Intergalactic Summit

He's probably about as real as the "rights," including "human rights," the Gallente and certain Matari worship, Arrendis.

Though the idea of "inalienable rights" seems like it has the potential to tear people apart instead of drawing them together. ... Gods, it just occurred to me how much fun Gallentean heretics must be!

"I have an inherent right never to pay any taxes and to do basically whatever I want because of this obscure pseudo-legal arcana I found by cross-referencing a set of archaic legal wording with some weird snippets of history I once heard about and am conveniently interpreting in my own favor!"

Is that a thing? That happens? Oh, please do let it be!

Oh. Yeah ... they probably don't have penitence pits either (still curious), since the whole business is organized around things you're not allowed to do to people.

Doesn't that kind of let them keep making all kinds of noise from prison (and after) about how their self-declared rights are getting stomped all over, though? I mean, there's no point at which you can just shoot them, right?

Obviously, but for the same lifetime of the average Amarrian heretic anyway. For many the prospect of prison no doubt adds spice to the enterprise. Loss of your post mortal existence is a troubling thing, however, which no doubt explains the absence with which people cling to their new beliefs. It opens up to far more dramatic extremes of thought than simply flouting legalities.

You're still curious about the pits?

You mean being told that you won't get the completely unverifiable thing that you only thought you were getting because you were told that you were by the same people who tell you 'X, Y, and Z are bad unless it's us doing it, because the invisible magical sky fairy we can't actually prove exists said we should'.

Well, there's two kinds of 'fundamental rights', really. First, there's your actual, inviolate natural rights. These rights cannot be taken away from you. Doesn't matter what anyone does, how much power they exert, they can't take these rights away. These rights can summed up fairly succinclty:

• You have the natural right to do whatever it is you are capable of doing.

This means that yes, technically, you have the natural right to kill other people. Those people have the natural right to get pretty pissed off about the attempt and try to kill you right back. It's not a situation conducive to 'polite society'. Or, you know, 'society', at all. But they're there, and they underlie everything. That's what the SovCit mo-mos are on about when they talk about their right to not be taxed, even though most of them don't quite Get It™.

Then you have your 'fundamental rights'. These are the basic rights that make society society, and they can be summed up pretty succinctly, too, though it involves an overview of the concept of the social contract:

• It is desirous and beneficial to any population that the members of that population refrain from actions that injure, harm, or impair the well-being of the population as a whole.
• Pursuant to those ends, the individual agrees to waive their natural rights to undertake those actions—such as killing one another—in order to secure assurances that others will waive their natural rights to subject the individual to those self-same actions. (eg: "You agree not to kill people, and people will agree not to kill you.")
• Agreement to participate in the social contract is not required to be explicit, and shall be tacitly inferred from participation in, and benefiting from, society.

Thus: "I have the fundamental right to expect that I will not be subjected to the injurious behaviors I am expected to refrain from within society."

Okay, with you so far. ... Don't think I'd frame it quite like that, but, okay.




Okay. ... It's a pretty individualistic take on how society works, though. Also, I'm unclear on how you can consider something "fundamental" that can vary really widely from society to society.

Take the "right" not to be murdered. Say you're in one of the old iron age feudal aristocratic states, like pre-uplift Achura (it's been on my mind a little lately). It doesn't take murdering someone for you to lose the right not to be murdered; all it takes, for a common person, is to offend a member of the aristocracy, who then acquires the right to murder you. Snikk! Better luck in the spirit world (but don't **** off the celestials, either).

It's not fundamental in the slightest. Basically everything outside of that first primary "right" is negotiable, and sometimes negotiated.

First, I think you'd need to have the first idea what those are.

I'd say, rather, that it's a view of how society works from the limited perspective of a being that can only perceiving being one individual at a time. I mean, it's all well and good to talk about 'the collective', but with the exception of the Sansha, and the faux-Sansha that wander around claiming to be 'transhumanists' instead of 'meat drones', people don't experience collective motivations. They experience individual motivations. Some of those might be framed as prioritizing the collective, if that's how the individual was taught to think, but they're still experienced individually.



Is that framed as murder, though, or is that frames as societally-sanctioned execution? I know that seems like a semantic thing, but that's kind of the crux of things: societies themselves are just constructs, just illusory fictions that individuals tell themselves (again, because you can't experience things as plural) in order to reassure themselves of the general safety of their living conditions. We cling to social order because we fear the dangers inherent in not having others to support us and help us meet the needs we can't necessarily meet ourselves. Which is a perfectly natural fear.

But 'society' is just an abstraction, a shared hallucination of consensus. And so unless the society explicitly says that that aritsocrat killing the commoner is murder—and that it's ok—then murder is still not ok. And I think you'll find that in those iron age societies, that aristocrat's actions would've been seen as 'justice' or 'discipline', not 'murder'.



You miss the specific meaning of 'fundamental' in this framework. It refers to the mutual abrogation of natural rights in order to make society work. It doesn't matter which rights are abrogated, only that everyone is abrogating their rights in accordance with a collectively agreed-upon societal framework. In your example, everyone in that society tacitly agrees that that aristocrat's got the right to kill.... but again, I doubt they'd call it murder.

1) Shoot all slavers
2) Make childish comments "sky fairy"

I'm not claiming you have to respect a religion you hate for its practices, but you don't have to be Diana Kim about it.

Precisely. Societies define the collective good for the society.



Well, on the one hand, of course it's all mutual. Everyone's mutually agreeing to the same framework. That doesn't necessarily mean agreeing everyone occupies the same place in that framework. But the aristocrat would agree, for example, that if a higher authority, a 'king' for example, stripped him of his lands, rank, and title, then he himself could also be executed out of hand for daring to behave in the same manner as the man he's executed.

As for 'human rights', in a very real way, these harken back to the concept of natural rights. Human rights are, essentially, the right to basic consideration for biological, psychological, and emotional needs. In the absence of society—if we were, still, simply another primate attempting to scratch out an existence in the wilds of whatever planet—these would be the things we would seek out, universally. A few examples:

Life. Life is often listed as an 'inalienable right' or a 'human right', but what it really is is simply a prerequisite. To deny someone life—ie, to kill them—is to deny them the exercise of their other rights.

'Liberty'. A grand exposition and imagery, but really, it just comes down to agency, the ability to exercize one's own will as it pertains to how you go about doing the rest of the stuff on the list.

'Happiness'. Again, it's a lot of high-falutin' language for a far more concrete concept: Satisfaction, fulfillment. Joy is ephemeral, it's fleeting and gone. What people have the right to is to feel like their decisions and their actions matter, if only to them. It's the mental half of agency.

And again, the reason those two are 'basic human rights' goes back to the idea that "this is what all humans would instinctively seek out for themselves if there was no society".

"Equality" - this one's kind of a no-brainer. The social contract only works if everyone's playing by the same rules. Those rules may give an advantage to some, and disadvantage others, which would seem like a violation of this principle, but the idea that it doesn't matter which of us is the artistocrat, whoever that person is has the exact same set of legitmate choices is what matters. The Gallente like to think one's all about individual equality, but really, that's just part of their 'counting noses matters' delusions.

And on and on.