Godless Society Motivations
Sometimes people wonder what the point is for an atheist/agnostic group like Godless Society. I shall give a round-about explanation, prompted by a documentary I watched about the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan. They were two giant statues of different styles in the Bamyan valley in Afghanistan, which the Taliban exploded with dynamite in March 2001. What might be retaliation for economic sanctions or a religious statement about the blasphemy of idols was more likely a mixture of both, but the fact remains one primary reason for destroying them was religious intolerance. I say you need the Godless Society as another way of engaging the dialogue that is so miserably failing with the Taliban. You cannot deal with some people or regimes politically, even though you might tell yourself that they are a political entity: it is not all they are.
One common argument in defense of religion is that some group like the Taliban, any group for that matter, does not represent the religion of Islam. To say so is to disrespect the wisdom and temper of Muhammed. Still, Muhammed was a man with identifiable “faults” as modern western society would define them, and the Taliban do have the power of changing religion for whom they rule over. If there is a perfect, fluid entity of Islamic religion for anyone, there most certainly is an Islam of oppression and intolerance: one cannot have it both ways. We like to think that women in Afghanistan see the hypocrisy in the Taliban’s leaders and administration, or at the very least the cruel irony that God and Providence so favor the Taliban at the direct expense of themselves, but even at a glacial pace the Taliban recreate the reality of their subjects. In one woman the subjugation of women to menis enacted as some innate characteristic of life, and in another the intolerance to alternative views of life and religions (plural) becomes the correct and proper way to conduct oneself.
Like the religious in conversion faiths (the three monotheistic religions and, increasingly, Buddhism), I understand the power of a unifying framework. Many assume that atheists and agnostics should not need to discuss their faiths and beliefs because it is largely viewed as a negation of some prior concept. Trying to convert, then, is more about tearing down walls and telling others about how things are, often coupled with a superiority complex. Take away the superiority issues and replace them with a dose of humility, however, and I see something remarkably close to religion, especially with mystical elements:
- tearing down walls is about freeing oneself from limitations that one is a human and not endowed with the powers of moral distinctions,
- telling others how things are is the primary raison d’etre for organized religion anywhere,
- and so on and so forth.
Most religious don’t care about the unifying framework to the point of dogma, just as I don’t care if people see anything the exact same way that I do. Dogma is, after all, an initial compromise. What I care about spreading are healthy assumptions, habits, and customs. One must take one’s neighbor as someone who can be reasoned with. One should not impose uncomfortably. However, all of this comes with reciprication from the other party in mind. It is this aspect the Taliban, in particular, do not have. Against considerations of healthy coinhabitation, they provoke war (in a physical and mental sense, even spiritually) by actions like the Buddha statues’ destruction, and so I would meet them on the battlefield. Others want to try political tools like sanctions, but such actions do not cause them to to reexamine their precepts and only occasionally to temper their behavior. At the very least, Godless Society engages the root cause directly, whether it can be more successful or not, and sometimes keeping one’s eye on the ball is very important.
There is a quote that there can be no compromise between good and evil, for any compromise does nothing for good and something for evil. I won’t use such loaded language, but there are other concepts of dialectics to which this applies. Between liberality and oppression, a compromise innately favors oppression. This should not imply that cooperation is impossible or that a practical middle ground cannot exist. For instance, I make stand immediately against oppression where it is seen as legitimate, but I do not stand against helping countries like Afghanistan or its people, who are heavily influenced by the Taliban.
Consider a man who, by some bizarre and potentially deliberate circumstances, chooses between the life of another man or killing a third party’s entire livestock of cows. Say a train is coming down the tracks too fast to stop, and by pulling a lever the first man causes the train to divert from the track with a man tied to it to another track with the livestock on it. Is a compromising of two acts of evil? If the man does nothing someone dies as a result of a conscious choice, and if he does interfere he kills something bovine that belongs to another. Both acts are wrong in the sense that our hypothetical man can only be harmful, but I would counter that saving the second man’s life was of more value and would defend the action of diverting the train as good. In the case of the Taliban I recognize a difference between a war against people and a war against oppression that I must continue to fathom and act on, in part by knowing and “spreading” what I believe through Godless Society activities.
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Positive Rights in the International Community
I am in the process of researching, writing a paper, and giving a presentation about positive rights for the same class as my essays below. While so far it appears that the paper will not be earth-shattering, I have made decent progress into the subject, essentially tackling it on enforcement issues pertaining to provisioning those rights and making them effective. Some primary arguments for and against having to pay the costs of those positive rights will be discussed, but most of the case studies I am using relate to the international applications of positive rights.
The first historical thread will trace the rise of positive rights in national and international contexts, how the UN tried to frame basic "rights" with some of their post-war documents. This will expand into the NGOs and HROs, and their difficulties with, to name specifics, the Ugandan government and how developed countries deal with Arendt’s children, essentially migrant children who do not have citizenship rights for a variety of legal and practical reasons.
I plan to release notes from the readings as I compile the notes in a more straight-forward manner. (Right now, they are highlights and underlining on printouts of the documents.) The process is always effective for me to synthesize the elements as I prepare to weave them into a paper, a habit that I picked up while organizing a religion paper once. Normally, I prefer to use FreeMind, which is available on every OS I have ever used.
