mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate) (09/09/86)
The "nature of property rights" argument seems to be floundering, so I wish to continue on a tangent brought up by nrh (whatever that is). We begin with this passage: >Now I fully expect a certain percentage of the net to go absolutely bonkers >at the notion that property rights are as fundamental as the right to >life. I expect to hear the same old "man dying of thirst comes into >a town where all the water is private property -- should he just die of >thirst or what?". Bear in mind that neither emotional responses to rights, >nor the long lineage of some rights, renders them important. What renders >them important is whether they really are rights (which is a philosophical >question), not whether they were rights according to your government last >year (which is a legal question). Well, I just can't agree with this view of the nature of rights. It seems to subscribe to one of two errors. THe less likely is the "rights as axioms" viewpoint. In this case, since deductive means have been exhausted, we run headlong into a sticky philosophical problem where emotional "evidence" becomes important. However, I believe the second error was what was intended: the notion that rights are entirely rational in derivation. Let me first note that the kinds of reasoning which take us to various rights are by no means identical. I agree that certain rights can be derived readily from physical facts (with one very important assumption to be dealt with in a minute), but not all rights can be so derived. Capital property rights are wound up in the thing known as capitalism, so that an important part of their justification lies in justifying capitalism. And this leads us to the major difficulty: that at the root of all these justifications lies some notion about what a desirable state of society ought to be. This is not an area of universal agreement; moreover, its foundation is what people LIKE. So ultimately we ARE led back to emotion, unless you want a government of tyranny in the name of a principle. THe fact is that these emotional impulses about the proper aim of government as an agent of society are fundamentally important. Those which are selected essentially determine the rights which are expressed. C. Wingate