The Concept of Rights, Misc

América e o mundo estão em processo de colapso devido ao crescimento excessivo da população, a maioria no século passado, e agora tudo isso, devido ao povo do 3º mundo. O consumo de recursos e a adição de mais 4 bilhões de ca. 2100 desonram a civilização industrial e provocarão fome, doenças, violência e guerra em escala impressionante. A Terra perde pelo menos 1% de seu solo a cada ano, então, à medida que se aproxima de 2100, a maior parte (...) de sua capacidade de cultivo de alimentos desaparecerá. Bilhões morrerão e a guerra nuclear é quase certa. Na América, isso está sendo extremamente acelerado pela imigração maciça e reprodução de imigrantes, combinado com abusos possibilitados pela democracia. A natureza humana depravada inexoravelmente transforma o sonho da democracia e da diversidade em um pesadelo de crime e pobreza. A China continuará a sobrecarregar a América e o mundo, desde que mantenha a ditadura que limita o egoísmo. A causa principal do colapso é a incapacidade de nossa psicologia inata de se adaptar ao mundo moderno, o que leva as pessoas a tratar pessoas não relacionadas como se tivessem interesses comuns. A ideia dos direitos humanos é uma fantasia maligna promovida pelos esquerdistas para chamar a atenção da destruição impiedosa da Terra pela maternidade do 3º mundo. Isso, além da ignorância da biologia básica e da psicologia, leva aos delírios da engenharia social dos parcialmente educados que controlam as sociedades democráticas. Poucos entendem que se você ajuda uma pessoa que você machuca outra pessoa — não há almoço grátis e cada item que alguém consome destrói a terra além do reparo. Consequentemente, as políticas sociais em todos os lugares são insustentáveis e uma por uma todas as sociedades sem controles rigorosos sobre o egoísmo entrarão em colapso em anarquia ou ditadura. Os fatos mais básicos, quase nunca mencionados, são que não há recursos suficientes na América ou no mundo para tirar uma porcentagem significativa dos pobres da pobreza e mantê-los lá. A tentativa de fazer isso está faliu a América e destruindo o mundo. A capacidade da Terra de produzir alimentos diminui diariamente, assim como nossa qualidade genética. E agora, como sempre, de longe, o maior inimigo dos pobres é outros pobres e não os ricos. Sem mudanças dramáticas e imediatas, não há esperança para evitar o colapso da América, ou qualquer país que siga um sistema democrático. (shrink)

This article concerns the nature and limits of individuals’ rights to privacy over information that they have made public. For some, even suggesting that an individual can have a right to privacy over such information may seem paradoxical. First, one has no right to privacy over information that was never private to begin with. Second, insofar as one makes once-private information public – whether intentionally or unintentionally – one waives one’s right to privacy to that information. In this article, however, (...) we suggest the moral situation is more complicated than this. Rather, we argue that there is a class of public information – namely, once-private information that individuals have made public unintentionally – which remains within the scope of an individuals’ right to privacy, even when it has passed into the public domain. Significantly, this class includes any information rights-holders were unaware could be inferred from information they have made public and which they would not otherwise have wanted to be in the public domain. As we show, as well as clarifying several everyday dilemmas with regards to individuals’ privacy rights, this finding has elucidates a number of problems in the ethics of Big Data. (shrink)

For all their various disagreements, one point upon which rights theorists often agree is that it is simply part of the nature of rights that they tend to override, outweigh or exclude competing considerations in moral reasoning, that they have ‘peremptory force’, making ‘powerful demands’ that can only be overridden in ‘exceptional circumstances’, Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016, p. 240). In this article I challenge this thought. My aim here is not to prove that the (...) traditional view of rights’ stringency is necessarily false, nor even that we have no good reason to believe it is true. Rather, my aim is only to show that we have good reason to think that the foundation of the traditional position is less stable than we might have otherwise supposed and that an alternative conception of rights—one which takes the stringency of any given right as particular to the kind of right it is—is both viable and attractive. In short, to begin to move us towards a more ‘particularist’ conception of rights’ standing in moral reasoning and judgement. (shrink)

