I’ve never fully thought the situation through’, btw. Remarkably rare words on the net.
What about people who simply are silent, but not necessarily embarrassed?
I mean, there are lots of people in the world whose rights are being deprived, and I am silent about most of them most of the time. So is pretty much everyone I know. I don’t know all of our emotional motivations, but our silence is demonstrable.
If that means we’re all implicit in the murder of human rights and the spread of tyranny, I can accept that, but it’s not clear that there’s any grounds for singling out Swimmer’s community for special treatment (which I understood to be the original context) on that basis.
I don’t spend every minute decrying all the injustices of humanity, but if someone I know says in my presence that muslims are violent I at least let them know of my disapproval. Maybe that’s a contributing factor to Swimmer’s non-believing friends seeming grumpy and judgmental.
Actually I like it when people frankly correct other people’s incorrect opinions. The negativity I’m talking about is more on the line of ‘I hate this job, I’m so bored, my family is so stupid, I’m so sick of school’ and also comments like ‘That kid has the biggest head ever, I bet it makes her sink to the bottom of the pool’ or ‘seriously, why do fat people keep coming here and buying chips? They should just die.’ This is the kind of negativity I see a LOT less of in Christian circles. Atheists may also be more likely to correct people’s opinions, being more contrarian, but it’s not something I’ve noticed personally.
I find it interesting that atheists begin by condemning religious people over human rights. However, when they start working out their own theory of ethics, they’re perfectly willing to disregard human rights as long as they can find a “rational” reason for it.
I smell a false dichotomy. Condemning religion (or some particular set of religions) on human-rights grounds and then advocating a theory of ethics which disregards or doesn’t contain a notion of human rights is of course inconsistent, but it’d take a remarkable lack of introspection to do that.
Inconsistency’s a common symptom of naive ethics, of course, but for the sake of clarity let’s restrict ourselves to talking about people who’ve put actual thought into their ethical opinions. In that case, it seems more likely that the horns of the alleged contradiction don’t coexist but rather belong to non-overlapping sets of beliefs, which simply happen to share the trait of nontheism. Perfectly reasonable: religious disbelief doesn’t require you to subscribe to notions of human rights, much less a single consistent set of human rights, and there are plenty of nontheist schools of thought that don’t. Nor does it require you to endorse the ethical opinions of all other atheists.
Atheism is not a unified ideology. Treating it as one leads to some extremely wrong conclusions.
Read the sequences on cognitive biases. People, including yourself, are a lot less introspective then you seem to think.
The problem is people making atheism part of their identity, and therefore being reluctant to criticize fellow atheists. And then going no true Scotsman on the ones that are obviously wrong, so you don’t have to learn from their mistakes.
A certain lack of introspection in the general population doesn’t make blanket accusations of hypocrisy any more reasonable, particularly when the opinions at issue are entirely irrelevant with regard to the class you’re accusing. If Alice the Atheist believes in a particular inalienable human right, accuses theists of ignoring it, and goes on to espouse a moral philosophy which rejects that right in some circumstances, that makes her either a bad rights theorist or a bad moral philosopher, but not a bad atheist—and I remain unconvinced that there are many well-informed Alices out there.
Sure, there’s some some arguments-as-soldiers thinking going on among atheists. That’s never too hard to find in a closely fought ideological battle. But there’s a vast gulf between “atheists identified as such are unlikely to call each other out on their particular ideological inconsistencies” and “atheists, as an unqualified class, are hypocritical in this particular way that has nothing to do with atheism”.
In my experience, atheists usually ‘begin’ by condemning the religious on epistemic grounds.
I prefer condeming them on fun theory grounds. Even if they’re right, it would still be boring.
Well a theist could just as easily condemn atheism on fun theoretic grounds for being to depressing, or for removing the wonder from the world.
which i regard as valid.
I’d be interested in discussing the matter with anyone who did so. It doesn’t seem to me that either depression nor a lack of wonder follow from atheism, so I’d be curious about their inferential path.
Well a lot of people have that impression of atheism, not entirely without justification as the OP demonstrates.
Religion is also not necessarily boring, although a lot of people have that impression.
Ey said condemning, not disagreeing with. Their moral errors tend to be much more dangerous than their epistemic ones, though that could easily change.
Well during the last century atheist and secular philosophies, i.e., communism and fascism, have done a lot more damage then religions.
That’s because the more rational amongst us have stopped putting up with people killing other people on purely religious grounds.
Is apostasy still a crime punishable by death? It used to be. So was homosexuality. Thousands of innocent women were tortured and some even burned at the stake for so-called religious “crimes”.
People were still killing each other for reasons they’d consider “rational” back then too… but getting rid of any reason for irrational killing is, I think, a step in the right direction—one brought about by rational, enlightenment thinking.
When we can get rid of the rationalised, non-religious reasons too, then we’ll really be onto something good.
That’s why we argue against thing like communism and fascism in addition to thing like Christian and Islamic fundamentalism. The danger posed by religion are discussed here more often because the average LessWronger meets Christian fundamentalists more often than communists or fascists and because studying Bayesian epistemology makes us especially able to see the flaws in many common religious arguments.
