[extropy-chat] # What the #$?! are rights anyway?

[The Avantguardian]

--- Amara Graps <amara at amara.com> wrote:

> Lee,  The definition I presented said nothing about
> legality, At the
> base, what I gave is a reasonable definition with
> which to begin. If you
> don't like the word, then fine. One still needs a
> principle sanctioning
> a man's freedom of action in a social context.

Is it better to view rights as an active sanction of
ones explicit freedoms or as passive constraints on
ones freedom relative to other beings? Do
non-individuals have rights? For example corporations,
nations, etc.?


> Unless you are a hermit,
> then it doesn't matter.

So if come upon a hermit that has a pot of gold in
some remote woods somewhere, and I am certain that
nobody would miss him, I am within my rights to kill
him and take his gold? Obviously by being a hermit, he
has voluntarily opted out of any presumed social
contract.

> 
> The next step is to claim "what" are your moral
> principles and "what"
> are the social contexts and "how" does one put it in
> legal context, if
> that is what you want, and if it is, then "how" does
> one arbitrate
> disputes. That's another level. I said nothing about
> that.

Yes, I belive that we are speaking of something more
fundamental than mere legality here.

> 
> For moral principles, one must decide what is at the
> core of one's
> personal philosophy.
> 
> I would think 'right' to one's body as the most
> basic right that one can
> have. I do not know why H+ people feel a need to
> debate this and why
> such a basic issue is being brought up. If one
> doesn't accept this, then
> everything else that people in the  transhuman
> community have discussed
> during the last 20 years as desirable for their
> future collapses.

I think you may not quite understand what I am trying
to achieve by this thread. Of course I *believe* that
people have a right to their own bodies but that is
not good enough. For example pretend you are taken
before a super-intelligent future A.I. This A.I. has
immense power at its disposal and it is neither
hostile nor friendly, merely logical and supremely
indifferent. It has no sympathy, no heart, no
conscience, no emotion at all. It however is
constrained to act absolutely RATIONALLY, that is to
say that it could not act irationally even if it
wanted to. 

This A.I. takes you aside and says, "Amara, unless you
can convince me otherwise, I am going to upload you
painlessly into a suitably arcadian runtime
environment and use your body to make carbon control
rods to moderate my nuclear reactor."

How do you state your case for "a right to your body"?
Now if you can come up with such an argument and
generalize to cover all such "principles of social
interaction" then this thread will have accomplished
its stated purpose.
     

Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does." - Richard Feynman on QM

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