Posts Tagged “rights”

In a previous contribution I had referred to a component within an alternative perspective on relative moral quantification. I had spoken of a hierarchy based upon the degree of internalization or externalization of any conceivable concept. This time I would like to expand upon the relevance of such a hierarchy to the construction and function of any moral system set within the structures of logic.

Returning to an old question, why is it wrong for one person to kill another? Is it wrong for one person to kill another? Why, or why not? These are questions that religious texts do not answer to satisfaction.

Does an individual have the right to kill? If that question were to stand alone then the answer would be yes. The reason why the answer would be yes is because there is no conflict of interest involved. No target is defined and therefore there is no reason why an individual should not kill within the context of such a vacuum. This is why a large portion of the gaming industry features guilt-free killing. Puncturing a 3D image full of similarly virtual holes consists of acts upon the level of expression rather than action. It is acted out but not performed and the interests of no living organism come into play.

Lets turn the question around. Does an individual have the right to live? The answer is yes, because the individual has an interest staked in living. So if an individual has the right to live and an individual has the right to kill then how does this play out in the context of an individual wishing to kill another? The moment that the rights of one entity cross and contradict the rights of another entity, then one enters into the realm of responsibility – the prioritization of rights.

Rights and responsibilities. That is what this boils down to. The previous contribution outlines the basis for determining a moral hierarchy and it may now be appreciated, serving as a yard-stick by which the moral engine of rights and responsibilities is able to function.

Returning to the old question, an individual has a right both to live and to kill. However to live is to be while to kill is to act or do or choose. In the previous contribution it was proposed that the hierarchy should run via the adjectives to be, to think, to express and to do. Therefore while an individual has a right to be alive and the right to perform the act of killing, an individual also has the responsibility not to perform the act of killing as it contravenes another individual’s right to be alive. The right to be alive of one individual nullifies the right of another to perform the act of killing.

You are yourself every bit as much as I am myself. It seems obvious right? Well it is obvious but within debates both in Malta and World-wide we seem all too often to forget this essential truth. There is no element of choice in being who you are. It is a reflection of the sum of your personal interpretation of your internalized interpretation of your observations of the stimuli that surrounds your life.

Likewise thinking what you think is relatively involuntary and therefore not a choice. This is why many persons experience unpleasant thoughts that they desperately try to push out of their minds while other persons wonder where their previous more pleasant thoughts drifted from.

The way that you express yourself is more down to choice but even so there remains a degree of impulsiveness – of habits that are hard to suppress. In western countries there is the tendency to shake hands upon meeting. In fact I would break this section down into three parts. Firstly, one’s habits, secondly one’s communications, where one converts one’s thoughts into a medium through which those thoughts are successfully conveyed, and thirdly there is the performance, a series of acts that are devoid of the real implications attached to equivalent actions in reality (an example of such would be acting out a stabbing motion upon a stage). Lastly the actions that you perform are primarily down to choice, though the root may be entrenched within that which you think or are, and this completes the hierarchy from the internal to the external.

The reason why I consider this to be important lies within my belief that the legal and political systems within many countries fail to recognize the above in their daily dealings. The result is that the conclusions which are reached are logically incomplete and sometimes even incompatible with society at large.

Example fields where this blind-sightedness strikes include the inequitable treatment of different sexes, races, sexual orientations, marital statuses,political orientations, religions and more, within the context of identical circumstances. Likewise this same blind-sightedness applies to the loading of certain forms of deviance against other forms of deviances.

This aside, if one were to take the adjectives to be, to think, to express and to do, and were to throw each into the context of representing different grades of rights, then one would end up with a very simple, conservative yet liberal and also effective means of evaluating and comparing the conflicting interests that can make up some of the more profound of dilemmas. For example, is it wrong for one human to kill another? Why or why not? Do traditional instructions of indoctrination provide ourselves with a reason better than ‘because it is written in this text’ or ‘because the other person has the right to live’? The later statement is by far more credible a response than any variant of ‘because X says so’ but would we be able to explain this effectively or would we get caught within indefinite loops of ‘because’?

Through the acceptance of a certain hierarchy in the different degrees of rights and the use of such as a logical tool in the quantification and assessment of ethical questions one may find that the result would be a social fabric of greater consistency and with fewer elements of hypocrisy than that which more traditional legal concerns provide.