to mean that of course the Constitution doesn’t say “only citizens have the right to due process” because not only would that be atrocious from a human rights standpoint, and plainly contradicted by the plain text of the Constitution itself (as amended), but it would also essentially nullify the rights of citizens as well.
If “only citizens have the right to due process” then when the government gets tired of Gadfly Gary going on about no-bid contracts at every council meeting, the government could just say “Hey, we just found out Gadfly Gary is an illegal alien!” And when Gadfly Gary says “What?!? No I’m not! I was born right here! Here’s my birth certificate!” the government could say “You’re an illegal alien, that means we don’t have to prove anything, and we don’t even have to let you prove anything, HAW HAW HAW! Boys, take this ‘illegal’ out back and shoot him!”
“If we say that only citizens have the right to due process, then there is nothing to stop the government from denying someone’s citizenship, depriving them of due process, and executing them.”
Differences between that and what you mocked? One single-adjacent-letter typo. One that spellcheck wouldn’t catch. A “t” instead of an “f.”
I really do not know how I could explain this any more simplistically, although I fear that such may prove necessary.
I agree that this is a problem. The flaw is that “rights” aren’t actually natural and they aren’t free. To give people rights has a cost. (holding court hearings, etc). And so at a minimum it seems like rights shouldn’t go to outright hostile actors (lawless invaders who sneak in or shoot their way into the borders of the continental USA).
And at a minimum it seems like it should be quid-pro-quo. If the USA is going to respect the civil rights of citizens of Mexico who are uninvited residents of the US, at a minimum it seems like the Mexican government needs to agree (and actually grant in practice) civil rights to American citizens in return. Which it doesn’t do.
Then why do we have courts and laws? Why isn’t the moral stance “people have rights because they’re people” enough? Why do you have a Bill of a Rights,declared to be the supreme law of the land, and enforced by government agencies, notably courts? If the moral stance is all that’s needed, why not abolish courts and repeal the Bill of Rights?
Which is why, from July 4, 1776, all men in the United States had fully equal rights, right? Regardless of skin colour, ethnic origins, or property ownership? You didn’t need a sovereign power, like, say, an Army, to establish racial and ethnic freedom, right? And you didn’t need the Commander-in-Chief to order the Army to free certain people in certain parts of the country (but not other people, in other parts of the country)? And you didn’t need the people’s represntatives, jointly exercising the sovereignty of the People, to pass three constitutional amendments to guarantee equality, regardless of race or previous condition of servitude? And then you didn’t need a century of fighting for civil rights? It all just happened naturallly on July 5, 1776, right? Everyone free and equal?
And that reference to “all men” was just a typo, right? Jefferson meant to say “all men and women, including the black slave that I’m having carnal relations with, are created equal”?
Any theory of natural law breaks down pretty quickly as soon as you ask that sort of question. Don’t get me wrong - I agree with the “should be equal” as a basic moral, organizing principle for my society. But it doesn’t create rights.
Put another way: what country meets the test set out in the opening words of the Declaration, in your view? Not as a moral aspiration, but as a real, working society? And since when? Because if natural law works, that should be the basic state of humanity everywhere, throughout history. But it isn’t and hasn’t been. It’s only in the last two centuries that some societies have tried to put those moral aspirations into practice, through laws, codes and constitutions. Two centuries is just the blink of an eye in the history of Homo sapiens sapiens. If natural law is the source of rights, it sure hasn’t been very efficient at implementing those rights.
Why is the US Constitution the standard? My country’s Constitution recognizes rights that are unknown in the US Constitution, notably in regard to language rights, voting rights, gender equality, and religion in the schools. Why isn’t my country’s Constitution the real example of the rights which are inherent in the “nature of [del]man[/del] humanity”, and it’s just the refusal of the US governments to protect/support those rights that prevents Americans from exercising those rights?
I know you’re saying you’re not confused by the definition of natural rights, but I kinda think you are. If a right is inalienable, then it makes no sense to ask whether one class of humans has it and another doesn’t. That question makes sense if you’re talking legal rights, though.
That’s not accurate. Rights may be violated, but still possessed. An inalienable right means that no matter what, the right shouldn’t be violated.
They needn’t be a product at all. Rather, they may be a dynamic that arises naturally when sentient entities with desires exist around one another, a way of explaining their relationships.
Very crudely:
I have desires. I experience those desires as what I “should” do.
I recognize that other beings have desires. I think they have the same experience of “should” as I have.
While I can think of rational arguments for prioritizing my own desires, my own “shoulds,” I can’t think of convincing arguments for ignoring the “shoulds” of other entities.
Thus, my behavior becomes informed by the desires of others.
I think most modern constitutions protect the rights of non-citizens who arrived legally (and even in some cases illegally). But Japan’s doesn’t. It’s reference to “the people” means Japanese people as the courts have decided.
But for the first 80 years of the American Constitution, African-Americans could be bought and sold as chattels. What “inalienable rights” did they have? Saying they had the right to liberty, just couldn’t exercise it for their entire lives, doesn’t really make sense. It can’t be hand-waved away as “Well, they had that inalienable right, it’s just the law didn’t recognize it. (And in fact treated them as aliénable chattels.).” The reality is they had no right to liberty at all.
