| | Joe, thanks for explaining my position. You are certainly correct that what I meant by "justify" was to "give a good reason for" -- to "rationally support."
You wrote, In terms of the semantic debate, I understand where Bill is coming from, but disagree. He thinks rights denote an obligation, and so in contexts where there cannot be an obligation (these emergency situations), they must not be "rights". That's correct. All it means to say that I have a right against your stealing my wallet is (a) that you ought not to steal it, and (b) that if you do, then I am morally justified in using force against you to reclaim it. If it were not the case that you ought to refrain from stealing my wallet, then it would make no sense to say that I had "a right" against your stealing it. The latter statement would simply be incoherent and meaningless. This assumes that moral "principles" tell you that you must do something, and the moral "principles" just don't apply in some contexts. We went around and around on that topic. My belief, as I stated above, is that principles provide guidance by providing knowledge of likely consequences of our actions. They're epistemological tools. And so I don't have the problem that my principles disappear in certain contexts. They're just as valid in emergencies as elsewhere. Right, I understand that that's your position. Where I part company is that in order for a principle to provide guidance, it must specify those contexts in which it does and does not apply. If the principle is "Don't initiate force when it is against your self-interest," then in order to provide guidance beyond simply the injunction not to act against your self-interest, it has to tell you the conditions under which it is against your self-interest to initiate force and the conditions under which it isn't. If it just says, "Don't initiate force when it's against your self-interest," then it provides no more guidance than a principle which simply says, "Don't act against your self-interest."
That's the crux of my disagreement with you, Joe. As you noted, we went round and round on this before. So, I'm not sure if we can resolve our differences. We seemed to have reached an impasse. But if you think that principles do tell you what you must do, and do denote obligations, you only have two choices. Do what Bill does, and say the rights simply evaporate in those contexts. In this case, he is just arguing that the term doesn't apply, not that suddenly it's perfectly okay to go on a murdering spree. I wouldn't say that they simply "evaporate" in those contexts. I would say that they don't exist in those contexts to begin with -- that with respect to the self-interested aggressor and his victim, the principle of rights doesn't cover their context. The other option is to insist that even in emergency situations where respecting rights would be against your actual self-interest, you should follow them anyway. This puts so-called "principles" ahead of self-interest. It makes the tools more important than the ends to which they're supposed to serve.
I disagree with both of these options, and I think they share the same fundamental flaw. They try to make moral principles into moral rules. Once this error is committed, you're stuck with two undesirable positions. If I had to pick, I'd go with Bill's, because his position means discarding the moral rules when they don't apply and resorting to self-interest. My position is not that the moral rules (or principles) should be "discarded" in emergency situations, but that they don't cover those situations, to begin with.
I hope this brings a little more clarity to my position, and explains my differences with Joe on this issue.
- Bill
(Edited by William Dwyer on 9/23, 1:05pm)
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