We hear about all the rights this or that group has or this or that person has, so what rights do you all think exist? Of course this will also dovetail into what everyone thinks the definition of “rights” is.
The obvious seem to be everyone’s right to their life and safety, their property, and their right to act however they wish without infringing others’ rights.
I have been looking into Locke’s idea of a “right of sustenance,” which as far as I can tell is the right for all people to have a way to meet their basic needs available to him and the freedom to act to sustain themselves.
Does everything think that we have these rights? Do you think there are other rights?
Rights exist. None are universally agreed upon though. You said life, but we have the death penalty. You said safety, but I’ve never heard anyone articulate that as a right, and Ben “Freedom” Franklin specifically used safety as an example of something that shouldn’t be taken too far.
I think if rights can be taken away, they aren’t really rights. No one can take away your right to free speech. They can only punish you for exercising it (or threaten the same, chilling it). No one can take away your right to believe something, stupid, controversial or otherwise. But people can and do take “lives” away on a daily basis.
Privileges can be taken away. Rights can only be infringed.
I think your point about the death penalty gets at what the definition of rights are and when, if ever, they can be taken away and by whom.
I should have been more specific about safety. I meant the right to not be assaulted by another. This again begs the question of when we can infringe on people’s rights as a society obviously needs cops who by their very definition assault another by detaining them and possibly putting them in jail. This tends to be seen as acceptable when the person the cops are assaulting infringed on someone’s rights first. The sort of safety at the sacrifice of civil rights that Franklin had in mind when he said that was not what I had in mind.
Would love to hear more input from you and others on the interplay between rights and the government.
I tend to see them as going hand in hand as I think that the government’s only real obligation is to secure everyone’s rights, at least in theory. Thus by defining human rights we have implicitly drawn the bounds of government obligations. How the government exercises this obligation and whether they have any other obligations in practice if of course up to debate.
Yes, I was probably way too liberal with my wording there. That said, we do supposedly have an inalienable right to liberty. Whether a person uses drugs, assuming they do not hurt anyone else, would seem to fall under the category of liberty.
I would disagree. I believe we have rights simply by virtue of being human along the whole Enlightenment line of thinking. So since we do not derive our rights from the universe or culture, though perhaps there are rights that we only derive from culture such as the right to vote which obviously requires a society to exist where voting could occur. if this is true, whether the universe cares or not would be immaterial. But I imagine we will disagree here.
I’m not suggesting it *shouldn’t *be that way. I’m just saying it isn’t.
You asked:
Everyone would agree to the vague right to “liberty.” There would be many disagreements as to what exactly it means. Some people wanted to outlaw contraception for unmarried couples, and some people think gay marriage is part of liberty.
Like I said before, I personally think rights that can be taken away aren’t rights at all.
But I’m comfortable with the more common notion of “rights” as some sort of governmental obligation. When someone says “I have a right to social security. I paid into it my whole life”, I think what they mean is that they have a reasonable claim to social security, based on what social security was set up to be by the government and ostensibly still is.
Theoretically, the government exists for the sole reason of protecting “rights”, but is more realistically in the business of keeping the peace between disparate groups through the use of strategic handouts and subsidies.
This brings up a good reason why I think we need to establish a small list of broadly defined rights. If we try to define each and every instance of what may or may not be a right, this will lead to the increasing strife that’s been going on pretty much since this country has been founded, but notably in the last 50 years or so. Of course I’m bias towards events closer to my lifetime, but hopefully you get my point.
I’m not sure it does any good to try to make a list
People say “Driving is a privilege, not a right.” Who says? And why? What I think they mean is we won’t shed any tears when we take away your “privilege” to drive because you screwed up. It’s not like we’re violating your rights, or anything. Rights don’t get taken away by the government. But we’ll take away your “right” to vote if you get convicted of a felony.
I think I have a right to smoke pot. The government in most places disagrees. We can argue about whether it’s a right or not, or we can work on getting the laws changed to at least get me permission to do what I want. Unless I can go to court and argue a particular law is unconstitutional, I don’t think the discussion about rights is particularly productive. (but, to be fair, I don’t see much value in any of the field of philosophy)
I would say that a privilege is given by the government and so can be taken away under established circumstances. A right, a human right since we are presumably all humans here, derives simply from being a human.
