CMV: Self defense is a fundamental human right.

This is an extremely complicated question but the short answer is no. I will explain why as briefly as I can.

If there are "basic rights" where do they come from? The answer to this question is extraordinarily vexing, because without the "Creator" we don't have someone to give the "inalienable rights". Similarly, we know from Darwin that the processes of nature are morally arbitrary. We cannot deduce from how things are in nature that this is how they ought to be in the moral universe. Without this objective derivation of moral value "Natural Rights" becomes a meaningless term because people can (and empirically do) disagree about where to set the balance between positive and negative liberty (i.e. what counts as "rights").

As an aside, there are people who disagree with me here who are very smart (Ronald Dworkin is probably the best known) and they say that we don't need natural rights to have "deep conventions"--norms so fundamental to our society that they are functionally equivalent to natural rights. But I think that this is kind of missing the point, because these social conventions come from social processes and deserve to be continually reevaluated by social the society as a whole. Or in other words, ignoring the problem of the source of rights doesn't help clear it up philosophically; though it may help us simply accept them as givens, I don't find the fact that a certain balance between positive and negative liberty used to exist a powerful argument that it needs to remain now. There are also the "moral realists" who basically say that humans have an innate capacity for "moral reasoning" and that this means there is an objective moral standard from which we can derive rights; this claim sounds very fishy to me. I don't trust anyone who says that they have special access to moral knowledge that another person doesn't, as a general rule. I think that in order to be sure that we protect individuality and personal freedom, we have to assume that moral value is subjectively determined.

Anyway, back to my original point. We have no standard of moral value from which to judge which rights must be respected (and how much these rights must be respected) within particular social arrangements outside of their approximation of individual preference satisfaction using a subjective utilitarian system to give moral weight to subjective preferences. So following that logic the only source of legitimacy for "rights" is the proximity of the system of social bargaining for deciding on the balance between positive and negative liberty (a.k.a. politics) to approximating the actual optimization of individual preference satisfaction.

So because some systems of politics are empirically better at doing this than others (e.g. pluralistic democracy is better than dictatorship) we can say that it appears that most pluralistic democracies are objectively more just than dictatorships. This is an important statement, because it means that we can in fact make objective determinations of moral value without reference to a universal moral standard! Subjectivist utilitarianism treats value pluralism as more just than authoritarianism because the result of it tends to result in a closer approximation of the optimization as far as can be empirically determined.

So there are no basic rights because there is no possible source for these rights outside of social determination. We can't make claims about "rights" generating individual preference satisfaction in the abstract, because "rights" is just what we call a particular balance in the liberty dialectic.

But we can say that, empirically, certain negative freedoms tend to appear in societies which appear objectively more just than those without those rights: freedom from random assault, freedom from being murdered, freedom from people taking your property perforce. But this appearance says nothing about the character of those rights as "basic" and they are certainly not "inherent". These rights remain socially granted and socially contingent and rely for their moral force on reference to a subjective moral standard. All it says is that they appear to be, at this particular moment in time and space, generally more conducive to maximizing the aggregate subjective attainment of the good. Again, the morally "correct" point of balance between competing liberties is always in flux and therefore never attainable, all we can do is try to build a social system that approximates it as best we can for the moment, subject to constant revision.

/r/changemyview Thread Parent