The meaning of a document is not decided by majority vote, or by people going on a protest march, or even by judges making a ruling. But the laws we all live by, how those laws are interpreted, and how taxpayer money is spent, are all things that can be altered by elected representatives of the majority of voters.
There is a difference between a referendum determining how society should interpret a document, and a referendum being intended to determine what a document actually means. I took the latter as an implicit aim of the Act Party in seeking to hold a referendum.
But there are plenty of reasons why a referendum is a stupid way to go about determining how society should interpret a document. For one thing, it means that the interpretation of the Treaty will be voted on by people who know nothing about it. For another thing, it will cause tremendous division and unrest.
A common fallacy seems to be that the Bill is about changing the meaning of the Treaty.
It appears to me to be nothing of the sort!!!
Just as, an act of Parliament in 1975 created an undefined thing called the principles of the treaty. This bill seeks to create a definition of that phrase in law.
So when people are required to sign/agree that they support the principles of the treaty. They have something to agree with rather than various, often changing meanings put out by various government bodies/corporates.
Thanks for your comment! Whether the bill changes the Treaty is a separate issue from whether truth is decided by referendum. This article does not deal with the former issue.
Those who believe abortion is acceptable, those who think abortion is unacceptable.
Which is the truth about abortion?
Another example.
Those that think Maori need a separate Health organisation. Those who think that Maori Asian and all citizens can be served with one Health organisetion.
Which is true?
When the majority decide something is true, then it follows that society has decided truth. Until Society changes its mind.
Slavery used to be accepted(Truth) until it was not(the new truth)
A referendum is just a giant poll on what society thinks!!!
Or do you think a special minority must be the sole arbiters of what is truth?
EG Maori Elite, Supreme court Judges?
With regard to interpreting a document. Then use the US Constitution as a case in point. Arguments are many and varied before the Supreme court. Orginalists try and interpret the meaning when it was drafted. Others try to interpret the Constitution using todays norms.
I submit that in todays society, neither popular belief(referendum) or elites interpretation represent truth. But Society as a whole has to have a common undertstanding as to what is true or not true.
Re: morality, there is no academic consensus on whether objective morality exists. An example of a scholar who believes that objective morality does exist, and has argued for that position, is Robert Merrihew Adams. On the other end of the spectrum, I dislike Peter Singer intensely, but even he believes that objective morality exists.
Regardless of whether objective morality exists or not however, as my article has argued (successfully, I think) the existence of objective morality is the foundation of indigenous rights and human rights in general. You in fact concede this in your comment about slavery. The position you espouse may or may not be true (see the internal inconsistency there, by the way?) but my point is that that view leads leads to societies like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.
There are things that are obviously true. "Either Neil Armstrong landed on the moon or he did not" is a premise which is true by definition, as those are the only two alternatives. I recognise that it is obvious that truth is objective, and that may be where your confusion comes in, but for a significant period in time denying the existence of objective truth was in vogue and many people still believe that today.
You accuse me of not addressing the subject (referendum/Truth) then wander off in a discussion on morality???? I would hate to infer you were deflecting. But then you and I have different views on what truth is.
I loved your slur "maybe thats where your confusion comes in""
I will use it as a put down some time in the future.
I hesitate to say that morality and truth as in deciding truth are two different topics.
But I have had my say in saying that a referendum has its place in deciding what society believes is truth.
This piece is oddly argued. "Firstly, it denies that the Treaty of Waitangi has an objective meaning. If truth does not exist, then what the Treaty means is a matter of opinion."
Of course "what the Treaty means is a matter of opinion". Sir Apirana Ngata, for instance, had a vastly different view on it than TMP does now.
Lucy is apparently a lawyer. Who should know better that documents are capable of many interpretations than a member of the legal profession? Why else do lawyers go to court to argue their case?
I think you misunderstand my point. Of course there are often differing opinions over what a document means. My point is that those opinions are not all equally correct. Which is to say: the Crown and iwi intended to agree on certain matters and it is possible to be right or wrong about what it is that they intended.
