Posted by
David Eric Smith on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Sources-of-Innovation-tp4566136p4575780.html
Nick et al.,
A thought on rights, not well-formed. It comes from reading some of
Dan Dennett's work on free will and causation, and wondering how I
would frame the terms differently if I were not drawing on the long
philosophical tradition in discussing this subject, but rather from
the work of my ethologist colleagues on how animal personalities,
behaviors, and identities develop in the social contexts they both
construct and require.
My default would be that the whole human notion of causal efficacy
and the role of the will has emerged from the need of social animals
for group context, first for their mental development, and second for
its ongoing function (first and second only in a presentational
sense, both are concurrent and ongoing, and probably also logically
inter-dependent). It seems to me a problem of distributed control
over systems with huge random backgrounds, and small regularities
that we notice as the describable parts of function. The
evolutionary question has been (over and over), which parts of the
regularity will be canalized as part of development "within" the
context of the individual, and which parts go under the control of
distributed mechanisms constructed by coherent actions of members
that form the "group" as an entity with qualitatively distinct
dynamics. "Cause" (in the psychological sense) becomes the part of
your action that you implicitly recognize depends on group embedding
to take one form versus another, and "freedom" is some kind of
admission that the large random background is capable of taking on
elements of behavioral regularity, but that an appeal to some notion
of individuality in isolation is not enough to make sense of what
form that behavior will take. I know that this could sprout into a
long and exhausting disagreement, but I am hoping there is some form
of this argument that could be defended reasonably. But I'll put it
down here, except as a framing of some terms.
What does this have to do with rights etc.? The notion of right
presumably is the partner of the notion of responsibility, and the
only interesting sense in which I have a "right" to something is the
sense in which you feel a responsibility to help make it available to
me, or in which I can act on you to try to induce you to feel and
obey such a sense of responsibility. This "I" may be very much a
reference to the group coordination, as well as the way I instantiate
parts of it in my apparently individual actions.
So to the extent that there is a mechanistic or evolutionary question
about what are rights, it would seem very wrong to me to focus
primarily on individual development while excluding the recognition
of the group as a thing that has also undergone development in some
evolutionary context. Perhaps more strongly, it seems strange to
think that one could even talk about what the individual is, in
proper context, without constant reference to the group embedding.
i agree with what I think is one of your impulses in this, which is
to resist supposing that too much of this is really conscious social
choice or negotiation, because that may constitute only a small part
of the mechanism by which norms can form or change. On the other
hand, deliberate negotiation may constitute _some_ part of that
mechanism, and if we think it has ever had durable effects, it is
worthy of part of the discussion.
Sorry to argue obscurely and drag in things that probably could have
been better omitted, but this is a subject I have been wondering for
a while about how to frame in some coherent or interesting way.
Thanks,
Eric
On Feb 15, 2010, at 9:32 AM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:
> Glen
> See
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ and don't skip the bit
> that says "disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in
> barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind". A
> right isn't a natural consequence... but then I think you jest.
> Thanks
> Robert
>
> On 2/15/10 8:32 AM, glen e. p. ropella wrote:
>> Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 02/14/2010 10:49 AM:
>>
>>> Rights talk is madness.
>>>
>> That's the most true sentence I've seen on this mailing list. [grin]
>> Nobody has a right to anything. Some of us are lucky enough to be in
>> the right social classes to take advantage of particular legal
>> systems;
>> but that's the whole extent of it. If there are any rights at
>> all, they
>> are those provided by our biology.
>>
>> E.g. I have the right to be hungry when I don't eat. I have the
>> right
>> to be euphoric when I hunt. I have the right to pain and death in
>> the
>> freezing dawn in my cardboard shanty under the bridge.
>>
>> Everything else is ideology and illusion. Luckily, there are
>> those of
>> us who are crafty enough to exploit the gullibility of those
>> around us
>> so that our rights seem more real than theirs.
>>
>>
>
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