Abraham the Hierarch

Over the last few days, I've been listening to people who tell me that Abraham the Hierarch's theory is only a theory, and not empirically true. It has caused me to recoil in horror and then look very carefully at what they've said and why they've said it.

First of all, empirical observations are empirical by definition. You see things. If your perceptual apparatus is biased or otherwise returning false data, then those observations are empirical to you but untrue. But based on what normal human beings do, it is quite clear that biology tends to trump sociology or theology for the majority of us. It is the rare human who spends more time praying than eating (not that there aren't such people, of course).

Secondly, even Maslow admitted that his theory needed greater scrutiny, as it was only a generalisation based on his observations of selected people. But there is very little opposition to his theory; about the only serious contenders are a) Max-Neef's theory of fundamental human needs, and b) the somewhat arbitrary idea that there is no real hierarchy at all.

The reason that this issue is important is that there's been a lot of attention paid to 'human rights' — women's rights, gay rights, the rights of the poor and the sick and infants and children and students and teachers and unfortunate burglars and so on. But in order to think usefully about human rights, one has to ask how those rights arise.

There are a lot of theories about that, but I find myself standing back-to-back with Maslow's hierarchy when thinking about the priority one should assign to various rights. I've not said much about these things before, but I remember that in this post I related the rights issue with the idea of professional roles, and in this post I wrote about law and government with respect to basic rights.

The key idea is that a right (whether you're with Maslow or Max-Neef) stems from the ontological condition of being human. From a biological and developmental perspective, some rights are potential to begin with and conferred by the state of being a human in a human society (e.g. the right to communicate freely), while some rights are actual from the beginning and created by the fact of being a living organism (e.g. the right to have adequate sustenance and the right to have protection from environmental hazards). These rights are not granted by natural laws (that is, there are no physical laws which prevent you from starving or being hit by lightning) but are based on the 'given adequate resources, we should maintain these' principle.

If you're a starving artist, I think I would prefer to feed you before you starve if I had to choose between giving you food or art materials. In fact, if I had only one choice or the other, and I chose to give you the latter, most societies would consider me a little negligent. A minority would argue that art is more valuable than life. Well, it seems true enough for some people, but I don't think it is true for a majority. That's not just opinion; the empirical fact is that humans (even little kids in the mall) fight about food more than about art. People who fight about art are almost always at least at subsistence level for food.

One comment I read was this: "At the end of the day, when it comes to the crunch, what really drives and motivates life are values and causes. Entire civilisations have come and gone because of them. Our continued survival on this planet depends on them."

I found this dubious. I think food and physical resources are primary motivators. Values and causes are secondary. Empire-building is tertiary. You're welcome to disagree, of course, but I suspect when you get hungry and tired enough, you will prefer to eat or sleep instead of argue with me.