[Joonas]

	Originally Posted by Purgatid To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	What needs to be answered is: To whom?

Nope. When nobody in particular is specified, the person means that with the details at hand, any rational being should be able to draw these conclusions. If I do something bad, I'm not going to lie myself to sleep about it that it was somehow ok for me to do so. If I do not get the punishment I deem I deserve, I will go and complain about it. An irrational person will lie to himself about it, and thus his point of view becomes inherently flawed and useless.

I'll clarify. It doesn't matter to me in which role I am in a situation. I always interpret it the same way, so I don't understand why the position I'm in should matter at all to me in a discussion of human rights.

[nettneu]

	Originally Posted by Joonas To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	When nobody in particular is specified, the person means that with the details at hand, any rational being should be able to draw these conclusions.

Rational beings can only be expected to draw the same conclusions if they start from the same premises. In this case, the premises include such things as a philosophy of life, or an attitude towards other people, and from the available evidence the indications are that Bomazu, Bomazu's friend, and Purgatid all start from different premises in this respect, so there is no reason to expect them to reach the same conclusions.

	Originally Posted by Joonas To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	If I do something bad, I'm not going to lie myself to sleep about it that it was somehow ok for me to do so. If I do not get the punishment I deem I deserve, I will go and complain about it. An irrational person will lie to himself about it

Again, it depends on the premises from which a person is working, but it's quite possible to take the view that a rational response to not getting a punishment that you think you deserve would be to be grateful for your good fortune (or for the potential punisher's generosity in letting you off). This doesn't necessarily imply believing that it was "OK" to have done whatever would have invited the punishment - it might well be rational to learn from the experience and make a note never to do anything similar again, but there's no a priori reason why a sufficiently rational person shouldn't be able to do that without being punished.

I'd be curious to know what you'd do if you had other sorts of luck that you had done nothing to deserve. E.g. if someone who wanted to give his money away picked you out of the phone book at random and gave you a fortune. Would you refuse to accept it? Or is it only luck in escaping punishments that you reject?

[Joonas]

Originally Posted by nettneu To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

Rational beings can only be expected to draw the same conclusions if they start from the same premises. In this case, the premises include such things as a philosophy of life, or an attitude towards other people, and from the available evidence the indications are that Bomazu, Bomazu's friend, and Purgatid all start from different premises in this respect, so there is no reason to expect them to reach the same conclusions.

I agree, that's actually similar to what I've said myself, but those premises aren't carved to stone, and what's stopping anyone from bringing them up so that people can take them into consideration? If one hides a part of his reasoning away, it makes sense that people wouldn't be able to agree with him about anything unless they figure out the hidden parts by themselves.

Originally Posted by nettneu To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

Again, it depends on the premises from which a person is working, but it's quite possible to take the view that a rational response to not getting a punishment that you think you deserve would be to be grateful for your good fortune (or for the potential punisher's generosity in letting you off). This doesn't necessarily imply believing that it was "OK" to have done whatever would have invited the punishment - it might well be rational to learn from the experience and make a note never to do anything similar again, but there's no a priori reason why a sufficiently rational person shouldn't be able to do that without being punished. I'd be curious to know what you'd do if you had other sorts of luck that you had done nothing to deserve. E.g. if someone who wanted to give his money away picked you out of the phone book at random and gave you a fortune. Would you refuse to accept it? Or is it only luck in escaping punishments that you reject?

Hmm, I don't have anything against the idea of people having a stroke of luck and escaping punishments. I guess I bended the truth a little.. I'll reword myself.

If I harm a person, I'll do what I can until I've made it up for them. So when I said that I'd go complain about not receiving the punishment I deem I deserve, I should have actually said that if the person I harmed didn't feel like he got handled the way he deserved, I'd complain about it. I'm fine with people getting super lucky, but I'm not fine with negative kind of injustice.