This may be confusing because postmodernism is such a ridiculous worldview. It denies that 2 + 2 objectively = 4, and says that any answer to that question is equally correct. That is because it teaches that truth does not exist.
We can never know what the parties to the Treaty understood 184 years ago. We can only make educated guesses, using contemporary evidence such as the chiefs' speeches at Waitangi and at Kohimarama in 1860, but we can have no idea what most of the other 500 signatories believed they were signing up to . Most couldn't read te reo and relied on whatever they were told the Treaty actually said and meant.
I think you're entirely wrong to make this a question of post-modernism. A much better parallel is Bible exegesis. The debates about what particular verses mean has occupied scholars for millennia.
Again, that is a separate issue. The question I am posing is whether there is a correct answer, not whether we can know it. Postmodernism would insist that there is no correct answer and that contradictory views as to what the parties actually intended are equally correct.
But what would a "correct answer" look like and how would it be arrived at? 500 chiefs might have had very different ideas among them about what they were signing. You'd have to quiz all of them individually (and assume they were telling the truth) to understand their reasons.
Some views may be so outlandish they can be easily dismissed but a lot of contradictory or competing views will be plausible and have evidence to support them.
Similar issues arise about authorial intent in relation to legislation passed by Parliament (I remember in Law School a friend commenting sardonically when we were studying what politicians intended by section 15(d) of the Contractual Remedies Act 1979 that they were probably all drunk at the time) but our legal system revolves around the assumption that there is such thing as parliamentary intention. I agree that complex issues can arise about group agency but for present purposes the most straightforward way to approach the issue is to do our best to give effect to what the majority of signers intended in relation to any given document, while trying to accommodate insofar as it is possible what a minority may have intended. The exact dynamics of that will depend on the specific document in question.
Yes, legislative intent is sometimes more obvious than others. You'll know that the govt is redefining s58 of the Marine and Coastal Areas Act for exactly that reason. The judges claimed that the section couldn't possibly mean what it plainly meant because, if it did, very few iwi/hapu would qualify for CMT.
That case of judicial activism seems pretty clear cut but it's very often a matter of contentious debate.
There may well be serious problems with the suggestion that Christianity is the basis for so-called human rights. For one, the belief in human rights came out of the rationalist enlightenment, which produced revolutionary republicanism, overthrowing monarchies established on the Constantinian constitution, and repressing the role of faith and the Christian church,
Not at all. The Enlightenment led to the massacre of the French Revolution and later to the atrocities of Communism and Nazism. The vast majority of Enlightenment philosophers did not believe in democracy and those who did (like Voltaire, or Montesquieu) were often simply praising England's legal system rather than putting forward democracy as their own idea. For all the talk of liberty, equality and fraternity it just wound up in a bloodbath.
In fact, England despite being a monarchy ended up permitting far greater liberty and being far more prosperous than anything (say) France ever produced prior to World War 2.
I think you have a solid point here Mr. Daniel but I would not express it in terms of the European rationalist enlightenment, I would go wider and deeper.
First I will go deeper. If Judeo-Christianity is the basis for "so-called human rights" then what are we to make of Aristotle? He was neither Jewish nor Christian. Aristotle likely produced the Nicomachean Ethics around 340 BC which is too early for Christianity but not too early to be influenced by Judaism. But there is no evidence to suggest he was influenced by any Jewish or Hebrew religious thought.
Now I go wider. If Judeo-Christianity is the basis for "so-called human rights" then what are we to make of Hinduism, its daughter Buddhism and its neighbor on the other side of the Himalayas, Confucianism? The Eastern side of the Eurasian landmass has developed its own rich, complex and highly sophisticated moral and ethical systems without any input from either Judaism or Christianity. Those various systems certainly interacted with each other but by the time they met the Eastern systems were all ready formed. Is there anyone here bold enough to say that the Indians and Chinese (plus Japanese, Koreans, Malay, Tibetans etc.) were immoral and unethical before the Christian missionaries turned up and told them how to behave?
