>There are basically two ways of intending "we admit
that rights are
>universal": one, descriptive, emphasizing "rights are
universal", as if they
>were God-given and cast in stone; and one,
prescriptive, stressing "we
>admit". While the first, "Lockian" attitude requires
an act of belief, and
>therefore sounds more attractive to people with some
sort of religious
>belief (either theistic or deistic), the second
contains an admission of
>voluntarism, and is perfectly acceptable to agnostic
liberals like Hume. I
>belong in the second camp, as it's probably clear by
now.
>
>Also, it seems to me that you are overlooking one
point: some subjects are
>simply unable of fighting for their rights.
Civil society? Fighting for rights doesn't mean struggling for them day in and day out. Rather, it means, as you noted already (or have I got it wrong), a cognizance of tradition, of an historical understanding of rights/responsibilities as something people have created and can re-create if need be. Rights are social institutions. Just as property is a social institutions.
>Shall we wait for the toddlers
>to storm the Winter Palace before considering
infanticide reproachable?
Well, then I 'd ask: is it *always* reproachable? I don't think assisted suicide is reproachable, though many do. But I guess my views come from the experience of taking care of family members with alzheimer's and cancer as well as the experiences of my mother, a gerontology nurse who's watched far too many elderly people die under conditions that were dispicable.
At
>very least, you must admit some kind of "struggle by
proxy", which begs the
>question of why someone chooses to fight for someone
else's rights. We can't
>escape the fact that at least some of the values
determining our actions are
>not socially motivated through the class struggle,
but have their origin in
>our nature:
Fwiw, I don't reduce everything regarding human actions and beliefs to a vulgar conception of class struggle. What nature? On your view it appears that humans are self-interested beings who couldn't possibly act in the interests of others.
> I don't think that even old Karl would have dreamed
of denying
>that. So, back to the square one: what's the point of
extrapolating the
>Marxian analytic framework to a context where it
clearly does not apply?
You'll have to explain how it 'clearly doesn't apply'
>> Rather, they are
>>relatively enduring social constructions that rest
on
>>insitutions, practices, and traditions. However,
>>since they are socially constructed, then they are
>>also contestable, though not in any way we please.
>
>
>Yup, and determing which ways are kosher and which
ones are not is precisely
>the crux of the problem: hard work, that can't be
easily exorcised by
>choosing the right set of axioms and throwing them
into the dialectic mixer.
And this is as it *should* be. A state of perfection is not the goal here. The point is that people must wrestle with these moral issues. Turning them over to the state just isn't the solution: robbing people of their capacities to make moral decisions isn't the answer since it's this very capacity for moral outrage at injustice that will impel and has impelled people to want to alter the conditions which create injustice.
Snit "Loyalty to petrified thought never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul" --Mark Twain