The other day I was sitting and talking with a political philosopher, discussing practical interpretations of the work of various thinkers, and whether they’d been taken up more by the forces of progress or reaction.
You have presented a multitude of problems and issues that a total response would take great length. To be concise I will focus on the hungry person who steals food for survival. Everyone should have the "right" to survive, if there is right at all granted to humans, it should be that. The question therefore presented ,is not whether the person has a right to survive, but is it a crime for one to survive? You suggest that some societies may determine it not to be. So the question now becomes why does the person need to steal to survive and does a governing entity have a responsibility to provide for the members of its community. If it has such a responsibility, then how does the form of that responsibility play out? Does it playout through collectively humanitarian support, either through charitable or through taxation, always keeping the person on the verge of continuous need to survive, thus always on the doorstep of committing a crime to survive, or does it use its responsibility to create an environment where there will never be the need for stealing to survive which it cannot do without changing the entire perspective of criminality. To do that would demand an examination of the efficacy of ownership (property as well as people who are forced to create the wealth of others. From this perspective, and by limiting humanity to only one right, the right to survive, then the responsibility the government presumes is to insure no one not survive and the focus of crime not centered on anything that is necessitated by the need to survive, but to focus on the criminality of whatever hinders survival. If crime is not centered on actions taken to survive (which could include psychological necessities as well as physical necessities)then crime becomes not the action caused by the person being deprived but by the action of the person, or agencies doing the crime. I have explored this in great detail in my book "There Never Was...Democracy Freedom Justice" . It is available on amazon as an ebook, but so as not to deprive anyone, if you reply in my coming substack The UnUtopian Optimist, I will send a free pdf copy.
"It is surely absurd for a supposedly democratic state to have its decision-making apparatus neither reviewed nor understood by the public."
Not unless you insist that direct democracy and representative democracy are to be subject to the same reasoning because their names share a substring. The whole idea of representative democracy is that you select people you trust on the relevant issues, they do _things you don't trust yourself to do or know how they're done_, and you judge them by results. The relative ignorance is baked into the system and is the reason for the system. It's not ideal, but it is not some implicit contradiction not noticed by anyone, it's the foundation of the modern democracy systems. (Which arguably would, by Aristotle's classification, be elective oligarchies - food for thought.) Now, I think "it is surely absurd" for a representative democracy state to feel obligated to implement direct democracy.
(I also think direct democracy would be an almost immediate failure.)
You seem to suggest that rights are created through the exercise of power. Yet if that were so, they would lack any moral legitimacy. Rather, rights would derive from morality. They result from applying non-reasonably rejectable social contract principles to social facts and circumstances.
And there is no right to do wrong like commit theft when rights are made through reasonable agreement, since who would agree to be a victim to someone capable of caring for themselves? People wouldn’t have the general right to steal necessities since the social contract would impose a duty of general responsibility for self onto each party, given that the parties are free health adults.
Yet there would be duties to rescue in certain situations of life or death. And the state has excused crimes like trespass and theft made out of necessity in narrow circumstances, so long as their is compensation after the fact.
But rights would overwhelming create duties of omission rather than commission. There are many more ways you shouldn’t treat someone than should treat someone. And given the general responsibility for self that the social contract would impose, rights would generally be negative (given a social minimum for those unable to care for themselves).
And the state would have a positive duty to convict criminals since they hold the burden of proof when taking away someone’s liberty. People wouldn’t agree to unfettered state discretion. This is very different from our private duties to each other.
1. As I say in the piece, we're talking about human rights, a specific, actually existing institution of rights established by covenants between governments, not "rights" in the abstract. Those are most certainly established by power.
2. Why does the question of whether or not there is a right to steal come into it? We're talking about whether hunger can be abolished negatively or positively by the government.
1. "human" rights are explicitly non-governmental rights that are inherent to humans. They are the products of natural/abstract law rather than positive law. Otherwise, it would literally be impossible for the government to violate human rights if they are contingent on government grant.
2. What you we're talking about was 1) "The right not to be prevented from appropriating (stealing) the means of subsistence" so it comes in from your article.
To do human rights, you have to have a theory of moral realism. I argue that a constructivist metaethics can get us to rights, as I argue in the linked post. So the rights I list above (to rescue, a social minimum, but still largely related to acts of comission) would likely be accepted (given their existence without much complaint), whereas a general right to steal necessities wouldn't (given its non-existence).
