In this lecture, a critical exploration of the concept of rights is undertaken, specifically addressing the secular arguments that underpin the rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights. The discussion begins with the assertion that rights are not inherent in nature but are claims that require mutual agreement among individuals. This leads to a clarifying distinction between rights and physical properties, emphasizing that, unlike gravity or trees, rights demand acknowledgment and consent from others. The speaker articulates the necessity of agreements and mutual recognition to actualize rights, illustrating this with examples of property rights where one’s claim necessitates societal acceptance.
Expanding on this framework, the lecturer delves into the implications of rights when conflicts arise. The discourse emphasizes that rights serve as justifications for the use of force, positing that individuals have the prerogative to defend their rights through violence when faced with infringement, be it theft, assault, or violations of personal autonomy. This examination of rights as legitimizing mechanisms for force prompts a deeper investigation into the nature of ethics, which is portrayed as a system that must account for the reality of coercive enforcement of moral claims.
The idea of moral universality versus individual action is further scrutinized as the speaker addresses the philosophical query regarding evil. Evaluating acts commonly classified as evil, the lecture argues that actions like stabbing cannot be categorically deemed evil without considering context, such as intent or mental state. Through illustrative examples, including those involving mental illness or lack of understanding, it becomes apparent that evil is not solely contained within the actions themselves but may often reside within the theories or justifications that frame those actions.
The discussion culminates in a reevaluation of moral theories, with a call to recognize that the true danger lies in false moral constructs that claim universal applicability while simultaneously creating exceptions. This notion posits that genuine moral evaluation must transcend specific actions and gravitate toward the underlying moral frameworks that govern behavior. The speaker articulates that individuals who propagate asymmetrical moral theories engage in a form of moral fraud, thereby perpetuating injustice. Ultimately, the session emphasizes the importance of robust moral theories that uphold universal principles without exception, framing the conversation around rights, ethics, and notions of good and evil in a contemporary context.
0:18 - What are the best secular arguments for rights?
7:27 - The nature of evil and moral theories
12:44 - Understanding evil beyond actions
15:42 - Justifying rights and moral theories
[0:00] All right, a great question from a follower, I hate the term follower, but from someone on X, from someone on X, who writes, I never liked the argument that rights come from God,
[0:14] because many people are godless or believe in a God or a God that doesn't grant those rights.
[0:19] What are the best secular arguments for the rights we cherish in the Bill of Rights? How do we convince the atheists? Well, that's a big topic. So, rights are a claim on others that other people don't have to agree to, right? I have a right to this means that other people have to agree with you, or it doesn't happen. So rights don't exist in the world in the way that a tree or a rock exists so we have to go and figure out what are rights how do they work and how can they be justified without God in the Christian formulation of course God is the being that has created humanity.
[1:19] Has the purpose of getting into heaven, and in order to get into heaven, human beings must have free will and choose God's virtuous commandments, and therefore the rights are granted to you by God as your nature. But they are voluntary. We don't have voluntary options when it comes to submitting to physical properties, and gravity, and so on, right? Those are automatic. Involuntary, and not, like distinctly not, subject to our negotiation. Or as they would say in England, negotiation. Negotiation. So, that question of, rights is that they are voluntary and they require agreement.
[2:13] They require that other people agree with us. I have a right to property means that you should agree with me about property rights.
[2:24] And then, of course, the question is, what do you do or what happens if somebody disagrees with you about property rights. I have a right to my property. If somebody disagrees with you, then you have the right to use force to prevent them from taking your property. Somebody mugs you, you can use force to prevent them from taking your stuff. Whether your stuff is your property, whether it's a coerced sexual act such as rape, or whether it's your life such as murder, you have the right to use force. So, rights are claims upon others that you can use violence to enforce. Rights are claims upon others that you can use violence to enforce. As I've always sort of said, the entire purpose of ethics is to legitimize or justify the use of force, because without force, virtues or ethics cannot be, they simply cannot be enforced. So rights is the justification for the proposition, I can use force to maintain my claim. I have a bicycle, someone takes my bicycle, I can use force to either prevent them from taking it, or to take it back if they have stolen it.
