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From: ellis@chips.sri.com (Michael Ellis)
Newsgroups: alt.individualism
Subject: Re: re Phil Ronzone's stereo
Message-ID: <8158@unix.SRI.COM>
Date: 18 Jan 90 16:07:00 GMT
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Reply-To: ellis@chips.sri.com.UUCP (Michael Ellis)
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Organization: Berkeley Private Language Institute
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> Peter Nelson

>  [Phil] hasn't shown any ability to to actually counter an idea he
>  disagrees with with an idea of his own yet in this discussion.

    What makes you think your postings are in any way superior to Phil's?
 
> Perhaps so, but this discussion has been about HOW we decide what
> those rights are and WHO gets to make those decisions.  

> Earlier, Mr. Ellis posted that...

>#    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. 

    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.
    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.

> 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

    Now constitutions, like promises, are part of the real world insofar
    as  the participants are determined to abide by their
    conditions. They aren't, like physical laws, automatically obeyed.
    If humans could figure out a more practical and just way to do
    things, we might indeed decide to do away with the whole machinery
    of constitutions and laws and rights and so on.

    Now a government is (or ought to be) whatever its constitution
    says it is. The most obvious and direct way to make rights
    unvotable-away is to write that very declaration right into the
    government's constitution. By definition, such rights are
    un-votable away, and so long as the people are determined to
    protect that constitution, that right will stand protected,
    barring attack from without. Note something remarkable here: the
    consensus is determined to protect something that overrides the
    even will of the consensus itself, namely the will of the individual.

    The question isn't academic; it is a practical, real world issue;
    or at least it remains a real world issue to the extent that it
    involves commitment and practical action.

> But Mr. Ellis says they "must" be.  Why "must" they be? 

    The prima facie evidence is on my side. That voting rights must be
    unvotable-away is the practical conclusion from the experience of
    generations of humans trying out different ways of government.
    Recent events in eastern europe seem to bear this out. If you
    think otherwise, the burden of the proof is on you.

>-michael