Let's say we did institute a mating system were all humans mated for life, and their choices didn't matter. Is that good because now I can have sex? Or bad because now we're less free to make choices?
This is exactly what I have spent my time in this thread arguing against. "Personal choice" is a childish libertarian phantom - it is a "right" anchored firmly within the secular morality of the modern West. "People should be able to do anything they want to and anything that gets in their way is bad". It is an anarchic and incoherent kind of ethics. It is the essence of liberal society and characteristic of civilizations in decline.
I'm not going to convince you of anything if you hold this "personal choice" to be the highest good. Choices are not made
in vacuo. A system of rights should ultimately serve to keep a society stable and functional, not as some kind of nihilistic justification for the removal of constraints, to allow for the imbalanced piling of resources in certain corners, tipping the whole structure over. I refer to what I said here:
The question is: which rights work?
In order to develop a viable system of rights, some sacrifices of agency have to be made in order to hold up the structure as a whole. "Autonomy" is not morally positive - it is rather the removal of useful constraints on human behavior - and just devolves toward anarchy and conflict where resources are hoarded and battles are fought over them. At present, things seem to be in limbo between broad social liberalism and specific instances of heavy-handed control to keep "undesirable elements" from ruining everyone else's party.
Bolded was remarkable for the way in which it immediately incited moral panic. It's so deeply burrowed into everyone's head that "freedom = gud", whether or not they're able to exercise this "freedom" for themselves, that a measured and reasonable statement like this, a simple description of the logic of order, is taken as "Communism" by some people, "Fascism" by others, even "Theocracy" - i.e. the bad guys, don't hurt muh freedom!
Right now,
you are the one being controlled.
Your liberty is the sacrifice at the altar of liberty.
Even in a Rwandan genocide, those rights would still apply. It's just bad people would start listening to their baser instincts. Even in desperation, I and everyone else knows what right and wrong is. We might not all obey what right and wrong is, and some of us might not have much choice either.
See Thomas Hobbes on this. They would not apply, because things would have regressed to a state premature to "rights", i.e. nature. Strife, conflict, and chaos is the ground floor, the baseline, the essential state of life, which is reined in by constructed ideas of justice - which are being stripped away now to leave only a weak support. Things become more and more "natural" under liberalism, yet it still manages to disguise itself as the highest and most developed form of "justice" possible - evident by the claim that it is "self-evident".
But if I steal something out of desperation, it's not because the person I'm robbing doesn't deserve to keep what I stole from them. It's because I was able to convince myself to do it despite that person's rights. I don't justify my theft by saying "That gas station was bad."
You don't, because you don't rob gas stations and you don't have to. The people who
do rob gas stations are perfectly able to justify their theft by saying "that gas station, or that x, that
thing that is not me is bad."
Let's say we did institute a mating system were all humans mated for life, and their choices didn't matter. Is that good because now I can have sex?
It is good because it gives everyone a
clear opportunity to have sex and lets them know
clearly what they need to do in order to get it.