So how many people were killed by Christian fundamentalists during the last century?
Not all Christian, but see http://whatstheharm.net/religiousfundamentalism.html : 2370 people are known to that website and there are surely many more who have been unable to access medical treatment, killed themselves, been killed, etc. because of Cristian fundamentalists.
However, while your question asked about people being killed by fundamentalists, that is not the biggest problem. After all, the million of Ukrainians who starved to death in the USSR were not killed by communists, but by communism.
Christian fundamentalism preaches a general distrust of science and scientists. This seems like it would reduce the number of people who become scientists. I was going to look up a statistic to see if exceptionally fundamentalist groups were exceptionally underrepresented in science, but I found something even more strongly supporting of this idea. From that article: “Among scientists, as in the general population, being raised in a home in which religion and religious practice were valued is the most important predictor of present religiosity among the subjects. . . . It appears that those from non-religious backgrounds disproportionately self-select into scientific professions. This may reflect the fact that there is tension between the religious tenets of some groups and the theories and methods of particular sciences and it contributes to the large number of non-religious scientists.”
How many people were killed by every invention not created, every disaster not predicted, and every disease not cured by all the children of fundamentalists who did not study science?
Upvoted for evidence, but it appears to me that the figures given at the top of the page are a running tally for all sources of harm the site tracks, not for religious fundamentalism in particular. The same numbers show up if you look up, say, GPS devices.
Oh yeah. Thanks for pointing that out.
Would you count people who contracted HIV because their religion forbid condom use?
CronoDAS:
Can you think of any such scenario that doesn’t involve other actions forbidden by the same religion?
(The only thing I can think of would be spouses of patients who contracted HIV via transfusion and who would have used condoms if it hadn’t been for the religious prohibition. But how many of those have there been?)
However, there are people who’ve contracted HIV because condoms were forbidden, and personally didn’t do anything contravening the religion’s rules.
Catholics are not generally considered fundamentalists. ETA: now that I’ve read more of the thread, it seems that you’re using “fundamentalist” to mean people who don’t care about the effects of their beliefs. Is there a difference between that and being a consistent deontologist?
NancyLebovitz:
What concrete scenarios do you have in mind?
Spouse of someone with HIV. Raped by someone with HIV. Born to someone with HIV.
Yes:
1) a totally innocent married woman who has kept herself “pure” with only her husband… and contracts HIV because he is unfaithful
2) a woman who is raped by an HIV positive person (religious or otherwise)
3) a man who kept himself “pure” for marriage, only to discover that his now-wife hadn’t “kept herself for her husband” and contracted HIV during her own pre-marital sex
4) a person who converted to the religion later in life… and had unprotected sex before they converted
5) some poor young thing who contracts it during unprotected oral sex because they’re told that “it’s not really sex” and therefore not considered “impure” by their religion’s standards
6) a person who shares needles with somebody else… no prohibition against opiates in the bible mate
...I’m sure I could go on.
Argument from personal incredulity is generally not a strong stance to take.
It seems like you misunderstood my question. I asked about examples of HIV transmission scenarios that: (1) would be prevented by the use of condoms, and (2) don’t involve any actions (by any of the parties involved) that are also prohibited by all the major religions that prohibit condom use. I don’t see a single item on your list that meets both conditions.
I’m not sure how useful it is to search for sexual transmission scenarios within a reference class populated entirely by the chaste.
(Actually, the Shi’a practice of nikah mut‘ah seems to qualify, but that’s rather obscure by the standards of this discussion.)
Well, originally I suggested one scenario that would seemingly fall under this. I’m genuinely curious if someone can think of any others. Your suggestion of the Shiite temporary marriages is a good one, though based on some casual googling I just did, it appears that condoms are permitted by this particular religion.
Actually I disagree. scenarios 1 through 5 are all about sexual acts that do not involve condom-use, but through which an otherwise “innocent” person could contract HIV.
Scenario 6 involves a person who contracts HIV and could then go on to spread said infection to his/her otherwise innocent partner due to the restrictions on condom use, but yes, does not directly describe the infection due to forbidden condom usage. I should have mentioned Mr 6′s wife instead—at which it too becomes relevant.
AFAICT, they are all relevant to the current question.
As to part 2: The fact that some of the acts involve other people who are not following the “purity laws” of the religion makes no difference—in each scenario, the person getting infected has followed all the laws correctly. That’s the point.
Forbidding condom use does not necessarily protect the people that follow the rules.
Surely the ‘any actions (by any of the parties involved)’ isn’t relevant for casting blame/responsibility here? Christianity recognises, or rather emphasises, that people do constantly fall short of the values, and encourages repentence and continuing to follow the same rules.
I don’t know whether churches would advise a repentent person who had cheated or had sex before marriage to then be celibate within their marriage. But if they tell them to keep having sex without protection then that specific action can be blamed for the results. A system of behaviour that relies on being universalised to make any sense is flawed. One encouraged by a religion that is fully aware that people constantly fall short of its commandments could be regarded as culpable.