If human rights, ethics and morality are based on Judeo-Christianity, in the same way that life on earth is based on carbon and water, then it should be impossible for it to exist without them. I think that an unbiased examination of human time and space will show that is just not true.
I appreciate Lucy Rogers' attempt to shovel out some of the bull-puckey of post modernism and there is a thread that connects the modern Western European ethical system of human rights to the older systems of Judaism and Christianity but the earth is much wider and older than any of that.
This is where post modernism does actually contain an important truth, there are many languages and many different ways to say the same thing. There is no one final and true map of the territory.
Thanks for your comment! You are certainly correct that the focus of this article is on contrasting Christianity and postmodernism, rsther than assessing other alternative ethical systems.
However, my claim is not that other worldviews do not contain elements of the truth and have sophisticated ethical systems. Rather, I claim (in this article, at least) that Christianity is the basis for human rights (as opposed to ethics per se). That is because of the unique Christian emphasis on being human and being in the image of God, which grounds the concept of equality. There is much that I admire about Plato's emphasis on the good, the true and the beautiful, or for that matter in Stoic thought, but the ancient world placed no value on being human per se as is reflected in (to provide just one example) the treatment of slaves in Rome, who were not considered the equals of a free man.
What you are attempting to show is that the modern western ethical system based on human rights is THE ethical system (definite article) when it is only AN ethical system (indefinite article). An ethical system, which by pure coincidence is the very one I am sure you were raised and educated in and gives you, as a lawyer, social status and a pay check.
There are many very serious and legitimate criticisms to be made of the Human Rights based ethical system, of Liberal Democracy as a political system and the current professional social class that supports them both.
The correct position to examine the current social ethical system is not from an anarchy where all morality has collapsed nor only from one two thousand years in the past, also consider what does exist else where today and what could exist in the future.
If you do not see human beings as uniquely valuable, I understand completely why you reject the concept of human rights in favour of alternate ethical systems. I know for example that ethicists like Peter Singer have developed ethical systems which do not privilege human beings. But that is besides the point, which is that Christianity is the foundation of human rights, because it places unique moral emphasis on being human. Whether or not you believe in human rights per se is a separate question from identifying which worldview gave birth to that concept.
"An ethical system, which by pure coincidence is the very one I am sure you were raised and educated in and gives you, as a lawyer, social status and a pay check." -- Respectfully my friend I am not quite sure what you're driving at here? If you're asking about my background in actual fact I am a former militant atheist and moral relativist, a postmodern extraordinaire. I struggled with the question of whether morality was objective and if so where it came from for about 10 years.
I just don't think that humans are either the pinnacle of creation nor the axis around which the universe revolves. Naturally most human do as humans are most interested in humans.
You can find many elements in the long and complex Judeo-Christian tradition that support my view
"Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man"
Ecclesiastes 12:13.
That is the obligations of humans to a greater order beyond just themselves. there are alternative view points too of course,
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life"
John 3:16.
I have heard Christians say that is the central teaching of Christianity, but that is one that has humans much closer to the center of things, egocentric desires about what the universe can do for ME.
I know which I think is closer to the truth. The sun wasn't made to keep ME warm nor the Earth to give ME a place to live.
I could not agree more that we should have moral concern for animals, and even for the natural world itself. But human beings attach a particular and unique moral significance. That is the point of the term "human rights". For example: I have no issue with killing and eating animals for food (provided that the killing is done humanely and with due regard for environmental concerns) but I would have an issue with doing the same to a human being.
Well I'm very glad that you said that, must be that explains why I couldn't find my way driving around Bangkok, despite having a reputedly good map of all the Buddhist monasteries,
The meaning of a document is not decided by majority vote, or by people going on a protest march, or even by judges making a ruling. But the laws we all live by, how those laws are interpreted, and how taxpayer money is spent, are all things that can be altered by elected representatives of the majority of voters.
