A Quickie on Rights in General Starting From the American Right to Bear Arms

I did want to take up the second part of that post by Richard Carrier that I talked about a couple of weeks ago, but things have been really busy lately so I wanted something that wouldn’t take quite so much time, so I want to take up this post by Jonathan M.S. Pearce where he expresses his frustration with some of his posters who insist on challenging his views despite the fact that he constantly outlines his philosophical views that should show that they’re wrong.  Now, his philosophical views are a bit controversial and I would like to have the time to engage them in detail, but suffice it to say that I don’t think that he’s really managed to establish his underlying ontology sufficiently to be able to simply dismiss challenges to his view using it.  Trying to do that is one of the things that annoyed me about the books of his I read — and have yet to comment on — where he would quite often do things like dismiss the free will argument because he doesn’t think free will exists, and then demand that those who wanted to use it had to establish that free will really exists first, which is an unreasonable demand since it amounts to demanding that they settle one of the longest running philosophical debates before he’ll even consider their argument.  That’s a tough task for philosophers, let alone those who might be replying to his posts or reading his books.

So this expression of his frustration really bugs me:

It’s really frustrating, because I have debunked their position until they can show me I haven’t.

I have to say that philosophy doesn’t work that way, and Pearce should know that.  If he outlines what he considers to be a “debunking” of their position, that doesn’t mean that he can then dismiss them entirely unless they can refute that debunking, presumably to his satisfaction.  If they never accepted his position in the first place, then from their perspective there’s nothing to debunk.  While the best philosophers will want to refute any reasonable challenges to their position, the people he’s dealing with aren’t even philosophers, and so likely won’t be able to and won’t see the need to refute what they consider to be odd and unreasonable positions.  And even philosophers will ignore purported debunkings that they don’t consider worth addressing.  So while I can understand his frustration at seeing the same points raised over and over again, I and others who don’t find his foundation as solid as he thinks it is will also be frustrated at how much he relies on that foundation to dismiss counter-arguments to even his more controversial opinions.

Like the right to bear arms, which is the topic of the post in question.  A commenter who constantly defends that right posted with what is indeed a fairly standard defense with a few twists — relating it to what society can do — and Pearce responds with this:

Yawn. What is a right? Where is it located? How it is causally efficacious? How does it interact with the material world?

Okay, so I won’t rerun my arguments. He should have read them by now. About twenty times given the frequency of me banging on about them and the fact that his comments are directly below the articles in question.

The problem is that both philosophically and specifically people have challenged his insistence that if we don’t accept his view of conceptual nominalism then we have to be taking a strong realist stance.  I in fact challenged this in a comment on one of his own posts.  I haven’t been able to engage him as directly as I’d like, but I’ve challenged that view of his a few times, and he even has another commenter — Luke — who has taken him on directly on that.  Since Pearce is pulling this comment out of the morass that is his comment section to deal with it directly, he is setting his own priorities, and that he didn’t pull mine out and hasn’t addressed Luke’s recently, that prioritization says something about the sort of arguments that he’s interesting.  In short, that he doesn’t seem to be that interested in dealing with actual objections to his foundation while insisting that his opponents need to do just that.

Anyway, let’s look at parts of his reply:

The first point is this: if I have a right to guns, then I have a right to a nuclear missile. This reductio shows how absurd or how arbitrary the claim is. “Oh, that’s ridiculous!” – Is it? Well, where do you draw the line? Because my line doesn’t accept people walking around with guns, but your line is where? RPGs? Machine gun outposts? Nuclear warheads?

What I am saying here is that his “right” has to somehow include a very prescriptive cut-off point within it to show that the right doesn’t include a Death Star but does include an AR-15.

The problem is that the original commenter and pretty much all of those who advocate for the right to bear arms on the basis of self defense have a clear way to settle that:  what is necessary for self defense.  It is pretty easy to argue that a nuclear warhead cannot be used for self-defense for an individual because activating in any situation where it would matter would kill the person using it for self-defense.  It’s also reasonable to argue that RPGs and machine gun outposts would cause way too much collateral damage to be justified by self-defense of the individual.  Moreover, the original commenter said this:

The answer is always asked the wrong way. The question isn’t what gives us the right to do things or have things. The question is what gives the people in government the right to tell us we cannot do that which isn’t harming anyone.

All of the options that Pearce talks about would almost certainly involve harming innocent people if they were actually used for their purported purpose.  We might not have to worry about the attacker, but we probably have to worry about bystanders and would need to show that the use of those weapons would not run an unacceptable risk to bystanders.  So the questions Pearce is asking sound good rhetorically, but aren’t all that strong of a refutation to the position.

