Yes, I specifically avoid identifying groups who’s rights we can take away because once we do that it becomes very tempting, and very easy, to define anyone you dislike as belonging to such a group. One can quickly find themselves in Ray Comfort territory.
But failing to identify such groups, while permitting ourselves to take freedoms away from individuals (as you do here), isn’t clearly an improvement.
If I trust myself to evaluate individuals justly before depriving them of freedoms, it’s not clear to me why I don’t trust myself to evaluate them justly before assigning them to groups.
Conversely, if I don’t trust myself to deal justly with individuals I dislike, it’s not clear to me why I trust myself to deprive them of freedoms.
It seems to me that this problem is hard enough to require better tools than the ones you seem to be attempting to solve it with.
I think that it’s much harder to prove an individual’s guilt of a crime in a court of law than it is to assign someone to a group.
If I trust myself to evaluate individuals justly before depriving them of freedoms, it’s not clear to me why I don’t trust myself to evaluate them justly before assigning them to groups.
I really hope I don’t live in society where you can deprive someone of freedoms on your own for any reason. :) (or any one person, for the record—I don’t have anything against you personally). I advocate “individual guilt” over “group affiliations” as criteria specifically because it requires much stronger standards of evidence.
As the most egregious example of this—it would be very hard to prove Anwar al-Awlaki has done anything illegal. And yet he’s been condemned to death simply by having the president place him in the group “terrorist”.
So, I guess my hope has been shattered, actually. :( I meant that “I really hope” sentence more as an aspiration statement, really.
I agree with you that some people in the US are being deprived of freedoms without legal recourse because powerful people have declared them to have certain group affiliations, like “terrorist,” and that in many cases this is a mistake.
I also suspect that some people in the US are being mistakenly deprived of their freedoms in courts of law, despite nominal legal recourse, without any particular group affiliation being asserted, because powerful people desire it.
I’d say (90+% confidence) there’s at least an order of magnitude more people in the second group than the first.
At this point I think the discussion gets murky, because legal recourse is often intentionally biased and group affiliation is often implicit. The drug war comes to mind. I’d assert that there’s a lot of overlap and we could reduce the second group a great deal by strengthening popular support of universal rights.
I certainly agree that the group/individual distinction gets murky when you get into the specifics of how societies actually make the choice to grant and withhold freedoms… that’s why I was questioning the distinction in the first place.
I agree that if there were strong and pervasive support for a common understanding of what freedoms people are entitled to by default (which is more or less what I understand by “universal rights”), there would be fewer cases of people being deprived of those freedoms, all else being equal.
It’s not clear to me that all else can be equal, though.
It’s also not clear to me that encouraging everyone to support universal rights, without at the same time encouraging us to support a specific model of universal rights, is anywhere near as effective.
That’s a disturbing page in several ways, but I don’t see anything on it which implies actively violating anyone’s rights, unless you interpret security from proselytism as a fundamental right.
I used it as an example because a favorite tactic of Ray Comfort is to ask someone “Have you ever told a lie?”. Which is tantamount to asking “Are you a human?”. After receiving an affirmative answer he asks “Well, doesn’t that make you a liar? And god says no liar can enter heaven.”
It’s tricky for me to wrap my head around the logic of faith and repentance descended from Calvinism, but there’s some pretty clever Dark Arts in there. “Your salvation-state has been predetermined by God, and there’s nothing you can do about it—but God only assigns salvation to people he expects to join his church and believe really hard. Do you think you’re smarter than God?”
I wonder if Calvinists would be unusually disposed toward one-boxing on Newcomb’s Problem?
Yes, I specifically avoid identifying groups who’s rights we can take away because once we do that it becomes very tempting, and very easy, to define anyone you dislike as belonging to such a group. One can quickly find themselves in Ray Comfort territory.
But failing to identify such groups, while permitting ourselves to take freedoms away from individuals (as you do here), isn’t clearly an improvement.
If I trust myself to evaluate individuals justly before depriving them of freedoms, it’s not clear to me why I don’t trust myself to evaluate them justly before assigning them to groups.
Conversely, if I don’t trust myself to deal justly with individuals I dislike, it’s not clear to me why I trust myself to deprive them of freedoms.
It seems to me that this problem is hard enough to require better tools than the ones you seem to be attempting to solve it with.
I think that it’s much harder to prove an individual’s guilt of a crime in a court of law than it is to assign someone to a group.
I really hope I don’t live in society where you can deprive someone of freedoms on your own for any reason. :) (or any one person, for the record—I don’t have anything against you personally). I advocate “individual guilt” over “group affiliations” as criteria specifically because it requires much stronger standards of evidence.
As the most egregious example of this—it would be very hard to prove Anwar al-Awlaki has done anything illegal. And yet he’s been condemned to death simply by having the president place him in the group “terrorist”.
So, I guess my hope has been shattered, actually. :( I meant that “I really hope” sentence more as an aspiration statement, really.
I agree with you that some people in the US are being deprived of freedoms without legal recourse because powerful people have declared them to have certain group affiliations, like “terrorist,” and that in many cases this is a mistake.
I also suspect that some people in the US are being mistakenly deprived of their freedoms in courts of law, despite nominal legal recourse, without any particular group affiliation being asserted, because powerful people desire it.
I’d say (90+% confidence) there’s at least an order of magnitude more people in the second group than the first.
At this point I think the discussion gets murky, because legal recourse is often intentionally biased and group affiliation is often implicit. The drug war comes to mind. I’d assert that there’s a lot of overlap and we could reduce the second group a great deal by strengthening popular support of universal rights.
I certainly agree that the group/individual distinction gets murky when you get into the specifics of how societies actually make the choice to grant and withhold freedoms… that’s why I was questioning the distinction in the first place.
I agree that if there were strong and pervasive support for a common understanding of what freedoms people are entitled to by default (which is more or less what I understand by “universal rights”), there would be fewer cases of people being deprived of those freedoms, all else being equal.
It’s not clear to me that all else can be equal, though.
It’s also not clear to me that encouraging everyone to support universal rights, without at the same time encouraging us to support a specific model of universal rights, is anywhere near as effective.
Eek… Who writes this stuff? This is definitely the negative side of Christianity, although hopefully not an influential sect...
That’s a disturbing page in several ways, but I don’t see anything on it which implies actively violating anyone’s rights, unless you interpret security from proselytism as a fundamental right.
I used it as an example because a favorite tactic of Ray Comfort is to ask someone “Have you ever told a lie?”. Which is tantamount to asking “Are you a human?”. After receiving an affirmative answer he asks “Well, doesn’t that make you a liar? And god says no liar can enter heaven.”
It’s tricky for me to wrap my head around the logic of faith and repentance descended from Calvinism, but there’s some pretty clever Dark Arts in there. “Your salvation-state has been predetermined by God, and there’s nothing you can do about it—but God only assigns salvation to people he expects to join his church and believe really hard. Do you think you’re smarter than God?”
I wonder if Calvinists would be unusually disposed toward one-boxing on Newcomb’s Problem?