Note the use of the word “should” in the essay. Probably without knowing it, the author has implicitly assumed what he is trying to disprove; the moment he uses words like “should” or “ought” in discussing rights, he has assumed the pre-existence of a right.
Unless he does this, he has no basis for asserting that his “hierarchy of rights” is preferable to, say, Jack London’s “law of club and fang” — oppress the weak and obey the strong (which is observed in nature far more often than his hierarchy).
You wrote: “Note the use of the word “should” in the essay. Probably without knowing it, the author has implicitly assumed what he is trying to disprove; the moment he uses words like “should” or “ought” in discussing rights, he has assumed the pre-existence of a right.”
Exactly. bttt
“...the materialist metaphysics of logical positivism — even though such a philosophy is riddled with self-contradiction — undermined any claim to an objective moral order..
“By disgarding reason and reality; by abandoning the past and embracing moral and cultural relativism, the left has brought us to this place where we are morally and physically paralyzed.... This is their quest. To establish themselves as the arbiters of moral behavior by behaving immorally; of being ‘reality-based’ without the necessity of having to acknowledge reality; of speaking ‘truth’ to power, without being capable of recognizing truth. ...
“Again, the problem with the left is not its “immorality,” but precisely its unhinged, out of control morality. There is no sanctimonious moral scold like leftist moral scold. ...
“So, what is the specific source of the left’s moral passion? Polany felt that it originated with Christianity, which introduced an entirely new kind of morality into the world at large. I don’t have time to do justice to the subtlety of his argument here, but if you take the deep moral passion generated by Christianity — for example, for justice, equality, fraternity, liberty, etc. — and remove the Christianity, you’re going to have problems.
“Essentially it is the problem that Voegelin called immamentizing the eshchaton, which is a fancy way of saying tyranically imposing the vertical on the horizontal, thereby destroying both. This happened all over Europe in the 20th century, causing millions upon millions of deaths.
“As Polanyi described it, “Since no society can live up to Christian percepts, any society professing Christian percepts must be afflicted by an internal contradiction, and when the tension is released by rebellion its agents must tend to establish a nihilistic Messianic rule.... It can then only hold on by proclaiming itself to be the absolute good: a Second Coming greater than the first and placed therefore beyond good and evil. We see arising the ‘amoral superman’” (or woman, as the case may be; “It would undoubtedly surprise the proudly infrahuman, anti-Christian rabble of dailykos that they are actually messianic Christians, but there you go. They fall into the category of (-R), of fanatical Christianity with the Christianity removed. ...”
HERE: http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2007/11/moral-inversion-of-left-passion.html
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“...Socialism has nothing to do with “generosity” or selflessness; rather, it is the quintessence of selfishness, and diminishes a man down to the conviction that his animal needs should be provided for by someone else. The only thing that can rouse his passion is a threat to his entitlements. Only if the Islamists were to threaten their 12 weeks of paid vacation would they be taken seriously by socialist EUnuchs. ...”
HERE: http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2007/05/sacrifice-transcendence-and-vertical.html