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.)
Might makes right. Everything else is a facade.
Dunno. Right has a kind of “might” all its own. Nelson Mandela didn’t defeat apartheid by force of arms.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t see inalienable as meaning “uninfringeable” and I don’t think the term has traditionally been used that way.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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? 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?
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.
A lot of the arguments in this thread remind me of moral realism debates.
Are all social constructs non-real, or only certain ones? Here are some other social constructs.
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.
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.
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.
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.