The ninth amendment is a rule for the government. As such, any rights it bestows, are granted by the government.
Your rights aren’t natural, they’re given by the society you live in. You can’t get married to multiple women, other men in different cultures can. Each of those rights is created by common consensus.
If you were a cave-person living with an extended family group they would decide what rights you enjoy, and they would enact the punishments backing those limitations up.
Look, if our rights come from God, how do we discover what rights God intended us to have?
If our rights come from nature, how do we discover what rights nature intended us to have?
Even if you don’t believe the social theory of rights–that rights are just those things that we all agree to because that’s the kind of society we prefer to live in–it amounts to the same thing in the end. Because in order to get us to agree to your set of God-given rights, or natural rights, you have to convince your fellow monkeys that they’d be better off agreeing to your list.
God hasn’t spoke to me, and given me a personal revelation about human rights. Maybe he has to you, but he certainly hasn’t done the same for me. And those people who claim that God told them such-and-such don’t all agree. Now, some of those people may be getting messages directly from God, but how do we tell the difference between messages from God, and messages that aren’t from God?
Likewise, if rights come from nature, why did it take until the 18th Century before philosophers were able to decipher our natural rights? If our rights were self-evident, why weren’t they self-evident back in ancient Rome, or Egypt, or Sumeria?
It seems to me that our rights aren’t really self-evident. It’s more a question of looking around at the various systems of social organization that have been established around the world over the thousands of years of recorded history, and asking how those systems worked out. If one form of social organization leads to misery and horror, well, it doesn’t matter if that form of social organization is dictated by God or Nature, I don’t want to live that way. If another form leads to a tolerable life, well, it doesn’t matter if it’s against God’s law or Nature’s law, I know I’d rather live that way.
And this method can be refined, so that we can look at tolerable systems of social organization, and see if there can be any improvement. And it turns out, there are, and if we implement various rules that have been shown to improve life in other places and times, people often see an improvement in their own circumstances.
But of course, these improvements aren’t guaranteed, and we often have no idea how things will actually work out until we try them. We have to work empirically, because there’s no other way. And we’ve seen whole countries charge over the cliff and cause immense suffering, despite the examples of history that should have been a warning.
Human beings do not have an innate sense of justice. Or rather, we do have such an innate sense (given to us, in my opinion, by evolution), but that innate sense of justice doesn’t resemble the Constitution of the United States very closely. We know we don’t want to be killed, we don’t want to suffer, we want our children to survive, we want to keep our property safe, we don’t want to be disrespected, we want to belong to a family. But these innate desires don’t lead to modern liberal democracy, they lead rather to the typical lot in life of the typical person throughout history, which is living as an agricultural serf in some shithole village.
If we want to live our lives as other than serfs, we can’t just go by our natural instincts, we have to live by artificial rules that we assent to only because we see that for some reason, they work. And this is the source of our “rights”, which are just things that we all are compelled to agree to, because if we don’t, then the result is misery. And even if these rights preexist our faltering acceptance of them, if we discover these rights rather than invent them, it doesn’t make any difference, because the process whereby we adopt them as social rules is identical. We are convinced to adopt them because we think we’ll have better lives if we do.
This is interesting. Other non-sentence-starting words that are capitalized in the DOI include: Nature, People, Government, Rights, Despotism, Representation, Legislature, Annihilation, Offices, Military, and Judges. Do all of these words have implied godliness because they are capitalized? Or just creator? Is it all possible that capitalization was used for emphasis?
One plausible, universal, and I think agreeable answer to the OP is that natural rights derive from nature. That is, as independent sentient human beings we have certain freedoms that should not be limited by the yoke of authority. The founders of America felt (and I strongly agree) that the best way to protect those natural rights was through a social contract guaranteeing certain legal rights. By vesting power in the people themselves we could better perfect this contract over time.
None of this requires a deity in any way.
In fact it is somewhat contradictory to claim that some of these rights came from the Christian God, since he rather explicitly forbids large swaths of freedom of speech and freedom of religious expression.
