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*Which should the Martian colonist and colony gov't be more concerned with?
--Cindy
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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keeping the air on.
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Individual rights should be paramount on Mars, without it you'd have a USSR-like society.
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Or even a Guantanamo Bay-like society.
Sorry, I couldn't help myself.
Come on to the Future
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Or even a Guantanamo Bay-like society.
Sorry, I couldn't help myself.
*Yeah you could. I don't appreciate snide insults in this thread.
Spaceman2020, the citizens of a future Martian colony wouldn't owe anything of themselves to the overall society?
--Cindy
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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Twas more a counter to the above remark. The Ussr did not believe in individual duties being paramount did they?
Or maybe they did. Can communism be rendered as a general fulfilling of ones duties to society? Does your right to ignore the poor trump you duty to help them?
Given that the thread is meant to be about the rights/duties dichotomy.
Come on to the Future
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Or maybe they did. Can communism be rendered as a general fulfilling of ones duties to society? Does your right to ignore the poor trump you duty to help them?
Does one's perceived duty to help the poor trump their duty to use the communal resources effectively? Is determining that a given poor individual is poor because of their own willful actions and denying help a responsible act of allocating resources or merely a selfish exercise of freedom?
But then I usually render communism as a big hole full of dead people. <shrug>
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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A lot of Russians did get their land confiscated by their Czar of their own free will, this is true. But we are wondering about Mars.
Are rights and duties infact seperate entities or are they simply symantic restatements of the same thing?
A right is something that doesn't have moral force behind it, that is, just because an action is within your rights doesn't mean you should take it.
The duty however should be undertaken regardless of rights or legality.
One of the interesting aspects of American patriotism is that it sometimes appears that it is a patriotic duty to defend and use ones rights. Kinda wierd.
Martians Law should probably be built on rights, but it will only function well if the martian people are built on duty.
How many of us on the forum consider the colonisation of Mars a duty?
Come on to the Future
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Are rights and duties infact seperate entities or are they simply symantic restatements of the same thing?
A right is something that doesn't have moral force behind it, that is, just because an action is within your rights doesn't mean you should take it.
I will have to disagree here there can be a lot of moral force behind what we call a right. And then it comes down to what is a definition of a right, I believe there are two sorts of rights Natural and Statutory. Here are examples of what I generally take to be natural rights.
Life, this basically means you have a right to life what you do with it is up to you but everyone has the right to life.
Society, Everyone is a member of society and as such can do with what they wish with this. The world is not an Equal place so to use equality would be false though this is changing slowly and surely and remember not everyone is born equal.
Learning, Everyone has a right to learn it is a genetic and physical need and a means to make yourself better than you are. It should be encouraged by goverments.
These are rights, remember im European even worse Scottish so do not take it strongly that I do not consider it a right to carry around weapons whose only designed purpose is to kill your fellow man. I do accept the right to defend yourself and if necassary kill in that case but the right just to own an assault rifle is not one I truly can consider as wise. But a right is something a person can take for granted and something they do not often regard as such.
There are also statutory rights those we have laid so that society is a better place to live in though they are not what we would have been born with.
Fair trial, This is the right to be able to expect to be given a fair trial to be able to explain misdeeds but also to allow society to punish law breakers with punishments fitting the crime and so protect society and its members.
The duty however should be take regardless of rights or legality.
Duty is more easily explained as something imposed on a person to do a set of instructions. This can be self imposition ever through tradition or moral standards or what you believe to be right. It can also be imposed by society as you are in a position where you are expected to do what society expects. In short duty is a means to help the general society along and to function.
Rights though are what society should be based on.
Chan eil mi aig a bheil ùidh ann an gleidheadh an status quo; Tha mi airson cur às e.
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Most 'Rights' come with a dual nature that duties, I would suppose, do not.
In a lot of countries one may have the right to vote, but in most of those you also have the equal and opposite right not to vote. The idea that you ought to vote comes from a sense of duty either to ideals religion or anscestors.
One has a right not to defend oneself in most places where one also has the right to do otherwise. Now in many places duty will instruct you to defend yourself or those around you, but in a non-violent march duty requires that you do not defend yourself. Failing to defend yourself from police aggression, for example, is not a moral failure to utilise your right to defend yourself.
Innit?
Aren't rights more self centered than duties which tend to be selfless?
Come on to the Future
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Rights in the modern sense are a consern only to those who have air in their lungs, food in their bellys, and most importantly, time on their hands.
If someone doesn't mind the greenhouse, no one eats. If no one maintains the oxygen generator, no one breaths. And then no one has any time on their hands.
In short, only once the needs of the colony are reliably met will secondary rights be dealt with. The right to live is far harder to earn on Mars. Even on Earth things go to hell in a hand basket when the most basic needs are not met. In an environment were were everyone is dependant on each other just to survive, ones duty to their job is of paramount importance.
"Yes, I was going to give this astronaut selection my best shot, I was determined when the NASA proctologist looked up my ass, he would see pipes so dazzling he would ask the nurse to get his sunglasses."
---Shuttle Astronaut Mike Mullane
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Spaceman2020, the citizens of a future Martian colony wouldn't owe anything of themselves to the overall society?
--Cindy
Not necesarily, when I say individual rights, I'm talking about the God-given rights of free speech, press, religion, gun rights, etc. Man is supposed to live in a society, that's how we trade and learn. So man gives his talents to his society through the free market, others do the same, this causes interdependence. Man is not dependent on his image of "society", but he's interdependent with his fellow man and the "free market". Hopefully that's not confusing to you.
idiom, rights guarantee that man can live in this colony without fear of being killed or having his rights (free speech, press, religion, gun rights, etc.) taken away. Duties keep man from having an incredibly inflated ego by giving him a check on his impact on society. (Look at the current global society without a sense of moral duty. It's based on "me" and "I". No wonder that real morals and real family values are disappearing from the world and the definitions of "happiness, real, and love" are disappearing) They're both necessary and co-dependent on each other.
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It has to be a good balance of rights and duties. In terms of government, the people have a right to establish the government that they want and to be a part of that government (as by voting). The government has the responsibility of protecting people's rights, and people have the duty to protect their and each other's rights. They have a duty to work for the good of the colony (not meant in a communist sense). They have rights to speech, religion, etc. but not to, say, turn off the oxygen supply. Basically, gov't should protect everybody's rights and manage communal resources (such as keeping dome pressurized with a supply of O2), and people have a duty their colony. When everyone does their duty, everyone has their rights. In practice, of course, you have problems, so you need law enforcement and such to protect rights and enforce duties as much as is possible in an imperfect world.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
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Rights or Duties: Which should the Martian colonist and colony gov't be more concerned with?
I'm radical for capitalism, so I say it should be rights as a basis for Martian government. In my view, there is no "duty to society", only responsibilities to which one contractually agrees with another person. Proximity with others implies no unearned "duty" to them. Besides, the first settlers will be people who will build this new world, and no one will need the services of another person that don't already exist by the others' own necessity. It can be a society of interdependent specialists, not servants to a "greater good."
I highly doubt there would be a "wild west" scenario on Mars. No one would be able to go (in the early days) unless they had the skills and means to survive. Those means - habitats, air reclamation & recycling, water purification, etc. - would be made available by those who produce and sell them, probably before the new settlers even leave Earth.
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