So if you’re enslaved for your entire life, as happened for some people in the United States between 1776 and December 6, 1865, how did you have any of those God-given rights?
And if you were only freed by the combination of Union military victories and the passage of the 13th, didn’t your right to liberty not depend on laws and government?
Nope, the rights already existed, but they were infringed by the government and society. They weren’t granted by the government.
So you have a “right” that you never get to exercise your entire life, until government snd laws protect it.
I don’t see how you had anything without action from government snd laws.
So you’re position is rights are worthless and useless and the only right that matters is Might makes right
Governments secure rights, but certain rights are endowed by the Creator, not the government.
How? How can you identify such rights and link them to a Creator?
I can identify very easily the actions by governments and. laws that gave a person liberty for the first time in their life.
To quote the Declaration, the rights are self-evident.
But anyone can remove the right to life. It doesn’t even take a government just a 2 year old with a gun. What use is a right that can be removed by anyone at any time?
Here’s how I read that part of the Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”
We’re not going to attempt to prove or back up this statement. We’re taking it as given, and we hope you agree with us. But if you don’t, at least we’ll be clear about where our disagreement arises.
“…that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”
The rights we’re talking about here are rights which people have inherently, naturally, as opposed to having them only because some human institution or government has granted them. You can understand “their Creator” as whatever causes them to exist: the Judeo-Christian God, the God of the deists, Nature, the universe…
“…That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…”
These rights don’t originate with the government, but it is the job of the government to ensure that people enjoy these rights and that they are not denied or taken away. People have the right to alter or abolish a government that fails in this task—which means that they would be right to do so. (And obviously it’s not the government saying that they’re right to do so. They’re right to do so in spite of what the government says.)
And yes, there is a huge contradiction between what the Declaration of Independence says about rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the reality of slavery. Plenty of people at the time were aware of this.
So purely a question of faith.
Do you consider imprisonment/execution an infringement of those rights? Or does society/government get to decide they have limits? Or do you think the creator also gave a self evident right of imprisonment to people to defend themselves against those who would take their stuff and interfere with their “Pursuit of happiness”?
Are they self evident to Enlightenment era Europeans (and the Greek/Roman philosophers they based much of their thought on, though those rights apparently didn’t apply to their conquered subjects) or are they self evident to all humans?
Because the rights that are self evident to, say, Confucius are quite different. The rights that were self evident to Vercingetorix or Charlemagne were very different too.
While we’re at it, whose Creator? Mine is apparently quite different from yours. If each of us has an individual Creator, or even each million human beings has a different one, then does that mean there are 8000 or more different sets of Creator endowed rights? And that’s not counting the rights of all those people created in the past! And while we’re at it, since you’re using the DoI as the defining belief document for your Creator (which you’re fully entitled to as a matter of faith), does that make Jefferson your primary prophet? Are other prophets recognized?
Personally, I tend to lean toward the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster these days, although I was brought up Reform Judaism. And in both faiths, the Creator tends to put on emphasis on things you shouldn’t do (although FSM just prefers you don’t) rather than suggest specific rights. More on the negative than the positive you understand. But all of these would seem to infringe on your Creator’s Right to Pursue happiness. How would you reconcile these?
I think the modern-day stickiness comes in with what “certain unalienable rights” means. There’s not a list somewhere or even a good set of rules as to what constitutes an unalienable right or is just a “nice-to-have” kind of thing.
And I’m pretty sure this changes over time as well- if you’d have gone back 20 years, nobody was seriously saying that internet access was a human right, for example. If you went back 35 years, nobody would have even known what you were talking about.
Yes, I asked awhile back what “unalienable” rights are, in light of the 5th Amendment clearly stating you can lose your rights to life and liberty. No-one’s answered that question.
Regarding that, I remember pointing out on past discussions about health care that universal health care should be for all because it is a part of Life, Liberty and The Pursuit of Happiness.
Interesting. @D_Anconia, would you agree that universal healthcare is an unalienable right? It does seem pretty critical in the quest for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But it is fairly universal among enlightened thinkers, is it not? Surely nobody you know believes that people should be arbitrarily killed or denied their liberty. I’m sure these same people believe that everyone should be free to pursue a calling in life that makes them happy.
I mean, outside of anything you can cite from a government, why do you believe that someone shouldn’t be killed on a whim? Do you not just hold it to be “self-evident” that it shouldn’t happen?
As to the other criticisms, it does not mean that nobody can ever be executed after due process, nor that someone cannot be imprisoned after due process. These are not absolutes just like how none of the Bill of Rights or anything in any constitution is an absolute.
How are you defining “enlightened thinkers”?
Pretty much everyone except psychopaths. “Enlightened thinkers” was probably the wrong term, but almost everyone would agree with the statement that people should not be arbitrarily killed or imprisoned. And that agreement doesn’t come from the DOI or a belief in a Creator or anything of the sort. It is “self-evident.”