You have presented a multitude of problems and issues that a total response would take great length. To be concise I will focus on the hungry person who steals food for survival. Everyone should have the "right" to survive, if there is right at all granted to humans, it should be that. The question therefore presented ,is not whether the person has a right to survive, but is it a crime for one to survive? You suggest that some societies may determine it not to be. So the question now becomes why does the person need to steal to survive and does a governing entity have a responsibility to provide for the members of its community. If it has such a responsibility, then how does the form of that responsibility play out? Does it playout through collectively humanitarian support, either through charitable or through taxation, always keeping the person on the verge of continuous need to survive, thus always on the doorstep of committing a crime to survive, or does it use its responsibility to create an environment where there will never be the need for stealing to survive which it cannot do without changing the entire perspective of criminality. To do that would demand an examination of the efficacy of ownership (property as well as people who are forced to create the wealth of others. From this perspective, and by limiting humanity to only one right, the right to survive, then the responsibility the government presumes is to insure no one not survive and the focus of crime not centered on anything that is necessitated by the need to survive, but to focus on the criminality of whatever hinders survival. If crime is not centered on actions taken to survive (which could include psychological necessities as well as physical necessities)then crime becomes not the action caused by the person being deprived but by the action of the person, or agencies doing the crime. I have explored this in great detail in my book "There Never Was...Democracy Freedom Justice" . It is available on amazon as an ebook, but so as not to deprive anyone, if you reply in my coming substack The UnUtopian Optimist, I will send a free pdf copy.
"It is surely absurd for a supposedly democratic state to have its decision-making apparatus neither reviewed nor understood by the public."
Not unless you insist that direct democracy and representative democracy are to be subject to the same reasoning because their names share a substring. The whole idea of representative democracy is that you select people you trust on the relevant issues, they do _things you don't trust yourself to do or know how they're done_, and you judge them by results. The relative ignorance is baked into the system and is the reason for the system. It's not ideal, but it is not some implicit contradiction not noticed by anyone, it's the foundation of the modern democracy systems. (Which arguably would, by Aristotle's classification, be elective oligarchies - food for thought.) Now, I think "it is surely absurd" for a representative democracy state to feel obligated to implement direct democracy.
(I also think direct democracy would be an almost immediate failure.)
You seem to suggest that rights are created through the exercise of power. Yet if that were so, they would lack any moral legitimacy. Rather, rights would derive from morality. They result from applying non-reasonably rejectable social contract principles to social facts and circumstances.
And there is no right to do wrong like commit theft when rights are made through reasonable agreement, since who would agree to be a victim to someone capable of caring for themselves? People wouldn’t have the general right to steal necessities since the social contract would impose a duty of general responsibility for self onto each party, given that the parties are free health adults.
Yet there would be duties to rescue in certain situations of life or death. And the state has excused crimes like trespass and theft made out of necessity in narrow circumstances, so long as their is compensation after the fact.
But rights would overwhelming create duties of omission rather than commission. There are many more ways you shouldn’t treat someone than should treat someone. And given the general responsibility for self that the social contract would impose, rights would generally be negative (given a social minimum for those unable to care for themselves).
And the state would have a positive duty to convict criminals since they hold the burden of proof when taking away someone’s liberty. People wouldn’t agree to unfettered state discretion. This is very different from our private duties to each other.
I discuss here if interested
https://open.substack.com/pub/neonomos/p/there-are-no-natural-rights-without?r=1pded0&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
1. As I say in the piece, we're talking about human rights, a specific, actually existing institution of rights established by covenants between governments, not "rights" in the abstract. Those are most certainly established by power.
2. Why does the question of whether or not there is a right to steal come into it? We're talking about whether hunger can be abolished negatively or positively by the government.
1. "human" rights are explicitly non-governmental rights that are inherent to humans. They are the products of natural/abstract law rather than positive law. Otherwise, it would literally be impossible for the government to violate human rights if they are contingent on government grant.
2. What you we're talking about was 1) "The right not to be prevented from appropriating (stealing) the means of subsistence" so it comes in from your article.
To do human rights, you have to have a theory of moral realism. I argue that a constructivist metaethics can get us to rights, as I argue in the linked post. So the rights I list above (to rescue, a social minimum, but still largely related to acts of comission) would likely be accepted (given their existence without much complaint), whereas a general right to steal necessities wouldn't (given its non-existence).