Human Rights & Government
Having a chat the other day with the Hierophant, we went over some old ground. I realise that I've not actually explicitly said much about basic human rights, except perhaps in places like here, where the context was how human professions cater to the support of human rights.
Let's apply some simple reasoning based on human politics. This isn't new, and many people have wandered down these roads before, so bear with me (and that includes Wolfberry, whose study of the law is related). I'm not considering moral issues via a religious perspective per se.
All political states consist of people and subsist in people. Without people, there would be no state. Since the first implicit duty of a state has to be self-preservation (or it wouldn't exist to have any other duties), the state has a duty to preserve its people. The main duty of law is to regularise and/or formalise the transactions between people for the good of the state.
This means that basic laws deal with the support and maintenance of basic rights. As I've said before, one plausible definition of a basic human right is the maintenance of a condition that, in general, all humans are born with and that a human would be considered deficient if born without. The most obvious right, and the most basic, is therefore the right to supported life outside the womb. If life exists on birth, the right to have it continued is paramount.
This is why there are laws and social barriers against killing in general, indiscriminate killing, and deliberate killing. There should also be laws against negligence or other behaviours that result directly in death.
The next step down is to have laws which protect the individual against physical incapacitation. The individual can't really be protected against the state of which he is a part, but the state can be protected against individuals who have become renegade elements. Law, after all (and in the long-term view), is created and sustained not by individuals, but by social groups (and at the political level, states).
At some level however, the choice becomes one between protection of all individuals and discrimination between some individuals and others. This was the choice that faced Athenian democracy — pure democracies discriminate as little as possible, while republican democracies discriminate 'for the greater good'. In the former, a distinguished physician would be treated with the same weight as a peon; in the latter, the rights of the physician would be considered to some extent superior to the rights of the peon, or might be better defended, or might have laws defending certain things the physician might be able to do (or not do) as opposed to the things a peon could do. There are no pure democracies.
This means that the duty of government essentially is to enforce (and secondarily, maintain and/or support) interactions that are beneficial to survival of the state in a form which allows for continued enforcement of interactions that are beneficial to survival of the state...
The more private an individual's behaviours and the less they have to do with interacting with other people, the less important they should be to government. Reading a book of any sort should therefore not be as constrained by government as sharing the contents of that book in such a way as to provoke disruptive behaviour against that government. In this, I do not make any judgements about the type or kind of government involved; I am only saying that this is the perspective a rational government should have.
Following this logic, growing of cannabis sativa for personal research (and consumption) is a 10,000-year-old hobby that has had little negative impact on some states. However, the dissemination of the plant to others is a legitimate concern for some governments, since it is an interaction between individuals within the state. This is why the possession of small amounts of certain drugs for personal use is considered allowable or less of an offence than the possession of larger quantities beyond the typical amount an individual would be expected to use. Trafficking in such drugs is most definitely a province of government, whereas personal consumption is normally (but not always) only indirectly so.
That said, some governments also consider it their duty to protect individuals from themselves. This is probably based on the idea that not all humans are able to determine whether something is good for themselves or not. This is a terribly grey area. For example, what if the government of a state decides that any other form of government would be fatal to the continued optimal behaviour of the state? That opens the door to restricted participation in the governance of the state.
As you can see, once we stray away from basic human rights and start considering second- and third-order interactions and beyond, the law rapidly convolutes and metastasizes into something rich and strange. It is a wonderful world we live in.
Let's apply some simple reasoning based on human politics. This isn't new, and many people have wandered down these roads before, so bear with me (and that includes Wolfberry, whose study of the law is related). I'm not considering moral issues via a religious perspective per se.
All political states consist of people and subsist in people. Without people, there would be no state. Since the first implicit duty of a state has to be self-preservation (or it wouldn't exist to have any other duties), the state has a duty to preserve its people. The main duty of law is to regularise and/or formalise the transactions between people for the good of the state.
This means that basic laws deal with the support and maintenance of basic rights. As I've said before, one plausible definition of a basic human right is the maintenance of a condition that, in general, all humans are born with and that a human would be considered deficient if born without. The most obvious right, and the most basic, is therefore the right to supported life outside the womb. If life exists on birth, the right to have it continued is paramount.
This is why there are laws and social barriers against killing in general, indiscriminate killing, and deliberate killing. There should also be laws against negligence or other behaviours that result directly in death.
The next step down is to have laws which protect the individual against physical incapacitation. The individual can't really be protected against the state of which he is a part, but the state can be protected against individuals who have become renegade elements. Law, after all (and in the long-term view), is created and sustained not by individuals, but by social groups (and at the political level, states).
At some level however, the choice becomes one between protection of all individuals and discrimination between some individuals and others. This was the choice that faced Athenian democracy — pure democracies discriminate as little as possible, while republican democracies discriminate 'for the greater good'. In the former, a distinguished physician would be treated with the same weight as a peon; in the latter, the rights of the physician would be considered to some extent superior to the rights of the peon, or might be better defended, or might have laws defending certain things the physician might be able to do (or not do) as opposed to the things a peon could do. There are no pure democracies.
This means that the duty of government essentially is to enforce (and secondarily, maintain and/or support) interactions that are beneficial to survival of the state in a form which allows for continued enforcement of interactions that are beneficial to survival of the state...
The more private an individual's behaviours and the less they have to do with interacting with other people, the less important they should be to government. Reading a book of any sort should therefore not be as constrained by government as sharing the contents of that book in such a way as to provoke disruptive behaviour against that government. In this, I do not make any judgements about the type or kind of government involved; I am only saying that this is the perspective a rational government should have.
Following this logic, growing of cannabis sativa for personal research (and consumption) is a 10,000-year-old hobby that has had little negative impact on some states. However, the dissemination of the plant to others is a legitimate concern for some governments, since it is an interaction between individuals within the state. This is why the possession of small amounts of certain drugs for personal use is considered allowable or less of an offence than the possession of larger quantities beyond the typical amount an individual would be expected to use. Trafficking in such drugs is most definitely a province of government, whereas personal consumption is normally (but not always) only indirectly so.
That said, some governments also consider it their duty to protect individuals from themselves. This is probably based on the idea that not all humans are able to determine whether something is good for themselves or not. This is a terribly grey area. For example, what if the government of a state decides that any other form of government would be fatal to the continued optimal behaviour of the state? That opens the door to restricted participation in the governance of the state.
As you can see, once we stray away from basic human rights and start considering second- and third-order interactions and beyond, the law rapidly convolutes and metastasizes into something rich and strange. It is a wonderful world we live in.
Labels: Government, Law, Philosophy, Politics
etched with acid at 9:55:00 am
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