Tom, thanks for continuing to engage in discussion.

It’s rather hard to see how the defeasibility of an argument for the divine right of kings, based in any case on a specific supernatural metaphysics, permits the inference that it will be impossible to make a persuasive case for grounding some contemporary action-guiding principles though a naturalistic metaphysics. After all, many human projects that would have been seen as impossible or unimaginable in the 13th century have been realised during the past 700 years.

Where you refer to ‘the quest to logically ground human “rights” ...' and to ‘how anyone acquires this ... nonexistent and illogical “right” ... to coerce others’, and where I refer to ‘a metaphysical question about grounding ‘rights’ naturalistically in something other than the brute facts of the empirically demonstrable’, what is involved, on my construal, is a dual aspect of rights that could be characterised as follows.

Empirical (R-Emp): Rights, whether to coerce or to be exempt from coercion (at random: to levy taxes, to assemble with others, to emprison, to practice a religion, to a fair wage, to self-defence, to impose a traffic fine), are variously asserted, denied, assented to, argued for, introduced, withdrawn, modified, and so on. Under this aspect, the existence of rights is a matter of observation, fact and public discourse.

Metaphysical (R-Met): The web of individual logical/cognitive operations which underpins intersubjective cooperation in maintaining, justifying or enabling rights to have the mode of empirical existence (R-Emp) that they do. To say that this web is metaphysical is to say that it is explanatorily engaged in excess of the empirical realities to which it points. It can be seen to apply to rights in a similar way in which it applies to money: under an empirical aspect (equivalently, M-Emp), I use a $50 banknote in a transaction; under a metaphysical aspect (M-Met), money is referable to a set of logical/cognitive operations in the way just described without which the (M-Emp) transaction would have no practical significance.

In saying that rights are ‘nonexistent’ one clearly cannot mean rights under the (R-Emp) aspect without denying social facts and observable states of affairs, since rights (R-Emp) do have an empirical mode of existence and are appealed to all the time under this aspect in an action-guiding way. But, as I understand it, you are in fact using ‘nonexistent’ as a way of saying that you do not believe particular arguments for rights (R-Emp), underpinned by (R-Met), can be logically justified. However, in saying that some ethical claim is not logically justified you are saying, equivalently, that it has no right to be considered justified, and thus you are obliged to use a language or a concept of rights in order to make this assertion. Moreover, one cannot, as far as I can see, get round this simply by claiming that the judgement itself is a value-neutral logical judgement about a value-laden object (rights), because this begs the question whether it's possible to make value-neutral logical judgments on ethical issues, that is, without ethical assumptions about rightness and wrongness entering into the judgment. (The fact/value distinction is much debated but unresolved, and my assumption here is that the possibility of making value-neutral logical assertions about something like rights is very limited.

I don't see this. "Rights" could be justified or not justified by logic, perhaps, but the ability to make claims about them is different. The ability to make a claim does not equate to the right to make a claim, and while we have the ability to say that rights are not justified by logic, this is not contradictory because we are not invoking a right to do it. (We even have the ability to make a claim about rights and logic that can be shown to be logically inconsistent).

Are you saying that "rights" have the same type of value that fiat currency has? I can certainly see empirical evidence for this.

Mcfate, the ability to make a claim, as I see it, is the acquired cognitive ability to engage in some discursive practice (in science, economics, history, ethics, sport, whatever) and to make the kind of assertions which are normatively regarded within that practice as ‘claims’. The making of a claim under those conditions supposes that arguments can be adduced which will allow it to be considered as justified or not justified according to the norms of the practice, which means that a claim has a right to be considered justified when it meets the appropriate normative criteria.

Consequently, I have no difficulty at all in agreeing with you that ‘the ability to make a claim does not equate to the right to make a claim’ because, as I hope that disentanglement may show, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m not referring to ‘the ability to make a claim’, but to whether that claim when made has a right to be considered justified in its appropriate context, which was the gist of my comment that you’ve quoted.

What I’m suggesting in general is that ‘... has a right ... ’ is a highly mobile and catch-all predicate which transfers with relative ease from apparently value-free logical assertions to ethically-loaded assertions of all kinds while appearing to import something radically different as it goes.

1. Yes, I think the defeasibility of the divine rights of kings may be a bit of a strawman, but I see a relationship between the belief in the divine rights of kings and the belief in "certain unalienable rights" "endowed by their Creator" mentioned in the US Declaration of Independence. Old Testament Judeo-Christi-Islamic ethics in combination with utlilitarian ethics, with the state as a father figure, have arguably stood the ancient Golden Rule on its head wherin homosexual acts are now considered to be unethical by many, but killing innocent people with drone-fired rockets is not unethical. I don't think that I am distorting the facts or being merely inflamatory to say that it was this same combination of ethcs that the National Socialist Workers (NAZI) Party argued for under the Third Reich.
Note Hitler's appeal to altruism:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf6_zKLbykQ
(Okay, what's another straw man between friends?)