[3:54] So, rights are justifications for the use of force. I have the right to free speech. If somebody uses violence to prevent me from speaking or to attack me for speech, I can use violence to protect myself from their violence.
[4:13] And that is all that rights are, is that which legitimizes the use of violence. Now, of course, self-defense in the moment is something that we all accept, but rights in general are that which justifies the use of violence even after the fact, to restore something to its moral station or status. So, if someone steals my bike...
[4:43] I can use force even later to get my bike back. I can knock on the door and say, you've got to give me my bike back. And if they don't, I can use force to retrieve my bike. I mean, in general, you'd turn it over to a sort of generic protection agency and they would deal with it through ostracism and things like that. But that is really what rights are. Our claims upon others, that can be violently or coercively enforced. I have the right to bodily autonomy, so I can do my K-pop dances in the basement. I have the right to bodily autonomy. And if someone disagrees with that, and they want to rape me or stab me or assault me in other ways, I have the right to use force to prevent them from doing that. So, just so we're clear, rights are that which legitimize the use of force, violence.
[5:44] And even ostracism will be enforced through violence. So, ostracism in a free society is when we say to someone, you are no longer part of the economy of this society. And then, of course, if you go into a grocery store when you've been blacklisted because you've done something terrible, if you go into a grocery store, people can use force to take you out of the grocery store, right? To remove you as a trespasser.
[6:15] Just so we understand that. So, rights legitimize the use of force or make moral the use of force in the same way that medicine legitimizes stabbing someone, right? Or administering a drug to someone. If you stab someone as they're just going about their business, then you are guilty of probably attempted murder or grievous assault, right? So, if, of course, they have signed a waiver and say, gee, it'd be really great if you stabbed me so that you could take out a cyst or remove a tumor, then that's no longer stabbing, right? That's surgery. So, how do we best defend the rights of a property, of bodily autonomy, and so on? How do we best defend those rights? While, of course, recognizing that rights don't exist, again,
[7:25] does not make them subjective or anything like that.
[7:28] But rights do not exist.
[7:31] And we kind of eat them. So I would say, and this is a question that I asked yesterday on X, which I really do want to answer. So what is evil? And I've taken a run at this a number of times, but it's a big topic. So what is evil? Well, can we say that evil, let's take an example, is stabbing someone? Believe it or not, we cannot say that evil is stabbing someone.
[8:03] So, we can think of situations where somebody would be stabbed where it's not evil. I mean, it's obviously a aforementioned example of surgery, we get that. But also, a robot could stab someone, and we would not call the robot evil. Well, also, a crazy person could stab someone, and they have a brain tumor, they have some, you know, really clear and diagnosable psychosis or schizophrenia or something like that. And we would confine that person because they were a danger, but we would call them mentally ill, especially if it was like a brain tumor, right? We would call them the victim of an illness, not an evildoer. In the same way that if somebody drugs you without your consent.
[8:57] Operates on you without your consent, that is not necessarily evil, but to stab you without your consent, to drug you without your consent, is generally evil, but we can think of specific exceptions. So, the act of stabbing is not innately evil, because wherever there's a single exception, we no longer have a general rule. This is a sort of Socratic questioning 101. We inflict our will on others without permission from time to time. And it's not necessary. So even stabbing. Rape, of course, is almost certainly evil. You know, I'm not even going to go down the road of creating exceptions to this, whether it's psychosis or schizophrenia or something like that.
[9:47] But what about sleepwalking? Somebody can commit a crime, and this has actually happened, right? somebody can commit a crime while sleepwalking. Do we hold that person? Let's say that for sure, we know they were wearing their watch and all the signs indicate they've had a sleepwalking history. So if somebody commits a crime while sleepwalking, is that person evil? It's hard to say to me, it's hard to say beyond the shadow of a doubt. Yes, they are. So evil is not embedded in the action. A monkey might grab a knife and not knowing what the knife is doing is stabbing someone. It might stab someone. We would not call that monkey evil. The monkey doesn't really understand what it's doing. So there are times and situations where the act, generally considered to be evil, is not put in the category of evil. And therefore evil cannot be synonymous with the action. So again, we could say that murder is the unlawful killing of another, the initiation of the use of force to kill another, but murder.