There is a difference between a referendum determining how society should interpret a document, and a referendum being intended to determine what a document actually means. I took the latter as an implicit aim of the Act Party in seeking to hold a referendum.
But there are plenty of reasons why a referendum is a stupid way to go about determining how society should interpret a document. For one thing, it means that the interpretation of the Treaty will be voted on by people who know nothing about it. For another thing, it will cause tremendous division and unrest.
A common fallacy seems to be that the Bill is about changing the meaning of the Treaty.
It appears to me to be nothing of the sort!!!
Just as, an act of Parliament in 1975 created an undefined thing called the principles of the treaty. This bill seeks to create a definition of that phrase in law.
So when people are required to sign/agree that they support the principles of the treaty. They have something to agree with rather than various, often changing meanings put out by various government bodies/corporates.
IT DOES NOT SEEK TO CHANGE THE TREATY....
Thanks for your comment! Whether the bill changes the Treaty is a separate issue from whether truth is decided by referendum. This article does not deal with the former issue.
Lucy, I suspect your argument is a straw horse.
Truth is different for different people!!!
A simple example.
Those who believe abortion is acceptable, those who think abortion is unacceptable.
Which is the truth about abortion?
Another example.
Those that think Maori need a separate Health organisation. Those who think that Maori Asian and all citizens can be served with one Health organisetion.
Which is true?
When the majority decide something is true, then it follows that society has decided truth. Until Society changes its mind.
Slavery used to be accepted(Truth) until it was not(the new truth)
A referendum is just a giant poll on what society thinks!!!
Or do you think a special minority must be the sole arbiters of what is truth?
EG Maori Elite, Supreme court Judges?
With regard to interpreting a document. Then use the US Constitution as a case in point. Arguments are many and varied before the Supreme court. Orginalists try and interpret the meaning when it was drafted. Others try to interpret the Constitution using todays norms.
I submit that in todays society, neither popular belief(referendum) or elites interpretation represent truth. But Society as a whole has to have a common undertstanding as to what is true or not true.
Re: morality, there is no academic consensus on whether objective morality exists. An example of a scholar who believes that objective morality does exist, and has argued for that position, is Robert Merrihew Adams. On the other end of the spectrum, I dislike Peter Singer intensely, but even he believes that objective morality exists.
Regardless of whether objective morality exists or not however, as my article has argued (successfully, I think) the existence of objective morality is the foundation of indigenous rights and human rights in general. You in fact concede this in your comment about slavery. The position you espouse may or may not be true (see the internal inconsistency there, by the way?) but my point is that that view leads leads to societies like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.
There are things that are obviously true. "Either Neil Armstrong landed on the moon or he did not" is a premise which is true by definition, as those are the only two alternatives. I recognise that it is obvious that truth is objective, and that may be where your confusion comes in, but for a significant period in time denying the existence of objective truth was in vogue and many people still believe that today.
You accuse me of not addressing the subject (referendum/Truth) then wander off in a discussion on morality???? I would hate to infer you were deflecting. But then you and I have different views on what truth is.
I loved your slur "maybe thats where your confusion comes in""
I will use it as a put down some time in the future.
I hesitate to say that morality and truth as in deciding truth are two different topics.
But I have had my say in saying that a referendum has its place in deciding what society believes is truth.
Message ends
Where to go then? Remain hostage to postmodernist experts …?!
This piece is oddly argued. "Firstly, it denies that the Treaty of Waitangi has an objective meaning. If truth does not exist, then what the Treaty means is a matter of opinion."
Of course "what the Treaty means is a matter of opinion". Sir Apirana Ngata, for instance, had a vastly different view on it than TMP does now.
Lucy is apparently a lawyer. Who should know better that documents are capable of many interpretations than a member of the legal profession? Why else do lawyers go to court to argue their case?
