I'm not sure about the language of "surrendering" rights in this situation. I think this seems more like a case where it's not completely clear what kind of treatment that people are due, and where cultural norms might play a significant role in clarifying what different communities think about that question. As Hayek wrote in "The Results of Human Action But Not of Human Design:"
...the natural law concept against which modern jurisprudence reacted was the perverted rationalist conception which interpreted the law of nature as the deductive constructions of 'natural reason' rather than as the undesigned outcome of a process of growth in which the test of what is justice was not anybody's arbitrary will but compatibility with a whole system of inherited but partly inarticulated rules.
http://libertarian-left.blogspot.com/
It is just a social convention. The problem which baffled and continues to baffle people who study it even now is why if a "superstition" it is so stable? Why we can not change it at our will?
I too have thought about it and came to my own answer. Which is quite clear for me... It has to do with the conditions of a total market we live in. I even wrought an article of about 10000 words. I just do not know how to place it so as to make it available for people interested in the subject. May be somebody can help me in that. I think it is a rather good solution to the problem.
Rational argument can not prove you that the price of a picture of Van Gogh must be 50 000 000$! There is not siuch arguments which can prove it. Van Gogh himself could not...
It is just a social convention.
Proof?
Relevance?
To darkness I condemn you...
scineram: Maybe he thinks the natural rights philosophers are running in circles. Rights can be ignored and violated. Why should he care about them?
Maybe he thinks the natural rights philosophers are running in circles. Rights can be ignored and violated. Why should he care about them?
Hence the normative-de facto distinction that I touched on earlier.
Market anarchist, Linux geek, aspiring Perl hacker, and student of the neo-Aristotelians, the classical individualist anarchists, and the Austrian school.
You may feel shame if you go to a rockers' party in a business suit, or to a buisness meeting in a T-shirt. Is not it a convention? You address differently your parents, your children your friend or a stranger... And all of you know how to adress in each case! But these formes are different for different societies and change with time even for the same one.
You can not persuade the other members of the society that your rule is better than the existing one. Wnat is more, in a dispute with a representative of some other culture you will probably try to prove the advantage of the rules of the culture you belong to. Is it not just coincidence? you are taught to observe them and it is enough for you to feel their naturalness. So Aristotle and Plato did not feel the horror of slavery... They even tried to explain its normality...
It is a long story. I can not explain how I understand it in a few words.
Now we have three main schools of ethics. All the three are wrong in my opinion, absurd at times, but there is a convenient opinion of a scholar society - philosophical tradition - and it is almost impossible to overcome it even by rational argumentation! Tradition is what helps us very much in most of the cases we have to deal with in our day to day life, but is an awful obstacle in some cases very important for us and the humanity as a whole...
Indeed. They are conventions. So what? Ethical theories proscribe what ought to be, i.e. what conventions ought to be in place, and they seek to justify (or show the error of) certain actions, which may simply be for instance a demonstration (descriptive in a sense) of why I am entitled to punish someone, as opposed to reasons for them to act in a certain way. Regarding persuasion, this isn't casuistry. If I fail to persuade someone of something that may speak more of their irrationality/blindness to the truth &c. than anything else. I do so love people who boldly proclaim that ethics is faulty, with what seems to be a variant of the argument for the impossibility of socialism applied to morality, albeit vacuous and content-free...
I am just saying that ethical theories just try to explain why what is - is just. Like Plato could explain why master should punish his slave... It is absurdity to say that something should be so. It is like saying that we all must wear rings in our noses... Justice is a market category, and is a qualification of the exchange: whether the exchange is executed in correspondence with the current market values (prices) of the things exchanged. Etc. We live in a world of total exchange. Any relation any intercourse of two people is an exchange of something: things, services... Even between friends, the members of the family... It encompasses everything! We must just logically continue to reason grounding on this fact and we will come to a consistent ethical theory.
The point is that if this were mere casuistry, there would be nothing wrong with Plato's account. He was wrobg, yes, because he was inconsistent. Aristotle to a certain degree did realize slaves also possessed a commonality with their master in that they too were human, and that to this extent a sort of proto-justice would characterize slave-master relations.
Many things we are ready to forgive, or to close our eyes at in relation to Plato, Kant, Mill... because they are Plato, Kant and Mill... What is the just price for a loaf of bread? There is not such thing. It changes from country to country, it changes in time... but it is concrete at each concrete place and time. The same is with moral. Etc.
Ludwig von Mises Institute | 518 West Magnolia Avenue | Auburn, Alabama 36832-4528
Phone: 334.321.2100 · Fax: 334.321.2119
contact@Mises.org | webmaster | AOL-IM MainMises
Mises.org sitemap