Only if they tell them to keep having sex without protection even if you have an STD. Or, perhaps, forbid testing for STDs.
It wasn’t my intention to make or imply any value judgments and blame assignments in this context. I just asked if someone can think of a scenario that meets these conditions, as a mere question of fact and logic.
Oh, fair enough: I was reading back to the ‘how many people were killed by Christian fundamentalists’ question… Sorry!
On your question, am I missing something obvious or would widows/widowers be a real and all-too-likely possibility?
What exact scenario with widows/widowers do you have in mind?
As in somebody gets AIDS from their first partner (who gets it from whatever, depending on how far back we count as ‘parties involved’: perhaps a cheating grandparent or if that still counts then transfusion etc.)
Yes, you’re right, that would be another possibility.
Only if you let me count the people who contracted HIV because they disregarded religious prohibitions against homosexuality on other side of the equation.
I would like to see those numbers.
(Though I don’t expect it to make much relative difference either way, it would probably also be a good idea to include lynchings of homosexuals, if only to preempt the obvious complaint.)
Here are some numbers. Note the incidence among children and women, for whom the predicate “disregarded religious prohibitions against homosexuality” evaluates to false in, I’d expect, nearly all cases.
Upvoted for data.
(You know there are female homosexuals, right?)
Only vaguely relatedly: in my callower youth, I enjoyed asking biblically inspired homophobes what grounds they had for sanctioning lesbians, since the go-to verses (Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13… also Romans 1:27, though that’s less relevant for Jews) were so clearly targeting behavior among men. The sheer bewilderment in their responses was oddly enjoyable.
I count a lesbian couple with one child among my best friends.
I remain doubtful that there is a large incidence of female HIV positives who would not have been positive had they adhered to religious strictures against homosexuality. The HIV-homosexuality links is (according to this page) specific to the US, not to the rest of the world. There is a base rate fallacy at work.
Sure, but I’m guessing that Morendil was alluding to the lack of explicit prohibitions on female-female sexual acts in holy texts among the Abrahamic religions. This does not, of course, stop them from being considered a sin and the practitioners punished accordingly.
All three of them had a “sex == penetration with penis” mindset which made even acknowledging lesbians an “outside the box” problem.
The Christian bible, at least, does not have any explicit prohibition against female homosexual acts, just warnings against sexual immorality without female-female acts given as a specific example (Romans 1:26-27 would probably be the closest). I believe the same holds for Judaism and the Torah, with the Talmud and other rabbinical rulings against it (though nowhere near the same degree as male homosexuality—no death sentences). AIUI, The Quran is in a similar position to the Bible -- 4:15 can readily be read to condemn female homosexual acts, but the words are somewhat generic so it can also be read instead as condemning other female sexual immorality. Hadith is practically silent—it condemns “effeminate men” and “masculine women”, as well as those who wear clothing traditionally used for the other sex, but again no explicit prohibition. There is a large body of Islamic jurisprudence however, and although the mentions of female-female sex are still rare, it is clear that it is forbidden under Sharia as it has been interpreted most places.
Sure, I doubt those are above the double digits.
A straight reading of the question clearly indicates no.
Examples?
Well Peter Singer is probably the most prominent recent example.
Not to mention all the number of people on this blog arguing that human life doesn’t have terminal value.
I pointed out to you before that this was people taking him daring to consider a lose-lose hypothetical (a trolley problem) and then using the fact he’d answered a lose-lose hypothetical against him. You didn’t answer further at the time.
Hm. Well, I’m certainly a person on this blog who has argued—recently, even—that human life isn’t a terminal value.
But it isn’t clear to me that I’m someone “perfectly willing to disregard human rights as long as they can find a “rational” reason for it.”
And if I were convinced that not terminally valuing human life reliably leads to disregarding human rights, that would encourage me to rethink my stance on the terminal value of human life. (Though I have to admit, I find such a connection implausible.)
Can you unpack the relationship a little more clearly for me?
There are many who don’t consider it the only terminal value. That is, there are other things that can be traded off against maximizing human life. (This is in accord with most religious treatments too. What price life on Earth if it prevent going to heaven?) Those few who don’t consider it a terminal value, often have very important instrumental values for the protection of human life. Is this distinction that important when it leads to largely the same actions and decisions?
The history on the 20th century isn’t encouraging on that being true.
No idea who this person is… but it doesn’t actually answer the question—I think we were after examples where rationality causes people to disregard human rights, not just an example of a person who may have rationalised something to themselves.
Also—don’t forget that rationalisation != rationality. There are a lot of posts on this site about that very misunderstanding.
Sorry I don’t understand what you mean by that sentence. Perhaps you could explain?
AFAICS the people on this blog argue quite strongly that life is very important and that we should try very hard to improve and prolong human life.
Unfortunately, they’re very hard to tell them apart when you’re doing them.
Amen to that :)
I haven’t seen anything that would fit that description, so far as I can remember.
Are you referring to all the people who think the value of a human life has more to do with the mind contained in it than the base pairs of its DNA? That’s not really the same as saying “human life doesn’t have terminal value”.
I mean things like this and especially this.