So I just saw that "coffee" commercial...
And I couldn't think of a good title, so I said that.
When I was reading for class today I got caught by the idea of waiving a right, just like most everyone in our class did. There are two points I want to bring up in the blog post. Of the three “main” inalienable rights “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” I do not think that any of those are really inalienable. A rational agent should be allowed to waive any of these free rights. I do not think it would necessarily be right to do it arbitrarily, but I also do not think that a fully rational agent would do so arbitrarily. Can freedom really be freedom if it prevents you from making a decision when you are of sound mind (the decision to forfeit your right to the freedom)? That does not seem to make sense to me, that feels like a limited freedom. Funnily enough, intuition seems to be playing both sides here, because as Kelly said Mill would argue that having the freedom to give up your freedom feels like the contradiction!
I need more than an argument from intuition, but I am not sure if I have more than that right now. I feel that if someone is of sound mind they should be able to waive their rights, a rational being’s autonomy should be respected. I agree with Kant that the ability to be a rational autonomous being is valuable and should be respected. But I also do not think that its value makes it so an agent cannot rationally give up their right to it.
posted by Jen Ming at
8:49 PM
2 Comments:
It seems to me that "inalienable rights" in the Declaration of Independence refers not the the idea that they can never be waived or forfeited, but that they can't be coercively taken away by someone else for the greater good. In this sense, your inalienable rights are essentially the non-threshold constraints that others have when interacting with you. Inalienable = absence of a threshold.
To interpret inalienable in a stronger sense would make the Declaration of Independence logically flawed. How else could the existence of these inalienable rights be made consistent with the existence of the death sentence (removal of life) and prison (removal of liberty and the pursuit of happiness). Jefferson's point, I believe, is that in these cases, the parties who lose their rights are guilty. Through their actions, they have forfeited their inalienable rights. If we brought Jefferson into our class today and talked to him, I believe that he would point to the case of the town drunk and the sheriff. That is the paradigmatic case of the right to life being immorally violated by someone who wishes to maximize the good.
Thus, inalienable rights (in the Jeffersonian sense) can be forfeited by a guilty party. Can they also be waived as part of a self-interested, rational choice? There was an institution in the colonial period that is relevant to this question. Poor people in England would sell themselves into indentured servitude (essentially, become a slave) for a set amount of time. For those who are unfamiliar with this practice, here is a quote from Wikipedia: "An Indentured Servant is a bonded labourer - a labourer under contract to work for an employer for a specific amount of time, about 4-7 years, to pay off a passage to a new country. Typically the employer provided little if any monetary pay, but was responsible for accommodation, food, other essentials, and training." According to a Google search, Jefferson had at least a few indentured servants, indicating that he approved of this practice. If he indeed did approve, this further supports my interpretation of "inalienable".
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Joshua Frear, at 11:25 AM
I think it is a funny thing indeed to be able to “give up one’s autonomous freedom”. In order to do so, I would think you would need some serious sci-fi mind-controlling technology...otherwise I don’t think one could really and truly give up such a thing. At any rate, (And this is a rare case) I agree with Frier about inalienable rights, if they exist, I think they are only inalienable insofar as they are only as such in respect to what others can do by force. So, to use familiar language: what one can do to oneself falls outside the scope of inalienable rights.
However, do I believe in inalienable rights? I haven’t been a fan of constraints, and I wasn’t too fond of options. Kelly says Aristotle believed in both...but you know, the guy wasn’t perfect, I just happen to like a lot of the things he had to say. Maybe I do not want to agree with Aristotle on this one. I’m not sure yet, because I’m still thinking it over. If I do concede that there are inalienable rights, then I probably have to be a fan of some type of constraints (if only the kind that have absolutely no possibility for threshold).
But maybe this doesn’t have to cash out into constraint-dom. Perhaps it is sufficient to think that they are necessary conditions of having a good, well-formed character. Such that, it is not that one is constrained against taking them away (by all means, they can if there is sufficient moral justification...which might be very hard to achieve) but these things are so fundamental to character development that to mess with them, it would be hard not to be of bad character. Therefore it could still in almost every case be wrong to do so, but the explanation is not that it is a constraint. I don’t know if that really works as an argument though. Maybe it is a consequence of my view (that all constraints actually aren’t morally offensive in and of themselves, but only when considered in addition to a moral factor of bad character) that I have to not believe in inalienable rights. The fact that I am intuitively attracted to them, may incline me to concede something like what I said at the outset of this entry (that only the kind of constraint with no possible threshold exists). But, maybe I could talk myself away from those intuitions, with something like Jen was arguing (that they really aren’t inalienable).
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Tommy G!, at 11:19 PM
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