I have been following this thread since last weekend, so had already come across that post and further. It is all very clear and to be agreed with until this:
Can you elaborate on that it (natural right to life) exists even it is not recognized? I think that that is a very important statement and that the rest of your argument depends on this being true.
No problem.
A crazy person breaks into your home and shoots you dead. Cops come and arrest crazy person. Crazy person says "why are you arresting me?". Cops say "because you killed someone". Crazy guy says, "I don't recognize his right to life, therefore he has no right to life, therefore I have done nothing wrong". The cops say "if you had recognized his rights you wouldn't have killed him and then you really wouldn't have done anything wrong."
See, your right to life wasn't recognized, and yet, objectively, the guy who killed you has opened himself to force (arrest and imprisonment). The reason it exists is because your right to life stems from pure logic, not from social norms or law or any kind of negotiated anything. It exists because purely logically when someone initiates force against you, they open themselves to the use of force against them.
Now, did you right to life protect your life? No, you're dead. So what good is it? Well, it's how society can morally put your killer in jail - and that actually does a great deal of good.
Insofar as our example where lion does eat the springbok, it ate the springbok. Both lives intersected by coincidence and the immediate goals/available energy of each contributed to the outcome. There are also outcomes where lion doesn't eat springbok, including outcomes where lion doesn't survive.
Yes there are alternative outcomes, but they don't change the nature of this example - and this example is what illustrates the right to life. The example where the lion decides to go to sleep instead of eating the antelope, or decides that africa is boring and decides to take his own life, are not helpful for illustrating rights.
Therefore suitability-makes-ability, I don't accept (or, by dint, know) that "the mightier was able to subvert the will of the less mighty". I've already said that 'might' as a multiplication of strength is not an indicator of potential success and I've also said that 'will' is nothing more than an instinctive driver.
Suitability, might, fitness, cunning, intelligence, agility, all of it is equivalent in this discussion. None of them is objectively superior to any of the rest. So your will is not suddenly objectively better just because you found a means of imposing it on someone else (whatever that means is). It is subjectively better, and subjectively worse. Once you decide it is subjectively better, you've crossed a line - objectively.
Was of more value in this instance; yes. Is always of more value; not necessarily.
See above. Doesn't matter.
Agreed...ish. Talent, if we replace it with ability.
See above. Doesn't matter.
Subjectively we can say "well, we're logically opening ourselves to the use of force" but that doesn't make it so for lion or springbok. Springbok#2 may recognise "the dog-elephant-with-no-nose that ate Dave" but doesn't conceive of anything other than a potential threat to life. Like all springbok he treats most noises/movements this way.
None of that changes anything. Regardless of whether or not the lion or the antelope know what they're doing, they are doing it. Regardless of whether any action is taken, objective conclusions can be drawn.
Interestingly, rights work that way among humans too. If someone steals from you, they violate your property rights (we haven't gotten there yet). At that point they are open to force against them - like you taking the property back and putting them in jail. However, you don't have to act on that. You don't have to report it, you don't even have to notice it. It may never get acted on, and the theft might go completely unnoticed by the universe (much like the dead antelope). Yet, if you had wanted to act, there are objective things that can be said about that action.
The potential for the use of force against springbok isn't increased any more by our example (except in a geographically-narrow scope of learned-behaviour amongst the ongoing lion population)
Correct. Only the implications of the use of force against the lion.
therefore I can't accept that the there is any logical invitation-to or acceptance-of the use of force against oneself. The possibility of such an occurrence hasn't changed.
The possibility of such an occurrence certainly has not changed in an anarchistic scenario where no creature is capable of understanding their actions (like lions and antelopes). And no, the lion doens't invite the use of force against himself (consciously), and absolutely there is no acceptance of it, that's
way out of the question. What is present though is the logical consequence that the lion is open to force, his own action demonstrate that objectively.
I can't accept that. Each life was goal-driven in the instance as we agree. The likelihood that lion would use greater kinetic force than springbok at the moment of interaction was always high. The springbok had no right against that and was just subject to the same probabilities as the lion. We presume that in this case the lion had the balance of probability on its side as a very very tiny percentage of such interactions actually end up with springbok for tea.
In a face-to-face exchange between two lions one will inevitably deliver the first cuff. That doesn't change the balance of right, the only thing that changes is the cuffer's perception of the cuffee's reaction and the cuffee's perception of the amount of danger that he is in. Retaliatory actions will be based on the need to survive and nothing more and that will be their only relationship to the initial cuff.
You keep expecting rights to change something physical about the interaction. The presence of rights doesn't change the state of a single atom in the interaction. What it does is allow anyone to determine the nature of the interaction and the logical consequences of it. I wonder if I can think another example of something like that, hell almost anything is an example of that.
You throw a spear at an antelope. If the spear hits, you eat tonight, if it misses, you do not - these are potential objective consequences of the action (not the only ones, just two). You can draw these conclusions from your action, and yet, those logical consequences change nothing about the nature of the spear flying through the air. It will either hit or not, the consequences of the act have no influence on the act itself.
If you find that confusing, just ignore it. I don't feel like I did a wonderful job with that example.
I agree with much of what you say but I can't agree that the rights exist simply because we say they do in a hypothetical framework. I'd go so far as to say that I don't even agree that they exist there.
The hypothetical is an exercise in applying objectivity to a scenario. Real-life scenarios can also have it applied. So they exist because you can do the same in reality.
There is no natural right. The lion doesn't have the cognitive ability to observe rights because there are none, its not part of lion.
There is an objective right regardless of whether the lion has the cognitive ability to observe it or not - precisely because it is objective.
Human prsioners do have the cognitive ability to observe rights because in order to simply be prisoners their position is a product of social (and hopefully democratic and legal) evolution. They still don't actually have any rights as an organism, they have to negotiate a shared likelihood of survival like everybody else.
They may have to "negotiate a shared likelihood of survival", but they also have (or had) rights, objectively, and so do the people around them. Us stating our positions at each other like this isn't really helping further the conversation. I suggest we stick to points where we disagree and skip the part where we re-iterate our positions.