[11:05] Be committed by a robot. You say, oh, but it's got to be a person. Yes, okay, all right, we can put that category in for sure, in which case it would be the person who programmed the robot, perhaps, who would be responsible for the killing. But you can kill while under the grip of a significant mental illness or brain deterioration, or, of course, we've all heard of these, it's either a drone or a giant mosquito. Yeah, so we've all heard of the NFL players. And the NFL players, who end up killing, have, you know, even after the kids are the murder-suicide, after their death, it is clearly revealed that they have brain damage, right? Significant brain damage. Somebody under the grip of Alzheimer's or dementia or something who commits a crime. So, it's not the action itself that is the evil, because we can almost always think of exceptions. I mean, Obviously, a mother killing her children is evil in general, but we can think of exceptions. Maybe she's sleepwalking. I know that this sounds like nitpicky stuff, but we need absolute rules for morality, because morality legitimizes the use of violence, and we wouldn't want to be casual about that, right? Or mistaken. We want to get that right.
[12:25] So, I would propose a different definition of evil that is tied, of course, into UPB, and it's something that's embedded in the book UPB, wherein I talk about the greatest danger to us is not individual moral actors, but false moral theories.
[12:44] So, I would say that evil is in the theory, not in the action. That the evil is in the theory. Now, the good thing about this is that it makes evil, specifically human. Because animals, I mean, they may have altruistic instincts, so to speak, that have evolved, but animals don't have moral theories. And so, if evil is in the theory, rather than the action, then we have something specifically human.
[13:17] So, science is in the theory, not in the individual action. So, I would say, that evil is the promotion of moral theories that claim universality, but create specific exceptions, more so than the individual actions. So, an example would be, sexism is bad, but women can't be sexist towards men. Or racism is bad, but you can't be racist against whites. Something like that, right?
[14:02] I think it is true in general that when you have false moral theories, theories which claim universality, but also deny it, usually surreptitiously, that is creating a form of asymmetrical moral warfare, which is to say, I want to fight you, but I'm going to disarm you. Right? So if you say, let's have a duel, right? Some 18th century thing, you say, let's have a duel. But then what you do is you say to the other person, like you surreptitiously disarm the other person, right? So you take the bullet out of their guns, bullets out of their gun. So you say, we're going to have a duel. And then you surreptitiously disarm that person. Well, that is really evil because you are claiming equality, like we both get to bring a gun, but then you're disarming the other person, which turns it from a duel into, of course, a straight-up murderer. And that's a whole different category, right? So when people create.
[15:14] Asymmetrical moral systems, I get to initiate violence, you don't. I get to have this prejudice, you don't. That, to me, is where evil truly resides. The evil is not in the action, but in the moral justifications for evil, which is where, of course, it's where most evil actually comes from.
[15:42] That's the best way to justify and work with the concept of rights. Now, of course, when it comes to proving the Bill of Rights and so on, the right to personhood, the right to property, and the right to maintain, or the requirement to maintain contracts and so on, all of that is covered in UPB, Justifications for Self-Defense, and so on, right?
[16:10] So, I would say that good and evil reside not in the specific actions for which there are exceptions that we can think of. So, it's not the specific actions, it is the theories. Now, if somebody sets up a duel, and then what they do is they disarm the other person, then that is a very conscious and programmed awareness of the evil that they're doing. So in the same way, if somebody creates a moral theory and then creates an exception or some exceptions to that moral theory, that person is immoral by definition. Because when you claim that something is universal, and then you create specific exceptions to that universality, well, then you're very, you're deeply immoral. Because that is a form of fraud or falsehood.
[17:18] And people are responsible for that fraud or falsehood. So, I hope that helps. I will certainly flesh that out more as we move forward. And I really do appreciate your time, care, attention, and support of philosophy at freedomain.com/donate. Bye.
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