I think you misunderstand my point. Of course there are often differing opinions over what a document means. My point is that those opinions are not all equally correct. Which is to say: the Crown and iwi intended to agree on certain matters and it is possible to be right or wrong about what it is that they intended.
This may be confusing because postmodernism is such a ridiculous worldview. It denies that 2 + 2 objectively = 4, and says that any answer to that question is equally correct. That is because it teaches that truth does not exist.
We can never know what the parties to the Treaty understood 184 years ago. We can only make educated guesses, using contemporary evidence such as the chiefs' speeches at Waitangi and at Kohimarama in 1860, but we can have no idea what most of the other 500 signatories believed they were signing up to . Most couldn't read te reo and relied on whatever they were told the Treaty actually said and meant.
I think you're entirely wrong to make this a question of post-modernism. A much better parallel is Bible exegesis. The debates about what particular verses mean has occupied scholars for millennia.
Again, that is a separate issue. The question I am posing is whether there is a correct answer, not whether we can know it. Postmodernism would insist that there is no correct answer and that contradictory views as to what the parties actually intended are equally correct.
But what would a "correct answer" look like and how would it be arrived at? 500 chiefs might have had very different ideas among them about what they were signing. You'd have to quiz all of them individually (and assume they were telling the truth) to understand their reasons.
Some views may be so outlandish they can be easily dismissed but a lot of contradictory or competing views will be plausible and have evidence to support them.
Similar issues arise about authorial intent in relation to legislation passed by Parliament (I remember in Law School a friend commenting sardonically when we were studying what politicians intended by section 15(d) of the Contractual Remedies Act 1979 that they were probably all drunk at the time) but our legal system revolves around the assumption that there is such thing as parliamentary intention. I agree that complex issues can arise about group agency but for present purposes the most straightforward way to approach the issue is to do our best to give effect to what the majority of signers intended in relation to any given document, while trying to accommodate insofar as it is possible what a minority may have intended. The exact dynamics of that will depend on the specific document in question.
Yes, legislative intent is sometimes more obvious than others. You'll know that the govt is redefining s58 of the Marine and Coastal Areas Act for exactly that reason. The judges claimed that the section couldn't possibly mean what it plainly meant because, if it did, very few iwi/hapu would qualify for CMT.
That case of judicial activism seems pretty clear cut but it's very often a matter of contentious debate.
There may well be serious problems with the suggestion that Christianity is the basis for so-called human rights. For one, the belief in human rights came out of the rationalist enlightenment, which produced revolutionary republicanism, overthrowing monarchies established on the Constantinian constitution, and repressing the role of faith and the Christian church,
Not at all. The Enlightenment led to the massacre of the French Revolution and later to the atrocities of Communism and Nazism. The vast majority of Enlightenment philosophers did not believe in democracy and those who did (like Voltaire, or Montesquieu) were often simply praising England's legal system rather than putting forward democracy as their own idea. For all the talk of liberty, equality and fraternity it just wound up in a bloodbath.
In fact, England despite being a monarchy ended up permitting far greater liberty and being far more prosperous than anything (say) France ever produced prior to World War 2.
I think you have a solid point here Mr. Daniel but I would not express it in terms of the European rationalist enlightenment, I would go wider and deeper.
First I will go deeper. If Judeo-Christianity is the basis for "so-called human rights" then what are we to make of Aristotle? He was neither Jewish nor Christian. Aristotle likely produced the Nicomachean Ethics around 340 BC which is too early for Christianity but not too early to be influenced by Judaism. But there is no evidence to suggest he was influenced by any Jewish or Hebrew religious thought.
Now I go wider. If Judeo-Christianity is the basis for "so-called human rights" then what are we to make of Hinduism, its daughter Buddhism and its neighbor on the other side of the Himalayas, Confucianism? The Eastern side of the Eurasian landmass has developed its own rich, complex and highly sophisticated moral and ethical systems without any input from either Judaism or Christianity. Those various systems certainly interacted with each other but by the time they met the Eastern systems were all ready formed. Is there anyone here bold enough to say that the Indians and Chinese (plus Japanese, Koreans, Malay, Tibetans etc.) were immoral and unethical before the Christian missionaries turned up and told them how to behave?
