>Insofar as one goes about making comparisons of this dreadful sort, I think
>it sort of odd that defenders of imperialsim insist on counting against
>communism the famine deaths of the dekulakization campaign in the USSR or the
>Greal Leap Forward in China, but think it perverse ti count against
>capitalisim any famines that happen in capitalist countries. Unless they're
>Irish, inw hich case theyw ill blame it on the English, but not on Political
>Economy.
I agree that there _is_ a double standard in counting (even apart from an empirical question of how to count). What happens under capitalism = natural; what happens under socialism = unnatural. Isn't this double standard inherent in theories of natural rights? The market is natural, while the state is artificial; the former is a matter of economics, while the latter falls under the purview of politics and ethics. The concept of natural rights, I think, emerged with the creation of separate spheres: economics, politics, & ethics; and it is this very separation that protects the market ideologically. (The notion of free speech came into being at the same time, with the separation of speech from action, intention from consequence; we can say what we want, as long as what we say doesn't have any direct consequence contrary to the maintenance of the social order.)
In your post on "Marx and Woman," you wrote:
>Nozick, however, says--I think this is a usefully pragmatic way of
>putting it--that natural righta talk just captured the idea that there are
>things you can't do to people _no matter what_ (maybe excepting moral
>catastrophe),a nd this is not because of social convention but because it
>would be wrong to do those things. Put that way, natural rights theory
>combines moral realism (independence of socisl convention) with the idea that
>rights trump welfare. I agree with both of those positions, so I am a ntural
>rights theorist.
If rights trump welfare, why is it wrong to let people starve through the workings of the market as long as you don't deprive people of rights? Certainly, Nozick doesn't help us here. John Rawls confines his social contract to a fancifully autarkic heuristic of a closed economy. Peter Singer, being a consequentialist utilitarian, is actually more helpful, but since he rejects Marxism, what he comes up with is a notion of charity and international aid (with conditions attached -- utilitarians often don't mind making people "happy" through social control). Neither rights nor utility helps us explain, much less fight against, the conditions that produce famines.
Yoshie