Oopsie, that was me 🤭 Just a tad of goofiness.

This is a bad argument. No, rights are not physical or materially real; that does not make them “fake” or contrived. Rather, they could be thought of as more or less useful in understanding material processes and relationships, in this case between people.

Your argument is essentially the premise of Empiricism. But what you and the Empiricists fail to grasp is that everything we comprehend is man-made. Our conception of a physical rock is just as much a psychological construct as a notion of natural rights.

Consider this very exchange. Certainly, our words and arguments are constructed psychologically and socially. But that doesn’t alter the purpose of the debate. In fact, it justifies it. If our words were perfectly consistent with the nature of reality, there would be no such thing as a debate, since a perfect word would need no elaboration; and if they were completely discordant, then there would also be no utility gained from engaging in debate.

So, our psychological constructs are not perfect, but neither are they completely fictitious. Thus, arguments are more or less accurate of reality, which is pretty much the starting point of any understanding of any rhetorical interaction.

Unless they have anything else to elaborate on than the premise of dialectical materialism, I don’t see how that is useful. Obviously that’s what happens; humans are social, and ability to persuade others into allying with oneself is not entirely correlated with a genuine or altruistic reciprocation. That doesn’t affect the aim of social philosophy, which is attempting to understand the principles underlying those same dynamics.

It’s not dumb at all. “Opposition” isn’t an accurate way to put it. I think your description is pretty good. I might summarise it as Empiricism, or sense, informs us of data or experience, while Rationalism, or reason, consists of the principles by which we order that experience. Judgement, interpretation, speculation, and others, are associated with and tend towards Rationalism; observation, experience, and so on are associated with Empiricism.

Which, I think, is the point of this article. Lower animals might be thought of as purely experience, appetite, and impulse-driven. In contrast, humans are far more capable of interpreting information from a limited set of experience.

Not just cooking, but fermentation, pickling, curing, aging… in fact you could even describe cultivating more edible organisms as a part of digestion, although that is certainly stretching the definition.

How we as a species are ideally capable of making sense of reality.

This is getting suspiciously close to the old Rationalism versus Empiricism dispute. There is substance, and then there is form. What we might call reality-in-itself is both and neither of these simultaneously; rather, they are two opposing means of comprehension. They are contradicting yet interdependent aspects of our consciousness. They could also be phrased as perception and conception.

You’re really pushing my temper.

As other have pointed out, this article attacks “happiness” in the title, then proceeds to argue against what should have been called from the beginning “mere pleasure”. “Happiness” is usually understood as a satisfied or serene pleasure, not necessarily a passionate or appetital one. “Happiness” is not the opposite of “pain”; it is the opposite of misery. I don’t think the authors are arguing that we must be miserable simply to pursue some ideal, so their argument ends up being simply “We should orient our lives around a higher ideal rather than mere pleasure”. And the obvious answer is that doing so will make us more “happy” according to its usual definition.

I myself had a strawmanned idea of what Epicurus was, then quickly realised that he is pretty much a moderate Stoic. Not completely ascetic, but still recognising that pleasure must be disciplined not only for objective well-being, but for the very ability to experience pleasure itself.