Fine, substitute “burden” for duty then. Living as a free human being carries the burden of being a free human being in a society of other free human beings. The best way to ensure that your rights are protected in a society is to vigorously defend the rights of others.
I don’t like the term “natural rights”, because as you point out, nature does not endow us with rights. But that’s a semantic quibble. The real question is “where do our rights come from?”.
And there is one answer to that question.
I prefer the term “inalienable right”, by which I mean a right arising from the fact that I am a sapient creature. That is, because I am capable of consent and have control of mine own actions, there are certain rights that I should have. And those are not dependent on what society or jurisdiction I live in.
Of course, the society or jurisdiction I live in will affect how easily I can exercise my rights or what the consequences are for doing so. But I do not recognize the right of a society or jurisdiction to revoke my inalienable rights, even if they have the capacity to do so.
Personally, I consider the idea of inalienable rights to be the cornerstone of the liberal movement (as exemplified by Declaration of Independence). The idea that rights are granted by the state is a pernicious holdover of illiberal monarchies. We, the people, grant powers to the states; they do not grant us rights in return, we retain them.
How do we determine what those rights are?
There’s no easy answer to that.
Different people will have different rights in mind. So we have to come to some sort of an accommodation, through discussion or protests or violence. The state could have an essential role in this, especially since it’s probably the state that is going to be protecting our rights.
We talk about them, write papers or books, discuss them in coffee shops or online, and use our reason and intellect to decide.
But then we have to establish a system of government to make all those discussions actually relevant to our real lives. And, if you happen to have a Constitution, you create a system of government that is in charge of defining, protecting, and limiting those rights.
Of course rights aren’t granted by the state. However, if certain rights are inalienable, what method do we use to determine what those rights are?
My method of determining what we should call “rights” is to imagine the sort of society I’d like to live in, and try to come up with some governing guidelines that I think are most likely to result in that society. All rights are rights we grant to each other, because otherwise we’d all be worse off.
I don’t want to live in a world where I’m in constant danger that my neighbor will kill me, so we all agree that nobody is allowed to kill anybody, except when they really need to. I’m happy to agree with this because the benefit I’d get from killing anyone who annoyed me is much smaller than the benefit I’d get from not being killed when I annoy people. And I am also agreeing to help out my neighbors when someone is trying to kill them, otherwise this agreement is pretty empty. So when I see someone killing my neighbor, I run over and help, and expect them to do the same. The system of cops and courts and jails we have is just an elaborate version of me running over to help my neighbor when the shit goes down.
And because we don’t allow random violence, I get even more benefit than just not being killed, all my neighbors aren’t worried about being killed either, and so we’re free to concentrate on other matters than self-protection. I live in a town without a wall, my house is not fortified, I don’t have weapons constantly at hand as I travel the highways.
Even the notion that a human being owns himself is merely an agreement among ourselves, because ownership is not a natural property of the universe. I own a car and a house and my liver and so on. What does that mean? It means I’ve convinced you all to leave that stuff alone, you aren’t going to come over and take the car that’s in my driveway, and if you do, I’m going to get the help of my neighbors to get it back. Same thing with ownership of myself. The only way I own myself is that all my neighbors agree I own myself, and I agree that all my neighbors own themselves. Even then, plenty of people wouldn’t agree with the self-ownership formulation, they might argue that you don’t own yourself, God owns you.
But that doesn’t matter. I don’t care what they think about the basis of our human and civil rights. I care about having human and civil rights that allow me to live a decent life in a decent society, as best as we naked apes can approximate. So whether rights are granted by God, or by nature, or by being a sapient being, or by the King, in reality it doesn’t matter since we all have to work together to enforce them anyway. And so it turns out that the social compact is all we have, in the final analysis, and the other things are just justifications for convincing people to follow the social compact.
Email sent. I put “Want a bigger penis?” in the subject box just so I could be sure you’d open it.
I agree, but I think the justifications are more important. For example, if the justification is “the king grants us our rights”, it’s hard to resist changes to those rights when the king changes his mind. If a right is granted because a majority of my peers voted for it, then it can be revoked by a majority of my peers. That’s not acceptable to me.
I guess there’s a largely philosophical issue about whether or not I have right if it’s not exercisable. I would say yes, and so the source of rights is important to me. If one thinks there is no right unless it can exercised, the source of rights is less important.
