# What are our Rights? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 6, 2017, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465 "2017-01-06T17:47:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2017, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/41 "2017-01-07T01:48:07Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > . . . “Rights” means society collectively saying “boy, wouldn’t it be nice if we all agreed to do _x_ and not do _y_?” and different societies have different ideas on what _x_ and _y_ are. . . . > [@ITR\_champion](#): > > Thomas Jefferson’s assertion “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights” is a wonderful thing that it’s good for people to believe. In a strictly philosophical sense, it’s not true. . . . But as an organizing principle for a modern government, a strong belief in inalienable rights is great, and far better than any competing principle. To me, that’s too close to Plato’s idea of creating a myth and teaching it to the people, to make them act as good citizens. I don’t like it. **Darren Garrison** is right: rights are a social construct, and do not exist objectively. There is no creator, and nothing is inalienable. Making up a fable to claim these things violates the ideal of the pursuit of truth. (Which pursuit is, itself, only a social construct.) ---
**Author:** ![octopus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/octopus/32/3716_2.png) [@octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/octopus)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2017, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/42 "2017-01-07T01:48:40Z")
Might makes right. Everything else is a facade. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2017, 3:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/43 "2017-01-07T03:46:02Z")
Dunno. Right has a kind of “might” all its own. Nelson Mandela didn’t defeat apartheid by force of arms. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2017, 6:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/44 "2017-01-07T06:38:24Z")
> [@octopus](#): > > Might makes right. Everything else is a facade. Yes. But when society decides it has a right then society provides the might to back it up. That’s why our rights to things like life and property are enforced by the police. The collective might of society is stronger than the individual might of any criminal. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2017, 6:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/45 "2017-01-07T06:44:30Z")
Rights are a human construct that we agree to, politically. Sort of. As a social species, we are skewed to thinking of certain obligations we have one to another, but that would be quite different if we were not a social species. So, consider “rights” to be a human construct, grounded in the fact that we are social primates. As the species we are, the “rights” we claim to exist are those that make us feel most comfortable in our social existence. As an atheist, I don’t accept that rights are anything give to us outside of our own desire to live in groups in a certain way. ---
**Author:** ![Latro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@Latro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Latro)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2017, 1:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/46 "2017-01-07T13:59:17Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > One could also point out that people lived in caves and whacked dinner with clubs for thousands of years without any of them, as far as we know, asserting any rights. Primitive cultures had primitive governments without any trace of the idea. It was only when societies reached a certain degree of complexity that philosophers like Aristotle and Augustine started thinking about the question of what justice is, which can be thought of as the birth of the idea of rights I can’t agree to that. Certain groups of people have always had more or less rights than others. Be it a tribe chief with more rights than the rest, a member of an aristocratic family, a person of the warrior caste. The idea of rights did not start with Aristotle. Aristotle had quite a few more rights than his family’s slaves. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2017, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/47 "2017-01-07T14:21:22Z")
> [@Latro](#): > > I can’t agree to that. > Certain groups of people have always had more or less rights than others. > Be it a tribe chief with more rights than the rest, a member of an aristocratic family, a person of the warrior caste. The idea of rights did not start with Aristotle. Aristotle had quite a few more rights than his family’s slaves. If modern and near-modern hunter-gatherer groups are/were organized in a way similar to prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups, then around 95 percent of the time anatomically modern humans have been around [predates this setup](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways). ---
**Author:** ![HumbleThinker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/5daacb/32.png) [@HumbleThinker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HumbleThinker)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2017, 2:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/48 "2017-01-07T14:27:02Z")
> [@DrCube](#): > > Maybe. I’m trying to reconcile the Deism-based Enlightenment concept of “inalienable right” with the fact that there is no god or any other non-arbitrary means of determining what humans “deserve” just for the sake of being human. That and the fact that every other definition of “right” I’ve heard is both arbitrary, contradictory, and goes against the reality of the situation, which is that people everywhere constantly have their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness (among other so called “rights”) taken away at every turn. So clearly they aren’t “inalienable” or “god given”. They’re just normal human desires, like sex and food. > > All that leaves is the stuff you can do no matter what the government or anyone else says. It’s pretty freeing in a way when you internalize it. I don’t think that’s quite what inalienable means though. At the risk of oversimplification, the general idea is that rights derive from us being rational beings. If we’re dead, for instance, we’re not rational beings, so we don’t have any rights. A theoretical person who has no ability to communicate of course would not have a right to free speech. And someone infringing our rights does not affect their status as inalienable. That they are inalienable makes it wrong for others to infringe upon them. And since we have prioritized preventing our rights from being infringed, we’ve come together to form a government who has gives a small number of individuals limited exception to infringe our rights so that the minority of people who would wrongly infringe our rights may not or be punished if they do. In short, I don’t see inalienable as “uninfringeable.” Nor do I think we need to appeal to the deistic notions any longer to justify the concepts of the Enlightenment. ---
