[lit-ideas] [re] Paying taxes for months on end

[These will be perhaps my final words on this topic, but that doesn't 
mean that I think they're 'the final word.']

Phil says:

I had written:

"There is no problem with 'The police have no right to .. ' because the
word/sign 'right' does not refer us to talk of rights."

to which Robert Paul replied:

"I think this must mean that it need not lead us to talk further of
rights."

No, it means what I said it means.  I can translate 'have no right to'
into 'do not have the power to' with no semantic loss and certainly no
need to start going on about rights.

*I'm sorry. I was trying to construe '…because the word/sign "right" 
does not refer us to talk of rights,' in a way that made sense to me, so 
that I could comment on it. If I'd known what it meant I wouldn't have 
needed to do that, but the notion of a a word itself's referring us to 
anything is unclear. 'This entry refers us to a further entry'; 'She 
referred me to her supervisor'; ' "Gold" refers to a heavy yellow 
metal'; these I can understand.

Robert: "It's as if you took Wittgenstein to be saying that in order for
an expression of any kind to be meaningful it must refer to something
(and that something must be the kind of thing which can be kicked or
bitten)."

Nope.  The exact opposite actually.  I am taking Wittgenstein to be
saying that sometimes an expression has a meaningful function in a
sentence without referring to something.  Like logical functions.  It is
a mistake, a typically philosophical mistake, to think that in the
sentence 'The police have no right to ...' the words 'police' and
'right' are of a kind in that they both refer to something.

*Good. We agree about the Wittgenstein part; but since a fair amount of 
our conversation has turned on whether there are, when you get down to 
it, such things as rights, to say that the word 'right' in this sentence 
doesn't refer to anything is question-begging.

Robert:  "You do appear to avoid the  question of whether or not the
sentence we're talking about is intelligible, even though it contains a
natural, unproblematic use of the word 'right.'"

Again, nope.  In my last post I said there was no problem with the
sentence.

*I think you must make up your mind.

Robert: "It's surely a bit disingenuous to say, after having ably
sustained a discussion of rights, their derivation and contingencies,
that you stand by your earlier statement that 'any talk of rights is
incoherent.'"

Again, not at all.  It is incoherent, not nonsensical.  Because the
issue was one of understanding rights, I have tried to be responsible
and so couched my responses according to the language of rights.  While
I noted my reservations, it would have been in poor form to respond with
a criticism of talk of rights.  I wonder how often Robert lectured and
ably answered questions on philosophical topics he took to be ultimately
incoherent?  I would never suggest that he was being disingenuous but
rather a responsible partner in a conversation.

*An historical aside: the original issue was not this at all, although
I realize that we've left it behind. It might have been 'poor form' to 
have launched into a criticism of talk of rights as an immediate 
response to the original issue, but as such a criticism has been a 
subtext of much of what's been said, I don't think it would have been 
entirely out of place further on. I find ethical theories (which isn't 
what we're talking about, granted), which reduce morality to rights and 
duties not only incomplete but incoherent, but you, I now see, find any 
talk of rights (ultimately) incoherent. I'm not sure though how I could 
find such reductionist theories unsatisfactory if I could attach
no meaning to the words 'rights,' 'duties,' etc.

*It's certainly fair to ask how I've dealt with philosophical views 
which I thought incoherent or nonsensical. Although it's been over forty 
years since I lectured on anything (at Reed there are only one or two 
lecture courses in philosophy), of course I've had to set out the views 
of the Great Dead Philosophers, and others, for the purposes of 
discussion. In doing this, I use try to use plain language and to avoid 
throwing around the jargon in an unexamined way: this is what a 
historian of science would surely do in discussing phlogiston, or a 
cognitive psychologist in discussing homunculi. But that a theory or 
metaphysical claim is incoherent does not mean that the language one 
uses to discuss it is incoherent! (How could one show its incoherence 
incoherently?) Nor need one keep one's fingers crossed when one uses the 
word 'phlogiston,' or the word 'monad' or the expression 'logically 
perfect language,' e.g. So, in talking of such things I don't think I'm 
talking 'as if'—I'm talking straight.

The conversation has turned to arguing over what I wrote earlier, a sign
the conversation is dying.  Let me then thank Robert for his comments
and express a measure of disappointment that Robert wasn't more
expansive on his own views.

*Perhaps my views went by so fast they weren't noticed. They are simply:

(1) There are rights, some said to be inalienable in the Preface, and 
others that are obviously legal creations in the Bill of Rights (the 
first ten amendments to the US Constitution).

(2) To have a 'right' that is never enforceable is really not to have a 
right. No doubt much more must be said here in the case of inalienable 
rights.

(3) The right to life is said to be 'inalienable,' which is usually 
thought to mean that it is neither revocable nor negotiable.

(4) If (2) and (3) are true, then it would seem that one has a right to 
what we've been calling the 'maintenance' of life (or else the right to 
life is not a right).

*That's pretty much it.

*I don't think this discussion is at an end, but I won't prolong it on 
my own. I thank Phil and everyone else who's taken part.

Robert Paul
The Reed Institute

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