The paper engages the conceptual question of the nature of rights. First, moral methodology for developing criteria to judge the adequacy of theories for the concept of rights is discussed. Standard methodologies for conceptual theory, such as analysis of language practices, appealing to intuitions to test and correct hypotheses, and mixtures of these with appeals to substantive moral values, are shown to fail in important ways to give us reasons to adopt one or another view of the concept. An alternative (...) methodology is proposed which appeals to the distinct role of concepts in our value scheme (the added value of being able to employ such concepts in our moral judgments). This is then used to develop criteria for a successful theory of rights. Two existing theories are shown, as a matter of illustration, to fail to satisfy the criteria, and finally an alternative theory of rights which does satisfy these criteria is proposed and defended. (shrink)

This paper has four aims. First it distinguishes two kinds of philosophical accounts of the ‘formal’ features of rights: models and theories. Models outline the ‘conceptually basic’ types of rights (if indeed a given model deems there to be more than one), their differences, and their relationships with duties, liabilities, etc. Theories of rights posit a supposed ultimate purpose for all rights and provide criteria for determining what counts as ‘a right’ in the first place. Second, the paper argues that (...) Monistic rights models (ones positing only a single basic type of right) are under-inclusive. They wrongly exclude and cannot explain relevant data, i.e., ordinary and legal linguistic practices. The third aim is to show that certain Pluralistic models are over-inclusive in terms of what they count as ‘rights’. Fourth, the paper begins to touch upon, but does not provide, criteria for determining what counts as ‘a right’. Two candidate factors will be addressed. (shrink)

Je décris dans ce livre un projet alternatif de société. Une société dite « digressive » serait basée sur le principe de n’en imposer aucun à autrui : principe paradoxal dont je démontre qu’il est équivalent à la maximisation globale des choix individuels ainsi qu’au combat contre toute forme d’aliénation. Loin d’être stérile, ce principe pourrait, je l’affirme, avoir des applications très concrètes dans la tenue des activités humaines. La société digressive est un manifeste pour une société post-certitude, une réponse (...) pragmatique aux dogmes et monopoles en tout genre. (shrink)

This paper is a copy of Digressive Society’s conclusions. In the book Digressive Society, I describe a society that would be based on the principle that no one is allowed to impose a principle on others. This paradoxical principle is, as I demonstrate, equivalent to the global maximisation of individual choices as well as the combating of all forms of alienation. A digression should be understood in the positive sense, it is distancing ourselves from an initial intention, deviate from a (...) pre-established or expected discourse. This book is, I hope, a productive attempt to develop a system at the crossroads of critical theory, existentialism, libertarianism, and anarchism: a system founded not on any preconceived notion of justice or human rights, but rooted in the ambiguous nature of human existence. (shrink)

Confronting persistent and widening inequality in educational opportunity, advocates have regarded the right to education as a linchpin for reform. In the forty years since the Supreme Court relegated that right to the domain of state constitutional law, its power has surged and faded in litigation challenging state school finance systems. Like so many of the students it is meant to protect, however, the right to education has generally underachieved, in part because those wielding it have not always appreciated its (...) distinctive forms and function. Deconstructed, the right to education held by children has been formulated doctrinally as both a claim-right, imposing affirmative duties on the state to act, and an immunity, disabling certain state action. These two strands—oft-manifested as the claim-right to educational “adequacy” and an immunity entailing “equality” of educational opportunity—once considered irreconcilable, are actually interlocked by the right’s core historical function to protect children’s liberty and equality interests. And yet the right to education is ill equipped to fulfill its protection function. Education clauses in state constitutions do not fix the standards for mutually enforcing equality and adequacy. This encumbers already-reluctant courts in addressing educational disparities and emboldens legislative resistance when they do. Appreciating that the right to education has a protection function entailing equality and liberty interests nevertheless suggests that the right can be adjudicated in a way that unifies the demands and guarantees of substantive due process and equal protection. That union holds the potential to ameliorate the enforcement standards thereby reconstituting the right to education as a mainstay of reform. (shrink)

The theory of justice that Hugo Grotius developed in De Jure Belli ac Pacis (The Law of War and Peace, 1625) set itself against a certain reading of Aristotle, according to which justice is conceived of as a mean between taking too much and taking too little. I argue that we can best understand the implications of Grotius' mature conception by considering the ends to which he had deployed this Aristotelian notion in his earlier work. Grotius came to perceive that (...) his earlier understanding of justice too easily ruled out the sorts of humanitarian concerns that could have a moderating effect. (shrink)