The problem with rights, though, is that any human can take them away from any other by force. If we were standing next to each other, I could easily theoretically kill you. I’ve taken away your right to live. Less hyperbolically, I could assault you or take your property. If I’m stronger and smarter than you and you cannot befriend people to help you stop me, then you cannot prevent me from continually infringing your rights.
That’s what I see government as being for: to be a seat of power that makes the individuals who seat in it the sole entities who under extremely strict and explicit circumstances can infringe upon certain rights in extremely explicit manners to prevent non-governmental individuals from infringing the rights of others or to punish them when they do. So unless you are a god, there is no such thing as uninfringeable, absolute rights.
An interesting program I heard talked about the “inalienable” as opposed to “unalienable” rights. I’m not sure how accurate it was since one is simply an archaic term for the other nowadays, but it separated unalienable as something that cannot be taken away and inalienable as something that could neither be taken nor given away. The moral of the story was that to Thomas Jefferson in particular and general enlightenment thinking, rights were something that someone could not even voluntarily give up to the government or anyone else. That was a tangent, but I thought it was interesting.
I don’t think it would be particularly helpful to say that driving is a privilege vs. a right as that is too narrow. There would be no end to the strife if that’s what we did (and is pretty much what we’re doing now as a country). When I think of a short list of broadly defined rights, I’m thinking of the “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” sort of deal. This would largely be a philosophical, logical, and political discussion more than a pragmatic one.
If we start with a list like this and broadly define these terms without respect to specific actions, specific actions will either derive from these or they won’t. Of course people will debate whether they are or aren’t, but we will at least have an firm, objective standard by which to argue whether any particular act should be prevented by government force or not. I honestly don’t think we have that firm foundation right now as we’ve long ceded power to the government to make powers for itself out of whole cloth. Some of these powers have been beneficial to a large number of people and some of them haven’t.
The larger point is that I think we should be arguing for what the short list of things the government should be preventing us from doing as opposed to the laundry list of things the government should allow us to do. The latter completely flips the citizen-government relationship. And the best way to get at this short list is to broadly define the few categories of actions the government cannot prevent us from doing except when we wrongfully prevent others from doing them. And this would require a philosophical discussion of broad rights as opposed to a pragmatic discussion of each and every tiny little right we think we should or shouldn’t have.
I gave the example of speech. You can speak all you want. Someone might punish you for it, but they can’t take that ability away from you. Even if they surgically remove your vocal cords you can still write. Yeah, they can kill you. Which goes to show that life isn’t a right, using my criteria. But the living can speak freely no matter what those in power wish.
Self defense is another. No one can take that away from you, though they can punish you after the fact if they think you shouldn’t have defended yourself. No guarantee you will win the fight, of course, but everyone fights for their life when they feel it is threatened, and no law or government policy can change that.
It’s a nice thought, but in practice our right to liberty is clearly alienable since many people don’t enjoy it. However, you define it, there is certainly someone out there that doesn’t have it.
This is all semantics, but I have always kind of thought of this as being along a division sort of suggested by Canada’s Charts of Rights and Freedoms (which is then internally inconsistent, but whatever):
A RIGHT is something you are at least partially owed. You have a right to vote; that is something the government actually has to proactively provide to you. The government is expected to pay for and maintain an apparatus of voting so you can vote. You have a right to competent counsel if you are accused of a crime; again, there’s a proactive obligation on the part of government, as is a fair trial. Canada’s Constitution actually specifically says a deaf person has the right to have court proceedings against them interpreted for them; the government has to pay for that, one presumes. You have rights as an employee, which you can sue someone for if they are violated. You may have a right given to you by a private contract, such as a right to acquire property. You might have a right to an inheritance.
A FREEDOM is a legal construct that states I should be free of interference in going about my business. I am free to say things, or go where I like as long as it’s not on someone else’s property. I have freedom to choose my religion, or to assemble with others in a peaceful manner.