Non sequitur, obviously. The Ninth Amendment says exactly the opposite.
Regards,
Shodan
And since the Ninth Amendment says it, we are following it. If the Ninth Amendment said the opposite, we would be doing the opposite.
The fact that you’re pointing to a document to prove what you’re saying, disproves what you’re saying. 
Man makes rights and enforces them. Remember, you’re an advanced monkey. In nature you would eat, shit and breed. But the real world is full of tigers and other things with the strength to remove those abilities from you. Now we have societies, whose function (among others) is to generate rights to make our lives better. The reason America is a great country is that the rights we get from it are pretty good.
Without society you would be at the mercy of anyone or anything stronger than you.
I love how this premise assumes that in the perceived absence of a natural explanation for simple social constructs, “a magic man makes it so” is a viable explanation of anything.
Invoking gods simply turns questions of social morality into “mite makes right.”
I think many folks above are right that if there is no God, or some other transcendent source for inalienable rights, then they don’t exist. What we call inalienable rights are just preferences we have for a particular social contract that’s a by-product of sociobiological evolution. In that case, these rights would not be inalienable or objective, but malleable and subjective.
But I think this view butts up against some problems in our moral experience. It certainly seems that slavery is objectively wrong. It was wrong even when most people in times past believed and agreed that it was right and the social contract of the day permitted it. But if there are no inalienable rights, this would not be the case. Slavery wouldn’t be wrong. Likewise most (all?) moral pronouncements would lose their meaning. Rape, murder, intolerance, etc. wouldn’t really be wrong either. We just prefer different values. If an individual or group had a different preference, we wouldn’t really have a basis to disagree with them.
We still don’t. Morality does not, and never has had any empirical reality. It derives from biologically evolved emotional responses. Humans are social animals. they are hardwired to survive in communities, not as individuals. Our emotional and empathic responses revolve around a sense of “us” and our shared biological responses (along with variable environmental circumstances) lead to consensuses about what is “right or wrong.”
These emotional responses can change according to who we perceive as our in-group – as “us.” If another ethnic group is seen as “other,” we don’t feel the same protective emotional instincts about them. The more we get to know them, the less “other” and the more “us” they become, the more our emotional responses (and, accordingly, our social consensus as to our moral codes) change to reflect it.
It’s all biology.
While my personal God-belief (a pantheistic God-who-couldn’t-give-a-shit) does emerge from the belief that there are things that are Right and Wrong (rather than just right and wrong); that Hitler was objectively doing evil things, even if all who were left alive agreed with him, I do not believe that such a belief mandates a God-concept, and certainly not the God-concept that most of the religious in America espouse.
Yes it’s biology, but that does not mean it is all biology.
If rights come/came only from society, then nobody has the right to something they don’t already have the right to.
For instance (accepting the rights-come-from-society idea), same-sex couples do not have the right to get married in Texas and no right is being taken from them or being trampled on. They have the aspiration to a right. If this is/were true, then SSM is more like zoning laws than a moral imperative.
That assumes that homosexuals aren’t part of society. And it ignores the fact that marriage is treated as a right except when it comes to homosexuals.
No it doesn’t in the same way that non-natural-born US citizens cannot be presidents. If rights are glorified zoning laws then there is no objective reason (aside from societal mores) that says rights should be the same for all. It’s simply a right for man-woman couples and it is codified as such. Even if you went out of your way to specifically say such a right doesn’t include a group of people, then the right is that, it is not violating a right (analogous to nulla poena sine lege).
Either rights are “bigger” than people/societies or they aren’t.
Yes there is; if they aren’t the same for all, then they aren’t rights. That’s rather the point.
Except that our society acknowledges other rights, such as due process and equal protection, as supreme.
If inalienable rights don’t exist, then homosexuals may still have a right to marry, but no one is doing anything objectively wrong by denying homosexuals that right. People who wish to deny homosexuals the right to marry may be logically inconsistent, but there’s nothing wrong with their being so. They simply prefer a different social contract.
