Mods, wasn’t sure if GD or IMHO, your call.
That is, what do you consider is– or should be– absolutely off the table when discussing what things can be mandated or prohibited by law? You don’t care if 95% of the country were to vote the other way, it’s a RIGHT, damn it. That if it isn’t in the Bill of Rights or protected by a Supreme Court decision, it ought to be.
IOW, what are you or would you be outraged to see “infringed” to borrow a term (which this thread is NOT specifically about).
Only inalienable right, IMHO, is the right to not be tortured or subject to injustice or unreasonable treatment. People have a right to be treated fairly and justly and humanely.
Everything else is a benefit or nice-to-have, but not a true right. There is no intrinsic human inalienable right to vote, to run for office, low taxes, own guns, etc.
I’ll give it a shot:
The right to do whatever I want so long as I am not harming others. That would be physical harm or diminishing other’s right to do the same.
These are shocking to me. When do you figure these “inalienable rights” arose?
Your statement, and the question that follows, are confusing to me.
I gave my opinion in response to Lumpy’s question:
And my apparently “shocking” response is what I believe a civilized society, with the brains and the plethora of resources and riches (I’m in Canada btw) should guarantee its population.
I actually find it shocking and appalling that we have hungry, homeless people in my country.
The part I’m unclear about is how these rights– to have things necessary for human dignity that one might lack– get transformed into a positive obligation on the part of others to ensure. Yes, it would be kind and merciful and charitable on their part if they do, and those are things we’d like to see happen; but I’m getting hung up on the “guarantee” part. It’s like the moral equivalent of a Möbius strip twist got in somehow. Unless one presumes that government is so nigh-omnipotent as to be an acceptable stand-in for an absent God.
That doesn’t seem very inalienable, though. Inalienable rights should be ones you retain regardless of circumstances. There can’t be an inalienable right to health care because there’s no way to guarantee that a doctor will always be available. That’s in contrast to, say, free speech, where all that has to happen is for the government to not prevent it. It can only be taken away by specific effort.
I don’t presume that, however, I believe that, given the right circumstances etc, governments should be aiming for this (or whatever one thinks should be inalienable rights).
For context, I’m an agnostic (poss atheist) who believes that everything in the universe is essentially a giant, inadvertent chemistry and physics experiment. So whatever ethics don’t stem from some “natural law” and, therefore, we have to decide them ourselves.
It’s also very possible that I don’t know what you are actually after.
An inalienable right is one that can’t be given or taken away and I’m not sure they actually exist. How many inalienable rights are removed when we lock someone up for a serious crime like murder or pirating software?
But I’ll bite. Self-defense.
Maybe we’ll end up arguing semantics. I also recognize that on American board with the majority of the posters being American, the opinions will be skewed due to the context for any poster, myself included of course.
With that aside:
I think all ‘rights’ should be inalienable because I think that a right shouldn’t cost the state / goverment / tax payers / anything. If it in any way needs to be paid by some other entity than yourself, it’s not a right, it’s a benefit.
Personally, I think a civilized society should make benefits available. But I think by definition saying that there should be a right to a home, a job, healthcare, education etc. is missing the point. Those are benefits and someone has to pay. I’m happy to pay my taxes, knowing that I help the common good in my country.
This is what I’m thinking and is the context of my post.
But IMO there’s no difference. In some situations health care could be threatened as you have described. But similarly, situations could develop in which free speech is threatened.
This could vary from country to country as a function of geography or culture or whatever.
In Canada, for example, not having adequate health care, or the other things I listed, should only be the result of mismanagement.
This may be happening. As such I will step back and see what others think.
The only way to threaten free speech is for the government to go out of its way to do so–to start locking people up for saying things, for instance. If it simply did nothing, the people would retain their right.
But health care is the opposite–the government has to go out of its way to distribute care, and if they ever stop then the people lose that care. Or if Canada becomes poor or the doctors leave or whatever. It’s already the case that there’s no real guarantee to care within a certain time because there are limited resources.
In my view, inalienable rights are more or less what I retain if I were stuck on a desert island. I have free speech, I’m secure in my possessions, there’s no one to imprison me, etc. But there’s no free food or healthcare since there’s no one to get it from.
Any private party or group could go around trying to suppress free speech through violence or intimidation. It would be up to the government to take action to prevent that. If the government failed to act, or there was no effective government, then free speech could easily be threatened by anyone acting in loco governmentis (so to speak).
This may seem like a trivial distinction, but I think it is an important thing to remember in a discussion of inalienable rights. Any government has a positive duty to protect these rights, as well as a “negative” duty to not itself threaten them.
What does your right to life, free speech, or shelter mean when you’re on a desserted island? Scream all you want at the sea, but when a storm knocks out that shelter you spent days building you won’t get anything other than indifference. The crabs who work their way into that container you were storing food in aren’t worried in the least about your rights. Rights can only exist as it relates to your relationships with other human beings.
That’s not what free speech guarantees. If a group of people is suppressing the speech of someone through violence, then that’s assault and we’re talking different rights entirely. But if they’re doing so by not giving the person a platform, that’s entirely legal and expected.
While we do hope that the government provides protections for life and liberty, that’s not what the Bill of Rights is for at least. It puts restrictions on what the government can do. How much protection they provide is a different question.
An inalienable right should not mean a right that can never be taken away regardless of circumstances, it should mean a right that can only be taken away if the owner of the right has, through their own actions, given it up. The rights to life and liberty can be forfeited by actions of the rights holder (although I am opposed to capital punishment for a lot of practical reasons). Free speech is, I think, a subset of the right to liberty, and can be forfeited as well.
Property rights are a complicated issue, but in general a person ought to be able to keep the proceeds of their own efforts without having them taken away without at least due process.
Speaking of semantics, in previous discussions of the subject of rights, I’ve noticed what seem to be two distinct interpretations of the term: one is rights as actually effectively exist and are in practice. The other is rights in the theoretical sense; what might be renamed “oughts” as in what someone ought to be accorded.
The best example of the difference in interpretation that I can think of is the pre-Civil War status of African-Americans. The infamous Dred Scott decision declared that African-Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect”. Yet obviously today we would think that African-Americans had possessed inherent human rights all along, and that it should have been manifest to all that slavery trammelled these rights. That while the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments in the words of the Declaration of Independence “secured” these rights, the amendments did not create them ex nihilo.
My point exactly. I don’t have the right to housing on my island, since there’s no one who can provide it but myself. Nor do I have the right to food since the crabs may get it.
But it’s only nature that can take away what I’ve built, not a government. And nature, at least, is not capricious.
Suppose there is one other person on the island–a doctor. They refuse to treat my injuries. Do I have the right to enslave them to provide health care?