It hasn’t been. There are people who disagree that such rights exist, but that doesn’t mean that the concept has been discredited.
Personally, I think that people are fooling themselves if they think that human beings have no intrinsic, natural rights.
Are you suggesting that unless something has been proven, it should not be believed?
Do you realize the logical implications of such a claim?
Assume I don’t. Share them with me.
But for the record, I meant that if a proposition hasn’t been proven and is not self-evident, it is difficult to use it as a basis for convincing others of the validity of an argument.
I hadn’t noticed the ridicule of the concept of natural rights as outlined in the OP. “Natural rights” for me has always meant rights that can be defined in a way that applies equally to everyone.
For example: the right to life means, to me, the right to not have one’s life taken away. It is possible for every person to observe this right and not take away anyone else’s life, and no-one will suffer for this approach. All benefit equally.
On the other hand, sometimes you see assertions that everyone has a right to housing or to health care. It is not possible for each person to benefit equally from this approach, because housing and health care have to be provided by the effort of someone or some group. So by my definition, these would not be natural rights.
(Requisite disclaimer: of course a person may give up his right to life through his own actions; and of course some rights are a lot thornier to figure out than others. This brief discussion is only intended to outline a framework for vigorous discussions of what rights really are, and how they can interact in a civilized society.)
Reading this thread has been rather depressing for me, I’m afraid. Other than panache45, no-one who has written in it seems to share this approach to rights, which is fundamental to my own personal view of how the world should work. I am very sorry to see that this is so.
Roddy
What Roddy says. The concept of rights – natural, inalienable, human or whatever you want to call them – has been moved from a philosophical discussion on which lawmaking is based into arguments for social programs. Thus, some argue basic needs (housing, healthcare, food, education, etc.) should be established as rights.
Compare those to what have traditionally been argued to be natural rights: life, freedom, the chance to improve one’s well-being. The distinction is one that gives even social progressives some pause.
I’d say natural rights started fading out of importance in 1787. Once we started writing down our rights and laws in clear text, we know longer had to rely on a consensus of what was and wasn’t a law. We no longer had to say “I think we have a natural right to say our government is a pack of fools when they act like one.” You had the explicit right to do so. In pretty quick order, all of the obvious natural rights got defined in writing and the only ones that are left unwritten are those that weren’t able to make a strong enough case. And if they couldn’t do that, they weren’t really a natural right to begin with.