That’s a normative statement, certainly. Their right to liberty “should” have been recognized, but it wasn’t, both before and after the implementation of the US Constitution, and for their entire lifetimes. If someone isn’t able to exercise a “right” for their entire lifetime, and in fact are considered to be chattels, not humans of equal status, how can it be said that they have inalienable rights?
If someone is born a slave, died a slave, and is themself “alienated” from time to time on the slave block for money, in what realistic way do they have the “inalienable right to liberty”?
They only got their liberty when they fought for it and ran, or when society worked at tremendous cost in gold and blood to establish their liberty.
A right can only be inalienable under a particular legal code. The right to freedom of speech is inalienable under the US Constitution, and only insofar as the Constitution is recognized and respected. There have, of course, been periods in this nation’s history where that has not been the case.
In China, on the other hand, the right to free speech is alienable as fuck.
A right that is violated without a way to redress the violation is a right that does not exist. A cop might violate my right to be free from unreasonable search, but I still possess that right because I can (in theory) go to a judge and have him either restore me, or punish the person who violated my right. If there is no such system to address my grievance, then I don’t have that right.
Needless to say, I agree that there are rights that everyone should have, and that should never be violated. But I find it slightly obscene to say that someone who is beaten to death by prison guards because he worshiped the wrong way had freedom of religion. No, he didn’t. You can tell, because they fucking killed him for it.
Like I said, “laws and customs.” But the thing is, the dynamics that arise when people with desires exist around each other very, very seldom feature any of the things commonly defined as “natural rights.” It usually takes millennia of progress to get to the point where people start thinking things like “freedom of speech” or “freedom of religion” are important. These rights aren’t a product of nature, they’re a product of civilization.
Er, thanks, I understand the concept of ethical behavior in a social setting. That’s not really related to my issues with the philosophical concept of “natural” rights.
We launched paper rockets to begin our study of gravity last year. I asked students to explain how the rockets could go so high. They supposed that maybe the air compressor made gravity not affect the rockets.
What they learned over the unit was that you can’t stop gravity from affecting something. You can, however, apply a force that overcomes gravity’s downward pull.
It’s not obscene to say that someone beaten to death had the right to freedom of religion. That right was violated. Rights don’t go away when they’re violated, any more than gravity stops affecting a rocket when it’s launched.
If that guy didn’t have the right to freedom of religion, then it’s nonsensical to say the guards violated his rights. In fact, by your framing, I’m not sure how you could ever say that someone’s rights are violated: if we can tell that guy didn’t have the right to freedom of religion, because he got killed for it, then doesn’t similar logic mean that nobody ever has a right if that right isn’t respected?
This is a real good summary of my position. If you think it’s different from my position, you’re likely wrong.
A person can go their whole lifetime without having a right be recognized, just like a person can go their whole lifetime without ever knowing they have DNA. Rights aren’t useful unless they’re recognized, but that doesn’t mean they only exist once they’re recognized: it just means that, until that point, they’re in a state of violation.
a. For almost the entire history of humanity, for almost all humans who have ever lived, none of the “legal rights” we are talking about existed or were applied.
b. Different countries that arguably are more free in practice have different forms of “inalienable rights”.
Your physics experiment is interesting but…gravity is real. It is not defined by a piece of paper and continues to exist whether or not a piece of paper is amended or reinterpreted.
Oddly enough, I’d wanted to use a gravity analogy myself, but I thought that conflating natural laws and natural rights might be putting words in my opponents mouths. I’m glad you went there, because this really encapsulates my problem with the concept of natural rights beautifully.
Gravity exists independent of human activity. Nothing humans can do can make gravity stop affecting an object. Even cases where something appears to be defying gravity, such as an airplane, or hot air balloon, relies on gravity to function. And, of course, if there were no such thing as a human, there would still be gravity. When you compare rights to natural laws, you’re saying those laws objectively exist.
And that’s bullshit. There’s no such thing as objective morality. The universe is not moral. Nature is not moral. Morality is something humans invented, which is what makes it so precious.
If there’s no law that says he has that right, then yes, it is nonsensical. In a modern context, there are international laws that say everyone has the right to worship how they want. When a nation ignores those laws, we can say that they’ve violated those rights.
If you go back to medieval Europe and start talking about someone’s freedom of religion, then you are talking nonsense. That right didn’t exist then, outside of a few limited contexts.
I provided an explicit example of how someone’s rights can be violated in that post. I provided another one just now. Here’s a formal definition to cap it off: a right can be violated if there is a law that establishes that right, and someone violates that law.
Look, if I assert that I have a natural right to be free from taxation, what does that mean? How do I demonstrate that this is a natural right, to the satisfaction of the government? How does the government demonstrate that this right does not exist, other than referencing its own system of laws and precedents?
I don’t have any problem with the idea that there are rights that all humans should posses. I expect if we compared notes, they’d be pretty much identical to what you call natural rights. My objection is that nature has nothing to do with them - they’re human rights. As in, rights for, and from, humans.
The truth is that might makes right. Everything else is a useful fiction. This is why I’m so vociferous with my support of free speech. This is why I don’t care what flag someone waves. Once you take that hard won power from the person and give it to the people who run the state it’s hard to get back.
That first sentence–especially the “should” in it–reinforces my understanding that our argument is semantic. The “should” is something that’s deduced, not a product of culture. The rights you say humans should possess are legal rights. The “should” comes from the underlying natural rights that arise when sentient, desirous entities interact.