If human rights, ethics and morality are based on Judeo-Christianity, in the same way that life on earth is based on carbon and water, then it should be impossible for it to exist without them. I think that an unbiased examination of human time and space will show that is just not true.
I appreciate Lucy Rogers' attempt to shovel out some of the bull-puckey of post modernism and there is a thread that connects the modern Western European ethical system of human rights to the older systems of Judaism and Christianity but the earth is much wider and older than any of that.
This is where post modernism does actually contain an important truth, there are many languages and many different ways to say the same thing. There is no one final and true map of the territory.
And any Buddhist monk could tell you that.
Thanks for your comment! You are certainly correct that the focus of this article is on contrasting Christianity and postmodernism, rsther than assessing other alternative ethical systems.
However, my claim is not that other worldviews do not contain elements of the truth and have sophisticated ethical systems. Rather, I claim (in this article, at least) that Christianity is the basis for human rights (as opposed to ethics per se). That is because of the unique Christian emphasis on being human and being in the image of God, which grounds the concept of equality. There is much that I admire about Plato's emphasis on the good, the true and the beautiful, or for that matter in Stoic thought, but the ancient world placed no value on being human per se as is reflected in (to provide just one example) the treatment of slaves in Rome, who were not considered the equals of a free man.
Now do that for Buddhism, or Confucianism.
What you are attempting to show is that the modern western ethical system based on human rights is THE ethical system (definite article) when it is only AN ethical system (indefinite article). An ethical system, which by pure coincidence is the very one I am sure you were raised and educated in and gives you, as a lawyer, social status and a pay check.
There are many very serious and legitimate criticisms to be made of the Human Rights based ethical system, of Liberal Democracy as a political system and the current professional social class that supports them both.
The correct position to examine the current social ethical system is not from an anarchy where all morality has collapsed nor only from one two thousand years in the past, also consider what does exist else where today and what could exist in the future.
Other ways of being are possible.
If you do not see human beings as uniquely valuable, I understand completely why you reject the concept of human rights in favour of alternate ethical systems. I know for example that ethicists like Peter Singer have developed ethical systems which do not privilege human beings. But that is besides the point, which is that Christianity is the foundation of human rights, because it places unique moral emphasis on being human. Whether or not you believe in human rights per se is a separate question from identifying which worldview gave birth to that concept.
"An ethical system, which by pure coincidence is the very one I am sure you were raised and educated in and gives you, as a lawyer, social status and a pay check." -- Respectfully my friend I am not quite sure what you're driving at here? If you're asking about my background in actual fact I am a former militant atheist and moral relativist, a postmodern extraordinaire. I struggled with the question of whether morality was objective and if so where it came from for about 10 years.
Thanks for your comments!
I just don't think that humans are either the pinnacle of creation nor the axis around which the universe revolves. Naturally most human do as humans are most interested in humans.
You can find many elements in the long and complex Judeo-Christian tradition that support my view
"Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man"
Ecclesiastes 12:13.
That is the obligations of humans to a greater order beyond just themselves. there are alternative view points too of course,
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life"
John 3:16.
I have heard Christians say that is the central teaching of Christianity, but that is one that has humans much closer to the center of things, egocentric desires about what the universe can do for ME.
I know which I think is closer to the truth. The sun wasn't made to keep ME warm nor the Earth to give ME a place to live.
I could not agree more that we should have moral concern for animals, and even for the natural world itself. But human beings attach a particular and unique moral significance. That is the point of the term "human rights". For example: I have no issue with killing and eating animals for food (provided that the killing is done humanely and with due regard for environmental concerns) but I would have an issue with doing the same to a human being.
Well I'm very glad that you said that, must be that explains why I couldn't find my way driving around Bangkok, despite having a reputedly good map of all the Buddhist monasteries,