I think the point that Aju is making is that if rights originate from society, you can’t appeal to some higher power in support of a right you seek. You can’t claim something should be a right even if the majority of people disagree.
But one can still make two types of arguments:
That society would be improved by granting these legal rights.
That universal human rights (life, liberty, etc…) demand certain legal rights.
The recognition of universal human rights does not require a supernatural source of these rights - secular ethics is sufficient. And a society can grant legal rights that have no root in universal human rights, simply because it benefits society.
ETA: adding a distinction of legal rights to argument one
Our moral sense IS malleable and subjective. As proof, I hand you the entire sweep of recorded human history. How many ancient Sumerians believed in freedom of speech, or freedom of religion, or freedom of assembly?
But that doesn’t mean our moral sense is infinitely malleable, since we are human beings, not computer programs that can be reprogrammed at will. We have a particular human nature that is our biological inheritance, and we are compelled to live our lives as human beings. And that means we have to live together, we have certain physical and social needs that have to be satisfied or the result is disaster.
If we have a particular set of moral judgments, and some other group has another set, we can certainly disagree with them, on the simple grounds that we prefer to live otherwise, and we can point to the results of our moral system and invite people in the other group to agree with us. If they don’t agree, well, the result is conflict.
But suppose we imagine that moral systems are handed down by God. We obey the moral laws we claim are handed down by God, and that other group over there doesn’t. Now what? We tell them and tell them that they must obey God’s laws, but they don’t agree. As a matter of fact, they are so immoral as to claim that we are incorrect about what God wants, and they have a whole other set of moral laws that were handed down by God, and their set doesn’t match our set.
Now what? How do we resolve this difference? God, the source of moral law, has seemingly handed down contradictory laws, and both cannot be correct. So how do we determine which are the laws of God, and which are false? Is there some objective method of determining objective morality? If God or Nature has created these eternal moral principles, he hasn’t done a very good job of making sure that all humans understand them, has he?
The obvious complaint is if slavery is always objectively wrong, why didn’t God bother to tell the ancient Israelites it was wrong? Why didn’t God give them a document along the lines of the US constitution, or the Swiss constitution? Why didn’t he tell them to construct a modern liberal democracy? Or, if rights are self-evident from nature, why didn’t the ancient Israelites discover them?
If rights are given by God or Nature, how do we discover what God intended for us? Is there some objective process whereby this can be accomplished? If so, I’d like to hear it. Note that if your process includes something like, “Read the Bible”, you’ve just pushed the process back one iteration without actually explaining the process.
Correct. There is also nothing objectively wrong with wearing socks with sandals, spreading gossip, identity theft, cheating on your spouse, molesting children, or shooting up your workplace. An example of something that is objectively wrong is the statement, “Mars is larger than Earth.”
Individual subjective opinion regarding homosexual rights will differ from locale to locale, era to era. A lot of people arguing for inalienable rights are confusing the collective subjective with the objective. To me, the concept of inalienable or natural rights as a property of the universe is on a similar plane of believability as the six day creation. At least one can imagine the kind of evidence one could marshal for the existence of god. What exactly would an atheist point to for evidence of natural rights?
There is plenty of research in fields of secular human morality and the way the human mind is hard-wired for certain moral “instincts”, for lack of a better term. This is why human societies scattered across the globe, worshiping various gods, almost universally have moral imperatives against murder.
So one form of evidence of natural rights absent a supernatural power would be common systems of morality in societies with dissimilar religious traditions. Another could be research into the behavior and beliefs of young children with respect to fairness and morality. Yet another area could be brain-mapping and other neurological research into the source of “moral emotion”, so to speak.
In general, non-theistic natural rights would be those rights that humans are hard-wired to both grant to other and expect to be extended to themselves. Those which when violated provoke an innate negative emotional response in the vast majority of humans regardless of their religious inclinations.
This quickly devolves into the question of “can there be morality without a god” - an area ripe with discussion which has spanned centuries. If the answer is yes, then I believe clearly there can also be natural rights without a god. Natural rights would be those that our secular ethics demands be granted to all people.