But the worst part is that those questions don’t actually have a meaning if we start from Pearce’s foundation, so he’s actually starting from arguments that appeal to their foundation and not his.  The arguments here only work to show that the position can’t be clarified properly to actually be practiced, which is not actually a problem for Pearce’s view because for him the line can be drawn anywhere most people agree.  He could be trying to argue that any kind of objective line can’t be drawn, but since they think they could indeed do that he’s either underestimating their intelligence or arguing based on his view and importing it to them.  Either way, it’s not really supporting his position to start out that way.  He’d need to insist that his view is right but then they could indeed adopt his view and point out that the line doesn’t need to be objectively determined by his own view.  Thus, the starting argument only works if they are more interested in attacking his foundation than in justifying their view that they should be able to bear arms in the United States.  But then he demands that they must refute his foundation to make their specific claims, which a good philosopher will, of course, refuse to accept if they can contort his own foundations to provide for the specific thing that Pearce doesn’t want to see.

To say “I have a right to healthcare/water/education” or whatever you want to plug in there is very contextual. In the absence of the context, these are just another way of saying, “In the world I want to live in, everyone should have equal access to…”. When you start entertaining the context, such claims might be, “Given the legal framework set up in my nation-state, I am legally entitled to…”

The problem with this is the one that I also bring up to those who deny that objective morality exists: that’s not how we think of rights.  If a legal jurisdiction said that, say, no one had the right to be free from the threat of murder or the threat of being sold into slavery, we would never say — and I doubt that Pearce would say — that then in that jurisdiction people had no such rights.  We might say that they effectively didn’t have such rights because no one would protect it, but we wouldn’t conclude from that that they ought not have that right in that society.  No, we would instead insist that they ought to have that right, and that society has an invalid set of legal rights because they don’t enforce what we consider to be the objective human rights that we are owed for simply being human.  In short, we don’t need any notion of legal rights if they aren’t trying to map something beyond the laws of that jurisdiction since we could just have laws that describe all of that.  We might want “rights” as basic principles to interpret laws, but that would be a far cry from how we generally talk about rights.

I submit that Pearce can get away with his position here only because when he uses the “rights just reflect things we want to see” argument, he does so for rights that he doesn’t really care about or wants to dismiss, such as the right to bear arms, but when he does care about rights — like the right to choose for women — then he appeals to ones that he either thinks that people do all agree with or that he thinks that everyone should agree with.  This becomes problematic when someone challenges his views, as he has to scramble to come up with an argument that allows him to side-step the issue.  As he does for abortion in this very post:

I think that the reproductive “rights” of the mother are more important than those of a cluster of non-sentient cells.

But under his own view there can be no such objective arguments for that, and he arguably wouldn’t need any.  So coming up with that definition to even talk about rights works against his own view.  But to his credit, at least in this post, he realizes that:

People like Person223 disagree. So we argue in the marketplace of ideas and hope that our argument wins out in public discourse so that it is reflected in democratic elections and ensuing law changes (or lack thereof).

However, if all of that worked out against his position so that women could not get abortions, I don’t think he’d be that sanguine about it (and he hasn’t been in the past).  And there are a number of cases where pretty much no one would accept a definition of rights that came entirely from public discourse.  If society declared that black people were not deserving of any legal rights, I don’t think Pearce would accept that that was just the way that society worked.  If a society literally became “forced birth” and forced women to get pregnant and carry those children to term, I don’t think he’d just accept that either.  The whole point of using rights arguments is to show that the legal structure is wrong and invalid to allow those things because they aren’t reflecting what the real inherent human rights are, and those things are not supposed to be decided by vote.  So I don’t think that even Pearce will accept the consequences of his positions, even if they were adequately supported.

The other arguments there talk about the harms to society and so on and so forth, which are independent of his foundation, which makes this demand a bit awkward:

Here’s my request, though, please stop, stop, stop splurging the same old conclusions without first doing some legwork to establish a rational foundation upon which to build them. By all means, whinge about my own foundations, but do that on your own away from here unless you can show them to be in some way faulty; until then, kindly desist from endlessly conclusion-asserting.

If Pearce is going to ultimately use things that the commenter roughly agrees with like “harm to society” and the Social Contract to argue against their position, then he can’t make this request.  Someone who disagrees with his foundations could try to turn the discussion to something that they both roughly would or should agree with to try to have some sort of productive discussion on the issue even though they have radically different foundations for their views.  Because tackling foundations is a lot harder than finding some common ground, and the commenter does seem to have found some with the idea that the government cannot — or at least ought not — legislate against people taking actions that don’t harm anyone.  Pearce seems to roughly agree with that, but insists that allowing unrestricted gun ownership does cause harm.  If he sees and acknowledges that, then he should focus on that common ground instead of dismissing any such responses on the grounds that his somewhat shaky foundation must be assailed first.