>
>Enzo Michelangeli in quotes, me without:
>
>"...it seems to me that you are overlooking one point: some subjects are
>simply unable of fighting for their rights. Shall we wait for the toddlers
>to storm the Winter Palace before considering infanticide reproachable?"
>
>This isn't oversight. This is the issue. Rights are not universal,
>however much, voluntaristically or religiously, one wants them to be.
>That's because, as d-m-c says, they are socially constructed--and yes, that
>construction includes but is not limited to struggle.
Well, let's say "evolved". "Constructed" sounds too much of a conscious, finalistic design.
> It's also because,
>whether rights are abstractly or socially constructed, they always
>conflict. Can't get around those conflicts without getting around those
>rights! The problem with thinking in terms of rights is you end up
>obsessing about inconsistencies and hypocrisies that turn out to be
>unavoidable. I doubt if it is possible to construct a system of rights
>that wouldn't *necessarily* be self-contradictory, know of no proofs either
>way, but am sure that even if it is possible, it's not been achieved yet.
>So whatever your system of rights, you have to step outside that system to
>judge whose rights prevail when they conflict.
Echoes of Gödel here :-) Which is why I'm distrustful of constructivism.
> Me, I'd rather sidestep
>that rigmarole, and try a discourse not relying on rights.
The last phrase sounds like throwing away the baby with the dirty water. I think that we may still use rights as a useful, although provisional, tool for defining certain rules of social life. Even though they are not absolute and universal, most of them still represent a distillate of historical experience that it would be foolish to disregard.
> "...admit some kind of "struggle by proxy", which begs the
>question of why someone chooses to fight for someone else's rights."
>
>Indeed. This sentence introduces an idea, a good one, but says nothing
>about what to do with it. "Admitting" does not function for me as anything
>other than "acknowledging awareness or guilt".
I meant "recognizing the existence of".
>"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: 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?"
>
>Where does all this come from? Struggle is not limited to class struggle,
>social motivation neither.
True, but a powerful factor behind the appeal of the concept of struggle as engine of change, especially in people of the left, lies in the parallels with the class struggle in the social context. Once one has a hammer...
> Actions are not "determined' by values, or I'll
>have to forget bourgeois as well as Marxist psyschology, ethology,
>philosophy, economics, and all that other junk.
Are you telling me that individuals do not act according to their own values? That goes against everyday's experience. Of course, values are in turn influenced by lots of factors, including social, historical, natural etc.
> So, who's extrapolating a
>Marxian analytic framework?
On this, see my reply to d-m-c. My first post to this thread was triggered by her prase:
> Once you operate
> w/ the rights/responsibilities model, then it is much
> easier to see how a mother's rights trump those of the
> unborn child: the unborn child is not yet a member of
> society and thus has no rights.
This seems to me much too a restrictive way of intending a right: it's not only foeti that may be not be considered as "members of society", but also a whole lot of other subjects who, for one reason or another, are at least in part excluded from the social dynamics. Shall we ignore all those who can't fight, or fight and then lose? Hey, that sounds like Spencerism, not socialism. And in fact, superficially similar arguments are used by racists or theorists of eugenics, by simply redefining "society" in a convenient way. That's one reason why I tend to put extra care in handling such concepts: also because the world is not only made by the likes of Ivan Karamazov, but also by those of Smerdyakov.
Enzo