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FPS –Personal reflection
I wish that I had the exact writing prompt written down, because it was more specific than, "write about what concepts interested you this module." As it is, I will just continue transcribing my essays:
Inequalities arising from endowments are a tricky issue, especially from birth, be that natural talents or family circumstances. I have the most difficulty with trying to correct those because the methods for achieving equality generally lower the benefits. (The professor underlined this and wrote "monetary" in the margins.) We cannot take people away from their families without serious repercussions to emotional health and development, say, so aside from creating common grounds and public goods like schooling I would not seek to redress much. Giving help to those who ask for help seems the best method, practically speaking, which necessitates a certain level of advocacy to know what help is available.
Although far from a utilitarian or even a communist because of my primacy for negative rights, I’m constantly drawn towards notions of what people or societies can achieve by restructuring the definition of rights. I mean to say I believe defection or independence should always be a human right, although the most remarkable things are often first achieved in other ways, cooperation or coercion. Here you have one vision, which is best or most easily achieved from an authoritative source rather than a necessarily competitive one. Afterwards, the achievement is open to whatever interpretations and uses anyone can assign to it. My moral inclinations fall on negative rights, but I am consistently amazed and intrigued by positive rights, so some communitarian writings are really interesting to consider how societies change, amend, and abolish rights in a historical process.
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FPS –G. A. Cohen
Cohen also rejects Nozick’s Chamberlain example, this time on the grounds that people are not being given the choice Nozick assumes, essentially arguing that their liberty is at stake. If people are concerned with relative equality, the market may not lead to a favorable outcome. Specifically within the Chamberlain example, people may be willing to pay a quarter but unwilling to see a man get $250,000 for a game. Their individual, uncoordinated actions could cause them to mistakenly create something they would not do in a world with perfect information. Cohen argues people should have recourse to a moral process, something Nozick explicitly denies.
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FPS –Peter Singer
Singer disagrees with the capitalist notions in Nozick that anything that gets a market price can or should be bought and sold. Love should not, by its personal meaning, have a price.IF sex is viewed as an expression of love (not lust), prostitution should not then be allowed to name a price. This argument extends the logic that families could break down if people did not have to come together to achieve the satisfaction of sex (ha). Empirically, Singer uses the blood market in America and testimony from England to show that turning blood into a commodity decreases the incentive to provide for free by donation. This could lead to ransoming someone’s need for life against money, something Singer sees as unjust.
My professor wrote, "I thought his discussion of Singer, while not inaccurate, did not hit his most important critique of Nozick–the issue of positive rights."
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FPS –James Rachels
Effectively denigrating Nozick’s process as silly, Rachels inserts the conception of justice through the lens of desert. How fair is it to be born into the distribution one had no hand in creating? Personal autonomy (a key concept for libertarians) can only be achieved if one becomes responsible for one’s past actions (and nothing else). Rachels looks at desert purely through one’s past actions, to the extent that the winner of a sporting event does not necessarily deserve to win. If his opponent prepares harder or overcomes more obstacles, the opponent is the one who deserves to win, whether or not we care to award that desert.
In the case of black students receiving preferential treatment (reverse discrimination) to graduate applications, Rachels claims it is utilitarian, not just, to give aid/admittance to the less hard-working white student who scores better. The just thing to do is not to follow the process like law, but to reward the person whose actions show he worked hardest and will work hardest in the future.
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FPS –Robert Nozick
Having to reevaluate my essay fragments as I type them up, I am fully aware and irked by the lack of variety to paragraph openings.
Robert Nozick believes in a process for justice, above all considerations of how things play out, drawing the distinction between telelogical end-games (patterns) and the process of playing out to endgames. He figures that anything taken from him without consent is unjust and therefore rejects anything (principle or power) that would seek to justify itself against his lack of consent. To support his example of process, he challenges others to find any inconsistency with his process outlined in the Wilt Chamberlain hypothetical. Therein, a just distribution has been reached, and each has his share to do with as makes him happy. Wilt Chamberlain comes to town to play a basketball game and has anyone who comes pay him $0.25 to see him play, and people willingly do so.
As Nozick defines transactions and transference, Nozick sets up a perfectly just (if highly unequal) new distribution. Chamberlain squarely claims all the quarters for his own, without threats or coercion, and may in turn use his money as he likes. The situation is simple and only claims to be a proper, if debatedly ethical or desirable, application of transference. Nozick argues that without this assurance to do with our distributions as we please, nothing can be just or stable.
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FPS –Kai Neilson
Kai Neilson rejects Rawls on socialist ideas about class. Rawls implicitly defends class to the extent that he allows differences to evolve between the lease advantaged and others, while Neilson believes owning the means of production allows owners to constantly extract value from workers, giving them a constant hand-up that causes more problems with justice than can be argued plausible. Furthermore, Neilson considers whether the people under a veil of ignorance would have the rational constituency Rawls assumes, as well as whether those deciding on the original position would choose to apply the maximin rule. Socialists, he seems to suggest, might take a bit of a hit to overall production to achieve egalitarian (income/wealth) equality.
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FPS –Lessnoff
Lessnoff attacked the idea that the least advantaged group would choose to work, an underlying assumption of Rawls’s. If they chose not to work, in a just and moral sense do they deserve what Rawls would afford them by his process? Subsistence, for example–do their deserts include being taken care of it they won’t work? He attacks other thinks, like the burdens of unequal work, but his biggest point is the above.
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