[Bomazu]

Originally Posted by idoj To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

My 2 cents on the thread question: I think that all humans deserve equal human rights. We are all absolutely entitled to them, even psychopathic serial killers...however, once one fundamentally impacts another’s human rights by killing, or raping them (I know rape is not a capital punishment crime, but let’s face it… If you’ll rape, you’ve already killed something, just not all the way...), it's only fair and human to kill them back. Not, just for vengeance, which doesn’t have a place in the law, but because a social norm has been crossed that you don’t rehabilitate from, in many cases. Crimes of passion are different and there is a lot of grey. Though, if it can be proven that an individual will repeatedly seriously offend… We are placing an undue burden on the state by forcing others to maintain humane care of an individual that will never contribute to society or their own care, again. It is crueler to imprison people indefinitely, to my mind... You can forfeit your rights through your actions. They were your choices... Though, we have to make sure that anyone we kill really needs killing… I’d prefer to relieve the state of the burden... and give the victim’s or their families first dibs once guilt has been established, beyond the shadow of doubt; in my own little utopian world we get to stop wasting money playing civilized, est. guilt completely, and sweep up accordingly... It's vain and high handed to think that we get to choose punishments and call them corrections. We aren't correcting shit. We make it worse, and when it gets so bad we can't ever risk letting it out again... We need to have the balls to kill it, instead of going broke paying it's medical expenses. We could head the whole thing off at the pass if we made any real changes in our schools. They are a bureacratic cluster fuck of incompetence, and it's where the problem begins... it's where we start punishing and teaching people to not trust. Instead of giving them the skills they need to survive outside of an institution; we institutionalize them...

Agree 100%. And you've highlighted how human right law (providing a level of care) can negatively impact society in the form of a consequential tax increase. I wonder: If, for example, a psycho killer would happily kill me and everyone I care about, why would I show any compassion towards him? And if such a person’s motivation in life is to harm others, why do I want to help him in any way?

RE Education: although while schools could helps in reducing levels of some crimes, you cant teach someone not to be a paedophile for example. I think there are far better ways of reforming society but I'll save that for another discussion!

	Originally Posted by alphawolf To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	Ever see Death Wish? To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

I've not seen it, but it does sound like my kinda film! I wouldn't agree to kill muggers, but the justice system is too soft.

Originally Posted by Purgatid To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

Correct! Value is a subjective construction and is whatever we say it is. If humans cannot be bad enough to forfeit rights in her eyes, then they cannot be bad enough to forfeit rights in her eyes. There is no objective value though, therefor it is only viable in her eyes and not necessarily in anyone elses. Additionally - rights are ideas and unless someone upholds them, then they don't exist. In short - you have not violated any rights unless there's someone trying to enforce them. To compare to something else - in some countries prostitution is illegal, in some countries it is not - it is only negative once someone defines it as negative. Its objective value does not exist. "Better" is a value, and thus subject to individual perception. Better to whom? "Deserves" according to whom? Certainly not the psychopath. Obviously not to your friend either. The argument is dependent on "reward" due to behavior where one behavior has a higher value than another. Value is subjective, as stated, and therefore we cannot determine any specific function of human rights nor of the retraction of the same. What needs to be answered is: To whom?

haha- I'm learning there's no such thing as making a general point on this forum without it being 100% specific and without leaving an inch for potential dissection and deconstruction. Fair enough I guess, but sometimes I simply just want to say "I'm sitting on a comfy chair" without having to fully define comfy, justify it's comfort by comparing it to other chairs or needing add a disclaimer to say how I appreciate people with physical dimensions different to my own may not reap the same degree of comfort from such a chair
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In the example of "there are people better than me", let's just assume there is a person who is identical in many areas but who can perform tasks more quickly and efficiently without any trade-off and thus is considered better in a utilitarian sense. There's no need to waste time arguing that that if someone were to value incompetence more highly then I would be better. This is irrelevant to the main point I'm trying to quickly make.

	No one can be judged as being a fundamentally bad person on enough levels to forfeit their human rights

My argument isn't that values are objective. While it's still not universally agreed, it would seem that in a practical sense human rights are considered a tangible law of entitlement. My understanding is that generally she supports this law under all circumstances, where as I don't.