Can anyone think of a right that doesn't somehow involve a sense of self and of rightful ownership of something? At the moment, I can't. It seems to m...
Perhaps there's just no good justification for claims of rights at all. Maybe it's just something we pulled out of our collective asses. So far, I hav...
Consider that sometimes, the "my stuff" that is under discussion is such things as slaves. How would we respond to the Confederate slave-owner claimin...
It would seem that all our rights really amount to is a kind of social agreement to respect certain feelings that are more or less universal in the cu...
This isn't about the question of whether S has been proven wrong. I am interested in examining this concept of rights, since most seem to just assert ...
A feeling, especially if it is not shared by everyone, seems a poor justification for a universal claim and a restriction of behavior that you want to...
Suppose we find an example of a historical culture in which men feel that their wives and children belong to them, and that therefore, they have a rig...
Some rights seem to be mostly a matter of legal convention. "You have a right to an attorney..." The claim that people have a right to reproduce would...
It would seem that the claim that I have a right to X is often understood as being something like a claim that my doing X isn't illegal under the pres...
When a person claims that people have a right to X, they are making a universal claim. And they are saying that I should respect their right. But if t...
I decided to start another thread because I wanted to zero in on the entitlement or rights claim being made and the OP in that thread made his intenti...
Hanover, your comments are genuinely helpful in moving toward the actual material I'd like to get us thinking about. Thank you. So far we seem to have...
Fine. We'll be off-topic here then. I was trying to avoid diverting another thread, but that apparently wasn't appreciated. So let's examine the conce...
Forget it. I thought there was an opportunity to do some actually philosophy here. But it seems you aren't interested in that. Haven't you ever read P...
Different question. Related, sure, but different. I want to focus on why people think they are entitled to have children. Are they justified in believ...
If you are interested in defending your claim about entitlements, please do it in this thread I created just for the purpose of focusing on the questi...
Are there any other current threads specifically about the entitlement to have children? I tried to direct interest in this question over here from th...
The question of whether we should or shouldn't have children is being done to death in a thousand other threads. I want to zoom in on this one particu...
I already made clear my reason for asking you what rights are. I don't think you can justify your claim that we are entitled to have children. You acc...
This thread isn't about the question of whether or not people should have children. It is about the idea that we are entitled to have them. Sure. Stil...
I just looked it up in the dictionary. Basically it says that entitlements are rights. And if I look up rights, basically it says they are entitlement...
When I asked you what a right is, I was ribbing you a bit because what you said here is a little like the old "dormitive virtue" tautology: dormitive ...
Do we have evidence that it "arises" at that point? This seems to imply that it wasn't there before the arising. Perhaps it is more a matter of elemen...
I am not so sure that's true. There is something about an all-too-human God with character flaws that makes him far less believable. A being capable o...
One question that comes to mind for me when reading some of the posts in this thread is this: can a person ever be said to belong to another? More spe...
It is probably not 'either/or'. I don't see why such concerns can't be part of a large web of motivational vectors that end up summing one way or anot...
One way to try to support free will is to attack the strongholds of determinism, such as the causal closure of the physical, particularly where we, as...
I think it very difficult, if not impossible, to defend the idea of free will with rational argument. And it seems easy to disprove. So the matter wou...
It is probably the same mechanism by which we gain tolerance to drugs and suffer withdrawal symptoms when the drugs are abruptly discontinued. The ner...
I suspect that's probably not true for all antinatalists. I get the impression that many simply believe it is better to never have been born, period. ...
The kind of unconscious, thoughtless living that your recommendation seems to suggest is not in my nature. That's the problem with a lot of procreatio...
That's not quite what I was getting at, this growing from suffering that you read into what I said. And I object to your accusation of sadism, as I do...
When you read the various philosophers, you will find that they tend to refer back to earlier ones. Philosophy has a distinct historical dimension. It...
I've long been troubled by the question of antinatalism. I feel ambivalent about it. I see much of value in life and consciousness as we know it as hu...
After reading your post and responding, I later listened to a talk by Evan Thompson while doing some yard work: link Very interesting! I was rather im...
That is a thought-provoking post. Yes. I don't fully understand what Evan Thompson is saying as I am not familiar with his work and the context of wha...
I've not yet looked deeply into Buddhist doctrine to try to understand exactly what their conception of a self is to see what it is exactly that is be...
The nature of consciousness certainly isn't clear. And epiphenomenalism is a position with fatal defects. I feel confident in saying that nobody under...
Yes. That's in full agreement with what I said. Maybe I could have been more clear. Here is what I said: I should perhaps have been more explicit. In ...
You can see stars because photons are being emitted by them and then absorbed by electrons in your eye. The photon's "path", if such a thing makes sen...
Also, a curious thing about photons is that we never observe them in travel. We only register when one is absorbed. We think we see light as it travel...
I believe you are mistaken. If Bob in a ship is moving relative to me at close to the speed of light, his ship will be length-contracted. At the speed...
Something like the Rawlsian veil of ignorance can lead to conclusions quite unlike the ones we are expected to arrive at. Suppose we do a thought expe...
We could dispense with the valuation implicit in "superior" and just say "genes for more X", faster running for example. How's that? I should make it ...
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