It’s a weird definition of “right” and “self-evident” unless you include “due process” to be a “self-evident” “rights remover”.
I can’t speak for Northern_Piper, but I’m relatively certain that, like me, he’s not suggesting society shouldn’t have imprisonment, but that someone arguing against “rights are defined by society” needs a better argument than “these unalienable, self-evident rights definitely come from the Creator, but it’s fine if we take them away from bad people through our entirely society created system of ‘due process’.”
How do you define arbitrarily? I’m totally ok with my country killing people in another country because we’ve declared war on them. I don’t think anyone thinks that soldiers in WWI were denied their right to life despite the fact that which building a bomb fell on is pretty arbitrary. Or is simply trying to defend their homeland enough to lose someone their rights?
Sure, but personally I think that is a weird, and much too limited definition of “right to life and liberty”. China for instance would argue that the Uighurs aren’t being arbitrarily imprisoned. You’re introducing elements such as “due process” that are obviously the creation of society to argue against the position “rights are defined by society”.
The DOI was an aspirational document which declared in broad strokes why we were now independent of Great Britain. It wasn’t a statutory or constitutional code. It can be placed in context by the specific grievances that Jefferson had against GB.
Respectfully, everyone is engaging in the highest order of nitpickery here to attempt to defeat what is a pretty basic premise. Just to take the first one. You have a right to life. You have the right to stay alive as a basic matter. That doesn’t mean that you can’t die, you can’t be executed, that the government must treat all of your wounds, or have no wars. Frankly, that is silliness.
The DOI is talking about the general order of things, and the fact that nobody disputes these general propositions and attempts to rules lawyer them shows that they are indisputably correct. The idea that we have a right to “life” comes with all of the exceptions and caveats that are contained in the basic English understanding of context, exceptions, and custom.
Suppose a mother told her child that he could have a cookie if the child finished his dinner. If that statement was the DOI, then some of you would be saying that “dinner” was an arbitrary concept, that the mother could improperly call “dinner” ten pounds of pig liver, that the fat on the meat was part of dinner, that a cookie means different things in different cultures, that the size of the cookie isn’t specified, and that the mother can’t really promise that because if the child dies after dinner but before eating the cookie, then the child didn’t get a cookie.
Just take the statement for the broad, and pretty amazing freedom-enhancing principle that it is and stop trying to make it a Napoleonic Code.
No, we are trying to figure out the actual shape of the belief of someone who states these ill defined “rights” come from a Creator, and not from living in a society that finds such things sensible. It’s then not “nitpickery” to point out that those who wrote the document held other people as literal slaves. Or that someone trying to bypass such arguments by stating “all enlightened thinkers would agree” are just talking out of their posteriors.
but now I am just talking out of my posterior. Despite your agreement.
I wasn’t trying to bypass the slavery argument as others have addressed it. I was bypassing the “but what about executions” argument. Do you think that none of the founders thought about capital punishment? That they didn’t defend it? Or maybe because it is pretty silly in the context of the DOI that lawful punishments be a part of it?
If a tyrannical government, like China, imposes those punishments, then they are not the good governments discussed in the DOI. And no, they didn’t give us a roadmap for which was which. The only issue was that GB was not one of the good ones.
But this is the thing. The term “Creator” was used. Not God or Jesus or Allah or Nature. If you find it sensible, then where does that finding come from if not from the means of your creation itself?
Yeah about the only “unalienable” right that I can think of is that you have the right to think your own thoughts. Nobody can really take that away from you (well I guess people can incapacitate or kill you, or drug or torture you to affect your thought processes… so maybe it’s not as unalienable as I first thought).
“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” also seem rather ill-defined to me. Liberty, in particular - what kinds of freedoms are wrapped up in that term?
If I were to try to lay out some fundamental freedoms/rights for a “good” society though, as @Velocity asked, it would probably include:
freedom from unwanted physical harm - I think most societies have laws against physically harming others for good reason, though some societies allow it as a punishment for breaking other rules
right to equal application of the law - I think this is key to a “free and fair society” - no kangaroo courts is the big thing, and lawmakers should strive to write laws that don’t have discrimination baked into them (probably harder than it sounds though)
right to participate in the political process - I think this is not needed for a theoretical “good” or “fair” society (could have a good society with an enlightened despot), but is needed for a “free” society IMO
And rights for which I think significant restrictions/limitations are required, but for which I think societies should have as underlying values:
4) right to own property (basically needed for any form of capitalism - it wouldn’t be needed under pure communism but I don’t think that’s realistically achievable) - I think there are all sorts of limitations that can be put on this right (eg. taxes, etc.) but I think the idea of property is integral to any sort of commerce occurring
5) freedom of speech - this is the trickiest one, as I think restrictions on speech are generally acceptable, but also that a society which, say, only allows certain government officials to ever speak publicly and all other public expression is banned wouldn’t be considered very “free” to me.
