| | Ed,
Knowing you from your posts over the years, I KNOW that your use of the title to this thread and an occasional fiery remark did NOT mean you would be willing to exterminate or otherwise violate the rights of some group of people BECAUSE they were of an Indian tribe and therefore "right-less"
And, I knew we agreed on multiculturalism, moral equivalence, and cultural relativism.
But it still left a problem for me. I saw that you were, intended or otherwise, declaring rights as having some kind of pre-condition other than that of belonging to a human.
Let me explain. If someone says, you can't take that ball away the dog - it belongs to him. If I want to be an ass about it, I'm perfectly right to say that dogs don't natural rights like we talk about with people. Then say someone says, we don't have the right to execute a convicted murderer, it is just doing the same thing the murderer did - taking a life. I can say, the murderer, by choice, gave up his rights to his life when he committed the murder. He cannot stay within the context of moral rights while violating them. I end up at that same starting position - that all humans have the same rights at birth - no matter what culture they are born into and can loose them only by choosing to act in violation of another's rights..
So, an Indian, no matter that he belongs to a tribe, no matter that his tribe has some violent members, no matter that the tribe sanctions some violent actions, THAT Indian has rights until he gives them up (is himself violent) - with one partial exception - war.
Someone might say, but what about if that tribe attacks another or attacks some settlers? In that case, even though only the actual attackers, their leaders and supporters have given up their rights, the entire tribe is the unit that is waging war and the settlers have the right to defend themselves and to use as much force as they reasonably need to ensure they aren't going to end up dead. No one likes that we dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and lots of innocent lives were lost. I say innocent, because there were children there. But that is what happens in war and the main thrust of moral accountability becomes the measured approach to unleashing violence as needed. It could never be moral to underestimate what was needed and leave your life at an unnecessary risk and it would never be moral to needlessly slaughter innocents. The horror of war is that it puts good people into that awful position. The moral responsibility of the death of innocents remains with those who start the wars, but the innocent are still dead.
So, let's say we aren't talking about a tribe that is currently at war - no matter what their propensities or past - for the sake of argument. I maintain that Indians in that tribe have the necessary pre-condition for property rights at birth - they are human. And those rights manifest the moment any Indian in question (it is always an individual) picks up anything that had no prior owner and modifies it (makes a rock into a knife by chipping at it), or trades with another Indian for anything.
I know that you were working specifically with land, not rocks. But clearly the principle comes first. If one Indian specialized in making knives and arrowhead and claimed a certain piece of ground as his because it had a lot of the kind of rock that chips easily, began moving rocks around to put the good ones at hand, and arranged other rocks and logs to make a workbench... well, there you go.
From that basis, I saw your attempt to use Aristotle's properties of justice, plus the concept that steps are involved in the actions of acquisition of a specific property, into a belief that an individual might not have natural rights because he was in a culture of type X. And that would be a dangerous conclusion because it makes rights other than natural.
My point is that nothing a culture can be in the way of beliefs held or not held, or in the primitiveness of its technology, or the lack of its philosophical sophistication can alter the fundamental nature of individual human's natural rights.
I believe that a rigorous and unrelenting adherence to this stand for natural rights will give rise to the best strategies for resolving conflicts between cultures - ones where the culture that most closely adheres to natural rights is the winner - which for me, should always be the winning side. I look at the Brazilian Indian from the perspective of the Brazilian government and ask how to I bring that individual (not the fucking tribe) into the environment of recognized and protected individual rights. What things might go wrong as I attempt this and how do I mitigate against that. How do I keep the focus on the individual - his rights, his responsibilities.
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