**Author:** ![HumbleThinker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/5daacb/32.png) [@HumbleThinker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HumbleThinker)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2017, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/49 "2017-01-07T14:37:07Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > 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. I think this is certainly another category of rights so to speak: one’s that require a government or another entity to exist. For instance, if you aren’t in a democracy, there wouldn’t be a right to vote. If there aren’t any courts, you don’t have a right to a fair trial. On the other hand, I wonder if we could derive these rights from more basic rights that exist inalienably. For instance, could we say that if we have the inalienable right to free speech that, given the existence of a government, we have a derived right to have a say in said government which has the power to infringe our right to free speech if not checked properly. This sort of argument seems to have been an ideological part of why the American and French Revolutions happened. Just thinking out loud. ---
**Author:** ![HumbleThinker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/5daacb/32.png) [@HumbleThinker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HumbleThinker)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2017, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/50 "2017-01-07T14:44:46Z")
> [@HumbleThinker](#): > > I don’t think that’s quite what inalienable means though. At the risk of oversimplification, the general idea is that rights derive from us being rational beings. If we’re dead, for instance, we’re not rational beings, so we don’t have any rights. A theoretical person who has no ability to communicate of course would not have a right to free speech. > > And someone infringing our rights does not affect their status as inalienable. That they are inalienable makes it wrong for others to infringe upon them. And since we have prioritized preventing our rights from being infringed, we’ve come together to form a government who has gives a small number of individuals limited exception to infringe our rights so that the minority of people who would wrongly infringe our rights may not or be punished if they do. > > In short, I don’t see inalienable as “uninfringeable.” Nor do I think we need to appeal to the deistic notions any longer to justify the concepts of the Enlightenment. ETA: I do like your idea, though, of rights being things we can do, irrespective of consequences imposed by others, as opposed to things that cannot be done to us. So we could recontextualize the right to life, for example, as not being the right to not be assaulted, but the right to act in furtherance of your own life or something like that. As you put it about the right to free speech, any living person can always act in such a manner as long as they are alive, the initiation of the act cannot be prevented. But someone can try to punish you for this act or prevent you from doing it in the future. But once you are dead, you of course don’t have the right to life. ---
**Author:** ![HumbleThinker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/5daacb/32.png) [@HumbleThinker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HumbleThinker)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2017, 2:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/51 "2017-01-07T14:48:49Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > 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. I don’t see inalienable as meaning “uninfringeable” and I don’t think the term has traditionally been used that way. ---
**Author:** ![HumbleThinker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/5daacb/32.png) [@HumbleThinker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HumbleThinker)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2017, 2:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/52 "2017-01-07T14:55:28Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > Yeah, you’d have to define your terms before you can expect anything approximating consensus. A “right” could be something that you think all volitional creatures ARE ENTITLED TO whether they are granted that right or not, whether it is recognized by folks as a right or not. Or you could define a “right” as "what society has agreed that you are entitled to as a human or as a citizen or as a male property owner over the age of 21 or whatever. If I were looking for a consensus, you’d definitely be right. But I’m looking for something a bit more chaotic and entertaining from this thread. Personally, I see a right as even stronger than your first usage. Entitled seems to imply that someone is supposed to give it to us. I believe we simply have it by virtue of being human. I think they are a broad foundation for deriving all the particular actions we are rightly able to perform. How this plays out practically in a society will depend on the society, but I think it prudent that this foundation be firmly established so that we do not go overboard and give the government power to wrongly infringe one of the broad rights we have. But hearing a cacophony of ideas has its own appeal. ---
**Author:** ![HumbleThinker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/5daacb/32.png) [@HumbleThinker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HumbleThinker)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2017, 3:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/53 "2017-01-07T15:12:15Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > People keep using the term “privileges”. A privilege is “a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people.” > > Now technically, you do need to meet certain qualifications to drive a car or work a job. But I would not call those “privileges” as anyone has the right to go out and try to obtain those qualifications. > > And in this country (as in most developed nations), receiving medical care is not a “privilege” any more than receiving fire or police service is. Anyone can go into an emergency room and receive life-saving medical care. > > I’m not sure why you feel rights need to be universally agreed upon. > > I’m pretty sure most people agree with a sort of John Locke concept of “natural rights” with respect to life, liberty and property. At least when it pertains to them. I know many people would disagree on this next part, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to presume that rights apply universally to everyone. > > But people seem to be conflating “rights” with “guaranteed services” or “entitlements”. Since services have to be provided by other people and those people also have the right to not be forced to provide their labor, creating systems that protect people’s rights and provide for their needs becomes a lot more complex. Like I said, you have the right to travel. Buy you don’t have the right to force me to drive you around or buy you a car. I think this gets at a lot of the reason that we need a firm foundation for what rights actually are. Do rights deal with things we naturally have even without a society or does it also deal with things that we decide society owes all its citizens? For goods or services, is the right only the pursuit of that good or service, or is the guaranteed acquisition of that good or service? Even if we all never agree on what the concept of rights actually is, I think it is something we should continually discuss as it is the foundation of a free society. ---
**Author:** ![HumbleThinker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/5daacb/32.png) [@HumbleThinker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HumbleThinker)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2017, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/54 "2017-01-07T15:22:15Z")
> [@Buck\_Godot](#): > > Rights are whatever the government whose thumb you are currently under decides they are. Ideally you should work to make governments grant rights that uphold the general welfare of the citizens under government control, and oppose those “rights” which are detrimental to the general welfare. But even if I say that a citizen of North Korea should have the right to criticize the government that don’t make it so. I think this has the citizen-government relationship completely backwards. The government is not its citizens’ master, but their servant. The government ignoring continual redress of grievances that they have utterly reversed this relationship calls for revolution. And revolution is a duty in this case precisely because the rights that they are controlling do not derive from them to begin with. So North Koreans do have the right to criticize the government; that the government is preventing them from doing so is wrong precisely because their right to do so does not derive from the government. Remember that “the government” is not some abstract entity but simply another individual or individuals who are occupying a seat of power created at some point by a group of individuals. And if we accept that no individual has the right to infringe the rights of another except to protect the rights of themselves or another, then the individuals in the government are wrong for infringing the rights of its citizens when they are not infringing the rights of another. ---
**Author:** ![HumbleThinker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/5daacb/32.png) [@HumbleThinker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HumbleThinker)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2017, 3:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/55 "2017-01-07T15:32:01Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > I think a different way of saying it is the stereotypical adolescent complaining to their parents that something “isn’t fair”, to which the parent replies that nobody ever said that life was fair. Except you replace the word “fair” with “right.” Did a person living in the neolithic have the “right” to not be eaten by a lion, and if the lion ate him, did that lion violate his rights? If it doesn’t violate his rights, how is it different if he was killed by another person? “Rights” means society collectively saying “boy, wouldn’t it be nice if we all agreed to do _x_ and not do _y_?” and different societies have different ideas on what _x_ and _y_ are. For just one instance, the Spartans thought that fighting and bullying amongst children [was a _good_ thing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agoge), to be encouraged. In Enlightenment and related discourse, rights apply to rational beings, which has almost always exclusively meant humans. And the only beings that can infringe the rights of a rational being are another rational being. It is perfectly possible that a rational being not understand its rights; that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have them though. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2017, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/56 "2017-01-07T16:07:11Z")
> [@HumbleThinker](#): > > In Enlightenment and related discourse, rights apply to rational beings, which has almost always exclusively meant humans. And the only beings that can infringe the rights of a rational being are another rational being. It is perfectly possible that a rational being not understand its rights; that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have them though. So, a person has a right to not be killed by a flowerpot pushed off of a windowsill by a person waiting for them to pass by, but not a right to not be killed by a flowerpot pushed off a windowsill by a cat, or vibrated off by passing traffic? A person has a right to not be murdered, but not a right to not die from cancer, tuberculosis, or a slip in the shower? So a “right to life” really means a “right to your life not being deliberately taken by another human?” I’m sorry, but that sounds like arbitrary drivel to me. At what point would an artificial intelligence pass the point between being dumb enough to be allowed to kill you without violating your rights and being smart enough to violate them? What about an alien visitor who has an utterly different mental structure than humans. If that alien killed you, would he be violating your rights like a person, or not violating your rights like a cat on a windowsill? ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2017, 5:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/57 "2017-01-07T17:04:47Z")
