You’ve got it right. Being wholly subjective, it does come down to individual opinions.
Natural rights?
One can easily develop natural rights. Any organism that lives is geared to stay alive. So any action that an organism takes to stay alive is its ‘natural right’. There’s no discussion of good or bad here. It’s a fact of existing, like gravity.
All organisms need food and shelter.
The need for food justifies any means to get food, whether it’s being an herbivore, carnivore, or omnivore. As long as the food does not sicken or kill the organism, it’s food. That includes other organisms. But no class of organisms can last if canniblism is the main method of feeding.
Shelter takes two components: protection from the environment and protection from other organisms.
All organisms are equal.
By its existence, every organism has a ‘right’ to continue living. The problem arises when two organisms have to compete for food and/or shelter. They can attack each other, to secure food/shelter for themselves. That’s anarchy. They can live symbiotically, providing to each other what the other doesn’t have. They can live synergistically, making each other’s life even better than living alone. They can live cooperatively, so that each respects the other.
All organisms may not live equally.
A hierarchy is created when one organism can dominate another organism. An equalibrium has to be maintained so the dominant organism doesn’t destroy itself if it depends on the other organism, but that organism is destroyed by that dominance.
It means “in my opinion, all people should have this”.
For example, let’s take
[
](America's Founding Documents | National Archives)
My interpretations is
We believe it’s obvious that all people are politically equal and have the inherent rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And the people give power to governments to protect these rights.
Now that all the *principle players in the thread have agreed that the phrases “natural rights” and, according to Pleonast, “inalienable rights”, are simply social constructs - subjective opinions - that the majority has agreed to respect, I’d like to explore whether there could be other sources for natural rights.
I don’t believe that natural rights, as commonly defined, exist but I do believe that millions of years of primate and human evolution have given us certain instincts, preferences and predilections that guide our behaviour. As evidence, I cite the very different structures of chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla and orang societies. The rules of each respective ape society didn’t form by accident; they grew out of generations of cooperation between evolution and environment. So too for human societies.
There seems to be a preference for not killing, for reciprocation, for respect, for fairness across all human societies and across primates species more generally. It’s true that murder exists, in our species and in other’s, but murder is the exception not the rule and the rules for murder are remarkably similar within and dramatically different across the various species. Any system of rights worthy of the label “natural” must take these preferences into account. These preferences are more than subjective opinion as evolution has carefully selected for them across the millennia.
It’ll take a lot more study and argumentation before we can determine exactly what these rights entail, but I propose that it is possible, in principle, to derive a system of rights from our evolutionary preferences and that this system would be worthy of the label “natural rights”.
Another possible source: Although Bentham would no doubt shudder at the violence to common language, I believe that a form of utilitarianism could be a source of natural rights. Let me explain.
It should be possible, in principle, to design the best possible society. Yes, yes, it’s been tried before and it always fails. Philosopher Kings and Gulags and the Killing Fields and the Holocaust are just some of the terrible results of past experiments to make a better society. But that doesn’t mean such experiments are doomed to failure, does it? Is not the American Constitution also such an experiment to build a better society and has that not worked out pretty well so far? But, I suggest, after 200 years of experience with the american experiment and a good deal more political theory than than the founders had, we could do better. In principle, we could design the best possible society based on a system of rights. That system too would be worthy to of the label “natural rights”.
There would be a multitude of principles to hash out and agree (what is the good? what happens when rights collide? who guards the guards?) but I think a system of laws and moral principles founded on utilitarianism that takes into account our evolutionary preferences is not just possible, it would be highly desirable and we should get started as soon as possible.
- Of course, most apologists for natural rights would strenuously deny this formulation and I’m sure they’ll be along shortly to state their case. By any common definition, natural rights are prior to and outside of democratic agreement and often spring from supernatural sources. If such an apologist shows up in this thread, I will join with Tripolar and Czarcasm in asking them to justify their belief.
That sounds exactly like what I said in my first post, unless I’m misreading you here.
They come from God, nature, or the universe. It is the proposition that some things are inherently good or bad, and not simply because human beings say so.
If the government legalizes murder tomorrow, do we say:
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Well, that sucks. We had better vote in different legislators next election. OR
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That is wrong and invalid on its face. A society that tolerates murder has per se abandoned it’s legitimacy to govern?
I think we all agree with #2 way more than #1. But why? If rights and privileges only come from the government, then they can take those rights and privileges away. If there is a higher law (natural law) then #2 has a basis in something.
And a list of those things would consist of…?
All natural rights, IMO, are some form of the right to be left alone. That right is inviolable (as much as any right is inviolable) so long as I respect it for others. As a practical matter, that right is only enjoyed if we agree to sacrifice some element of it in the interest of societal protections (e.g., police). I would also suggest that I can concede willingly any part of this right in a given circumstance, which solves the “talking in a movie theater” dilemma quite nicely:
[ul][]Theater is owned by a person who agrees to let you in for the price of a ticket, so long as you agree to the rules of the establishment. He has the right to use his property as he sees fit (in this regard).[]You can walk on by or agree to the rules, whichever you like.[*]The rest of us in the theater have the right to be left to enjoy the movie without some d-head talking throughout. He left his right to jabber at the door.[/ul]You really want a list of rights, though, that seems clear, so it seems you’re rejecting the notion that such a comprehensive list isn’t possible or, frankly, even important. But here, I’ll start it for you: I have the right to read my newspaper, just delivered (and paid for), at my kitchen table while I drink a cup of my coffee, so long as I can do so without imposing any imposition on anyone who hasn’t willingly assumed it already.
But then they’re not really “natural,” are they? Or, in other words, they’re not inherently any different than the “right” to vote, or the “right” to bear arms, or any other arbitrary constructs that we have decided are appropriate for our chosen method of governance and our chosen values.
I don’t think anyone in this thread is arguing that we don’t or shouldn’t have rules to help us manage human interaction in a way that suits us.
What (I think) people are arguing is that calling those rules “natural” or “inalienable” implies that those rules are inviolable outside of the society that dreamed them up, which ought to be obviously false, if you are willing to admit that they are the product of individual whimsy.
This is a distraction.
I believe in Constitutional rights. But there’s no definitive list of them; people disagree all the time about what rights are protected by our Constitution or not. And we have a written constitution. What do you say about constitutional rights in a country without an explicit constitution, like the UK?
We have a fundamental disagreement then.
I feel that all people should be able to do certain things. I call these things inalienable rights. The fact that not all jurisdictions protect those rights doesn’t mean those people should not have them.
To be less abstract, take the inalienable right to communicate. Even though the nation of Elbonia does not recognize that right, the people there should have it, because they are people. I would not say “it’s too bad they don’t have free speech, but since their culture doesn’t believe in it, they should be happy anyway”.
If you believe there are rights that all people should have, even if their jurisdiction does not currently protect them, then you believe in inalienable rights.
Agreed. We can start with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and disagree on others. We can’t take the 2nd amendment and agree what rights that protects. How can we agree on what God, nature, or the universe gives so that any one of us can provide a list?