....

4. I'm not sure that the Golden Rule (esp. in platinum form) is not naturalistic in that it seems to conform to basic human nature the world over, one example being don't lie to people because they don't like to be lied to, or to lie, as evidenced by stress indicators in polygraph tests.

The statements above have the commonality of extreme skepticism I have about the acquistion of ethical knowledge since the time of Confucius' Golden Rule of about 500 BC, including Judeo-Christi-Islamic "knowledge", the philosophical "knowledge" of Aquinas, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Rawls, et al (including the discoveries of "rights" and "social contracts"), and the economic "knowledge" of Keynes, Gaibraith, Krugman et al predicated upon coercive states. True scientific knowledge, on the other hand, has, of course, exploded.

What I see is that in context a claim can logically be considered justified or not logically considered justified. If you are saying that this is a claim 'having the right' to be considered justified, does this mean that a right is some sort of logical measure? As I normally understand it, a right is a type of 'authority' over something (such as the right to make a claim, even an unjustified claim), as opposed to 'ability' (such as the ability to make a claim). Unlike a legal right, though, an 'inherent' right can only really be enacted by the person claiming the right (if I have a right to hit you then I can exercise that right), though this fails with many 'negative' rights (if I have an inherent right not to be hit, this does not protect me from being hit). A legal right has legal recourse (you could be put in gaol for hitting me, maybe).

I suppose logic could have authority over a claim, but I think I only ever see it as right to consider a certain type of claim justified, not a right that the claim has, or that logic has over the claim.

However, (6) is a logically structured, semantically virtuous and correctly assertable sentence in English:

(6) This formula has a right to be considered the most important theoretical achievement of the century in mathematics.

So is (7), your example:

(7) I have a right to hit you.

Dovoz,
I read everything that Elizabeth George, John Grisham, and Stephen White write, and a lot of other fiction, but rarely read nonfiction. Recently, however, my wife got a book by one her favorite authors, Margaret Atwood, which she thought was fiction, but is not, Payback, and I've just started reading it. On page 19 Atwood says:
"As Robert Wright says in his 1995 book, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are, "Reciprocal altruism has presumably shaped the texture not just of human emotion, but of human cognition."

And so on. I may comment on it further after I've finished it. I mention it because I think that this is related to the kind of discoveries you want to see discussed in the pursuit of satisfactorily grounded objective ethical principles. Interesting, and all well and good.

However, I'd like to further present the case of how IMHO the current reliance on utilitarian ethics may be distructive to over-all human well-being due to its enablement of statism and statism's handmaidens, Keynesianism and Keynesian-style command economics. So, what I'd like to do this evening or tomorrow is to cut and paste a few clips on this relationship. It's off-topic, and not even exactly in the category of ethics, but no one will be required to read it.

Tom, there’s certainly a wealth of evidence that would support Wright’s cited observation, and ethology is a fruitful source. Jessica Flack and Frans de Waal, for example, table 11 tendencies in nonhuman animals which they think of as constituting ‘the four ingredients of morality’ (Any Animal Whatsoever, in Leonard D Katz (Ed.), Evolutionary Origins of Morality, Imprint Academic, 2000: 22). These include giving succour, cognitive empathy and reciprocity, and it's eminently plausible to suppose that these are the proto-forms of empirically identified features of the neurocognitive architecture of modern humans on which cultural evolution has built its superstructure. Ethics is obviously concerned with factors limiting altruism, whether reciprocal or unconditional. Co-authors evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson and philosopher Elliott Sober acknowledge the difficulty humans have in extending altruism beyond in-groups of varying size and scope and observe prudentially that ‘if selection promotes an altruistic concern for the welfare of one’s near and dear, it also may promote indifference or malevolence toward outsiders’ (Unto Others, Harvard University Press, 1998: 326).

I’ll be interested to read your comments and observations on Atwood in relation to ‘the way we are’ and perhaps to statism as well.

Hmm, I have to think about this a bit. A right, to me, gives me the impression of a formula which describes a morally possible action (a subset of physically possible actions) - but this type of formula doesn't give me a right, it is a right. In the same way, the formula mention in (6) describes something, but has no possible actions (physical or moral). There might exist a right which describes that accurate, correct or logical information should have precedence when considering action (where considering or decision-making are themselves actions which can therefore be described by a right), but this applies to the actions of people, rather than the formula. However, "this formula has a right to be taken seriously" is convenient shorthand, so even though I questioned your usage of the word "right", I suppose I should accept it.

I would say, perhaps, that there could be a right which describes how people should and should not treat baby Ibrahim, which we could then use shorthand for and ascribe to the baby.

Also, if 'living' is considered an action, then there could certainly be a right related to this. However, 'being a formula' doesn't involve any action or process, so the shorthand notation definitely works, as I mentioned earlier, but the formula itself doesn't directly have a 'right'.