I think any society whose laws don’t allow for #1-3 wouldn’t be considered a “free and fair” society in my completely subjective opinion, and I think a society should fundamentally value #4 and 5 even though the application of those would be nuanced. I’m not even sure if I consider freedom of assembly to be a necessity, though I would expect that most societies would have laws that protect it in some form.
I don’t believe there is a creator, and even if there is one it is very clear that it didn’t make it so humans would find “right to life” sensible outside of outlawing killing fellow tribe members.
But you believe that nobody should be able to kill people, right? That belief is not because of any governmental edict, also right? So where did it come from?
Me being of the opinion humans should avoid killing each other if at all possible does not constitute a “right”. Neither does it become a right if I’m joined by millions in holding this opinion. Nor is it self evident, as evidenced by a much laxer attitude to killing for various reasons throughout the world and throughout history. The only point at which it becomes a “right” is when we, as a society, decide to define it as such, and even then we decide to immediately allow for exceptions, showing that it is by no means “inalienable”.
This has been a common theme as well. The idea that certain rights are “inalienable” does not mean that corrupt human beings are simply powerless to alienate them. That was the whole point of the DOI: that GB had alienated us from our rights and that the whole purpose of government was to preserve them. GB wasn’t doing the job, so it was time to chart our own course.
As to your first sentence, then suppose you were in the minority some day and the legislature passed a law saying that you could kill anyone if the person made you upset. If that passed, would you just say that you lost a fair and square vote or would you think something more was in play, say, that the person killed has a “right” not to be killed and that this legislature was not just unwise, but somehow universally “wrong”?
The fact that millions hold this opinion shows that God, nature, the universe, or whatever has made it “self-evident” that people indeed have this right to live.
I’m not talking about “corrupt human beings”, here, I’m talking about the same society that defined “life” and “liberty” to be “inalienable” rights deciding that it doesn’t apply to certain outsiders in certain circumstances, such as armed conflict or crimes. And the topic of this thread isn’t the US. It was just natural to narrow down the counter arguments to the “They’re from the creator”-statement to that, since that seems to be the extent of D’Anconia’s arguments. Whereas yours seem to only stretch a tiny bit further, to, ex nihilo, state that “of course inalienable only means ‘not without due process’”.
I think there are a lot of laws and norms today that are wrong, why would I think this big one was just the loss of a fair and square vote?
I just don’t suffer from the delusion that any of it is universally wrong or right. My ideas of what is “right” and “wrong” come from a combination of my upbringing, my genetics, and my own philosophical musings, as does everyone else’s, but many humans are so uncomfortable with the idea that it’s possible to disagree on what is “right” and “wrong” that it often takes generations to shift those for all of society.
Hell, I have to go because people are coming over and I am enjoying this debate and will be back tomorrow.
All I am saying in response to this, and I have said it, is that a “right to life” or a “right to liberty” or even a “right to abortion” or “right to universal health care” does not imply an absolute, unyielding, applying in every circumstance no matter what, right. I respectfully say that to infer that from the DOI is nitpickery that you wouldn’t apply to any other text or statement that anyone else has made.
Be back tomorrow. Thanks for the very nice discussion.
Did you read the OP? Did you read the posts that I and others were replying to? It seems to me you didn’t. The point was never “the framers meant everything literally”, it was “You (you being the posters we were replying to before you) seem to be stating the framers codified self-evident facts as an argument for why they picked the ‘correct’ set of ‘essential freedoms’. Here is why that is ridiculous.” Your counter arguments seem to weirdly attempting to claim both that the framers didn’t mean it literally and that there is one and only one self-evident interpretation of their words instead of them being the product of one society, interpreted by another.
Humans seem to have a built-in sense of morality. You can even see it in other social animals, like chimps and elephants. It’s also one of the reasons why people sometimes get unbelievably angry at minor offenses like cutting in line.
It’s the reason that many (all?) cultures have similar taboos about murder, incest, rape, etc. This is getting pretty far from the topic of this thread, but it’s a pretty interesting topic on its own.
It is exactly the topic (at least where the thread has gone). I don’t not kill my neighbor because the legislature has made murder illegal and I simply want to follow the law. It is innate that such a killing would be intrinsically wrong.
Your innate desire not to kill your neighbor is not the same as the right to life being unalienable. They come from opposite positions – I don’t want to kill, steal, etc., because I have an innate sense of morality. That doesn’t imply you have a right to live, it just says that most humans don’t want to kill you.
But, as to that right to life, the US says it’s unalienable and yet still has the death penalty in many states. The UK (and most (all?) of Western Europe) has gotten rid of the death penalty, so for the them, the right to life is more unalienable, even after due process. And, they would include the right to healthcare as well, which is either the pursuit of happiness or life, not sure. My point is that none of those rights are really innate, but are there because society has demanded them to some extent or another. And, they typically have much shorter jail sentences – so the right to liberty is again a social construct depending on where you live.
I disagree. Why don’t I want to kill my neighbor, even if he plays his fucking music too loud? Or better said, why do I think it is morally wrong to kill my neighbor? Doesn’t it come from the idea that it isn’t to save me from bad things, but to prevent him from suffering? As if he has sort of a right to live?