This whole side conversation is in response to @D_Anconia’s statement that rights exists and they are not granted by society, let alone the government. I think that statement is obviously false, and the government removing the right to live from a criminal is definitely on point.
What would it mean to believe in the DoI? How does that back up your statement that rights exist and are not granted by society or government?
I would say that the DoI is aspirational, and even the founding father’s didn’t really believe it. It’s not an argument that rights just exist – it’s a statement from some men that didn’t even live up to their own ideals.
I’m using that point to respond to the suggestion that rights exist independently of governments and constitutions. “Unalienable rights” is a grand political statement of natural rights, but very quickly meets all sort of necessary restrictions in any society.
There is a clear conflict between the aspirational statement of an unalienable right to life and liberty in the Declaration, compared to the clear statement in the Fifth Amendment that the rights to life and liberty can be forfeited, if the state follows all the procedural restrictions set out in the Fifth.
In my view it’s not possible to speak of rights in the abstract. The rights that a person has will depend very much on the context of the society they live in.
There’s also of course the even more glaring difficulty that the Declaration stated that it was self-evident that all men are created equal, with an equal right to life and liberty. But they really didn’t believe that, unless you define “all men” to mean “all white men””.
Again, rights depend on the context of a particular government and constitutional system. Black people in the slave states did not have any right to life or liberty.
In my country, I have a constitutional right to use French in the federal courts. Is that a right that exists, independently of society and government?
If so, does that mean Americans also have a right to use French in the courts, but the government is denying you the ability to exercise that right?
Or is the right to use French in the federal courts a right that has been determined by the society I live in?
So, to the OP, maybe the bare minimum is freedom of movement? That way, various governments could compete in marketplace of ideas, and people can be free to move from one state/country/whatever to another if their current government doesn’t live up to their expectations. If there was a guarantee of freedom of movement everywhere, then North Korea, probably the least free place in the world right now for example, couldn’t really continue to exist like that.
I’m not sure that I can back that up any further, and I can probably be talked out of it.
But if that’s the bare minimum right for freedom, no-one in the world is free, because all countries place restrictions on exit and entry, not just North Korea.
I have no right of freedom of movement into the United States, and the Americans in this board have no right of freedom of movement into Canada.
Is it truly the bare minimum right to freedom if it doesn’t exist?
To me the “rights are real and definite” seems a bit like the “if there is no god, why don’t you just go around murdering people?” boogeyman of some believers. It’s a terror of something fundamental being up for debate, and the solution is to just keep asserting it’s an undebatable axiom.
Of course this discomfort was felt by (or at least understood by) the founding fathers and the writers of the UN declaration of human rights as well, which is why get wording such as “inherent dignity” and “inalienable rights”, which can be seen as fundamental truth, even if (some of) the writers only meant them aspirational.
It exists to some extent in most places – in the Eurozone, you’re free to move around many of the countries. As a Canadian, you can move from province to province.
But, you have a point. I don’t really know what the bare minimum is – freedom of speech? Well, that varies tremendously from place to place. Freedom of association? Same. Maybe the question doesn’t have a good answer.
I spoke too broadly. Certain rights come from the Creator. If your constitution grants you the right to use French in federal court, that’s fine. But it doesn’t change the fact that certain rights do NOT come from the government.
Does the Creator give the same rights to everyone, regardless of their religious beliefs? Does the Creator give rights to atheists? Do Creator given rights exist in societies that don’t recognize the Creator? Have the rights given by the Creator remained consistent since the creation? Have new rights been added or old rights rescinded? What method does the Creator have for communicating to people what rights they have been given? What is the Creator’s means of defending those rights? If somebody violates a right given by the Creator, how does the Creator respond?
You know, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – that all came from the Creator. Unless you weren’t a white male or you were a criminal. Or too poor or whatever. The Creator has no time for any of those people.
Is there a foolproof way of determining which rights come from this Creator and which came from people who just decided it sounded nice to describe them as coming from a Creator?
I’m not so sure there really are such things as “natural rights” in the sense of an agreed-upon set of rights that people inherently possess. All of them can pretty much be taken by a tyrannical government, or even a person with some degree of power over someone else at their whim. They can execute you, they can lock you up, they can enslave you and prevent you pursuing happiness. They can deny you healthcare, they can starve you, they can break up your family, etc… ad nauseam.
Conversely, just about anything can be claimed to be a “right”, in the sense of something that a person in a society is entitled to. Trial by combat, trial by jury, adequate nutrition, right against self-incrimination, rights to not have soldiers quartered in your home, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and so forth. All of them are things that a specific society agrees are things to which its citizens are entitled. These change over time, and geographically as well; the US still mostly strongly feels that private ownership of firearms is a right, while the UK has pretty much categorically rejected that “right” in the present day, even if historically it was a right that Britons enjoyed.
So what is the distinguishing factor that transforms these theoretical rights into actual ones? The rule of law. Both the people and the government have to respect and abide by the laws of the land, however that turns out; you don’t get to pick and choose which laws apply to you or how they apply to you in a state with strong rule of law, and those laws should apply equally to the government as well as the people, and ideally equally to the people themselves.