Also, tackling the opposite direction of when something is intelligent enough to violate a human’s rights, [when would you suppose humans first gained them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_evolution#Hominidae)? Unless you believe that chimpanzees have the same rights as humans, the acquisition of rights would have to have occurred less than 7 million years ago, but how much less? Was the first species in the genus Hominidae, or is it restricted to the genus Homo? In which structural changes in the brain do you suppose those rights arose? ---
**Author:** ![HumbleThinker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/5daacb/32.png) [@HumbleThinker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HumbleThinker)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2017, 12:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/58 "2017-01-08T00:18:59Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > So, a person has a right to not be killed by a flowerpot pushed off of a windowsill by a person waiting for them to pass by, but not a right to not be killed by a flowerpot pushed off a windowsill by a cat, or vibrated off by passing traffic? A person has a right to not be murdered, but not a right to not die from cancer, tuberculosis, or a slip in the shower? So a “right to life” really means a “right to your life not being deliberately taken by another human?” I’m sorry, but that sounds like arbitrary drivel to me. > > At what point would an artificial intelligence pass the point between being dumb enough to be allowed to kill you without violating your rights and being smart enough to violate them? What about an alien visitor who has an utterly different mental structure than humans. If that alien killed you, would he be violating your rights like a person, or not violating your rights like a cat on a windowsill? As another poster pointed out to me, perhaps unintentionally, it is perhaps better to say that humans have a right to act in a manner to keep themselves alive and do not have the right to kill another human except when their right to life is infringed or jeopardized. Cats are not rational beings, or more specifically humans, so they do not have any rights to use or misuse. While technically true, saying a cat does not have the right to kill a human is implying things that aren’t true. It is also strained to say that human have a right not to die. They have a right to life, or as I said previously a right to act to sustain their own life. Save for inventing an immortality serum, everyone will die eventually, so saying that humans have a right not to die would imply that the government is under an obligation to keep them alive indefinitely. They obviously don’t have that power. We simply cannot make any conjectures about a sentient species we know nothing about. But if they are rational beings like us, we can reasonably surmise that that would have the same rights as us and the same responsibilities to other rational beings that go along with those rights. ---
**Author:** ![marshmallow](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@marshmallow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/marshmallow)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2017, 5:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/59 "2017-01-08T05:46:02Z")
A lot of the arguments in this thread remind me of moral realism debates. > [@Trinopus](#): > > **Darren Garrison** is right: rights are a social construct, and do not exist objectively. Are all social constructs non-real, or only certain ones? Here are some other social constructs. - Government - Language - Math - Chess - Money - Marriage - Friendship - Darth Vader This is mostly rhetorical, since one will get bogged down in defining “real,” then go off into mind independent facts versus the fuzzy ground of observer-relative facts, and whether math is discovered or invented is an entire debate by itself. Just food for thought. > [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > (And if you think that they are objective, can you point out rights that _all_ human societies agree on? Because if rights were objectively true, you’d no more need to point them out than you’d need to point out walking on two legs or breathing air instead of water.) Objectivity doesn’t require a consensus. Things are objectively true when it doesn’t matter what people think about them. For example, the age of the Earth is an objective fact, yet many people disagree on what it is. It’s also not an obvious fact. It took thousands of years to figure out. > [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > To paraphrase Death in _Hogsfather_, Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of “rights”, one molecule of “philosophy.” That sounds like a satire of nihilism. You could replace “rights” with any abstract concept. Show me one atom of science. One atom of logic. ---
**Author:** ![Latro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@Latro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Latro)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2017, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465/60 "2017-01-08T16:16:32Z")
There are no _natural_ or _human_ rights. Rights are given by someone with the power to bestow them. Be that a King or a god. Human and natural rights were made up by secular humanists to replace the power of the King and of God, which had been done away with, but they still wanted to have some basic principles to base a nice society on. Using the word _rights_ for these principles gave them an aura of authority, but fact remains that there is nothing out there to really hand out these rights. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-our-rights/776465.md?page=4)