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From: nelson_p@apollo.HP.COM (Peter Nelson)
Newsgroups: alt.individualism
Subject: Re: re Phil Ronzone's stereo
Message-ID: <481d3160.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM>
Date: 18 Jan 90 20:15:00 GMT
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Organization: Hewlett-Packard Apollo Division - Chelmsford, MA
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Michael Ellis posts...

>>#    If it is your point that rightness or wrongness are not
>>#    scientifically verifiable, I am in full agreement with you. 
>
>> So just how DOES he propose that we determine what rights must
>> be unvotable-away?   
>
>    Evidently your memory is very short. I just gave you a classic
>    example of an argument that voting rights should be unvotable-away. 
>    I will repeat it.
>
>ME>    If rights are and ought to be whatever the majority at any given
>ME>    point decides, then there is nothing wrong if a majority votes
>ME>    away all rights and gives total power to a small elite. Something
>ME>    very much like that happened in Nazi Germany. Certain rights must
>ME>    be absolutely unvotable-away. That is the important sense in which
>ME>    rights ought to be more primordial than government itself. 

>Peter> So just how DOES he propose that we determine what rights must
>Peter> be unvotable-away?   

 
>    This is of course not a mathematical or scientific argument.
>    You've got to give up your idiotic notion that the subject of
>    ethics might have anything to do with scientific verifiability.
   
   This is *not* MY idiotic notion!   It is the Objectivists who have
   been claiming that ethical values are subject to logical, 
   objective analysis!   I only brought up science to compare 
   how a REAL objective, rigorous approach works, to contrast
   it with the Objectivist's alleged intellectual rigor.   Sheeesh!

   
>    The continued failure of the human sciences should make it pretty
>    clear that science is not a particularly practical way to
>    understand human beings and their real world problems.


   No kidding!   I've been saying all along, and other readers 
   of the net will verify, that *nobody* has demonstrated the 
   ability to apply scientific principles to ethical, political,
   or other large-scale human phenomena.   Remember, the original
   thread here was about Objectivism.

>> Actually the question is purely academic; in the Real World
>> nothing is unvotable-away, which has been my point all along.
>
>    Constitutions, like promises, corporations, and other artifacts of
>    the human mind, are exactly what we make of them. That, however,
>    is not arbitrary, in the sense that I can arbitrarily assume that
>    promises are frogs or laboratory tables. They are arbitrary in the
>    sense that what they are is determined by consensus and agreement
                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

   Bingo, Mike!   Who do you think started the "rights as social
   convention" thread?   ( hint: his initials are P.N.)

   It is interesting that a week or so ago both Mr. Ellis and Mr. Ronzone 
   appeared, to me anyway, to be defending the notion that there 
   exists some absolute, universal ethical standards and at least 
   hinting that it is possible to divine what this standard might
   be.  But in the last day or so they both seemed to have retreated
   from this position.   

                                                       ---Peter