The most obvious “natural right” there could be is to be naked in publicly-owned places. (You can make whatever rules you want for your private property.) But, no, the government forbids it, and, in an unfunded mandate, makes us pay for the clothes we have to wear.
(One commonplace argument by extension is that this should also cover the “natural right” to eliminate liquids and solids in public places, but this fails, as a comparison, because it directly affects – and harms – the quality of the environment in an objective way. Just being naked doesn’t do that.)
(Especially if the nudist carries a towel to sit upon. Ahem.)
I guess, if you put it that way. Although I wasn’t thinking about the movie in legal terms so much as etiquette terms. But yeah, if the owner/manager of the theater wants the majority of his customers to be happy, he will take the loud talker outside or refund the other customers’ money.
It goes back to the definition of “harm.” I don’t think Loud Talker’s rights have been infringed or that he has been “harmed” if he’s told to go outside the theater to talk.
If those rights spring from an agreement among people then I don’t think they are the natural rights that people claim. They would be no different than constitutional rights, except perhaps not written down. Anyone may think they have rights, but they aren’t really rights unless there’s a way to enforce them. At best, nature only gives us the right to die eventually.
That’s a perfectly reasonable philosophical stance, but not everyone agrees with it.
Though much like others I reject the concept of natural rights, I can philosophically understand those that argue for them in regards to one’s person. But what does “natural” have to do with property? You aren’t born owning diddly ;). Extending person-hood rights to the property of said person kinda makes it seem to me that you are starting with the concept of libertarianism and arguing backwards to natural rights, rather than the other way around.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a communist and I like my property. But I have hard time jumping to an inalienable right to property as being “natural.”
Then in what sense would they be rights? They sound more like ‘wants’ to me if there’s no way to enforce them.
You don’t have to be an advocate for that position. I understand others have some kind of way of saying they have natural rights. What they say just doesn’t make sense to my simple mind.
I suggest reading Locke, Spooner, Bastiat, Thoreau… As you can see I tend toward the anarchist camp (not in the modern pejorative sense (blow shit up) but in the classical sense (voluntary -ism).
Anyway, I’d like to point out that the enlightenment rights of life, liberty and property were not arrived at arbitrarily but deduced based on the assumption that the individual is sovereign - because the individual is the lowest common denominator. Individuals make up the group… you can touch an individual but can’t touch a “group”, etc… You may disagree with that assumption but I think the logic is pretty solid.
The idea of property extends from the body and mind. What we make with our hands and minds is ours - land ownership extends from the concept of people needing land to survive (part of their body). Two or more people might not be able to use the same piece of land and survive. Therefore, people are entitled the exclusive “use” of land (which turned into ownership). Incidently, the Iroquois respected this notion land use (as long as someone was using it) and property in the sense of things we make or find etc…
That line of reasoning assumes rights already, I think–it assumes that individual human organisms have a right to be individuals.
But there’s nothing forcing us to consider human organisms to be individuals. We have a pretty good idea how to control them, in fact–how to make them non-individuals, with their wills subsumed either to other human beings or to social entities like communities or nations.
So then, we can keep on board the whole idea of deriving rights from the idea of individual as sovereign–but simply assign the status of “individual” to a different kind of entity entirely. For example we could assert that only communities or nations have the right to be an individual, and that human organisms’ wants must be subsumed to the higher level organization.
And maybe such a system wouldn’t work well. But that doesn’t mean that there are natural human rights. It just means that the system that gives humans rights works better than the one that doesn’t.
You’re explaining why a system that accords rights works better than one that doesn’t. But I take it proponents of “natural rights” think rights consist in something other than simply being the system that works the best.
In more seriousness, I think this is correct. We all have “interests.” Those interests that are widely enough respected, shared, enforced, and protected are the ones we call “rights.”
They can all be taken away, pretty much any time. It doesn’t take much in the way of tyranny to seriously undermine nearly any right there is.
And some interests are not widely shared, respected, or protected. This is why we have to fight, regarding abortion, gay marriage, etc.
It’s like the Dan O’Neill cartoon of the big Opinion walking along, shoving people out of the way. Someone complains, and he declares, “I am not a mere Opinion. I am a VALUE.” To which the other guy gripes, “That’s what they all say.”
Explain how an individual human organism is not already an individual.