Actually, he jobs it out to the Rights Fairy.
I hope you (and Liberal) don’t mind that rejoin the debate here. But I see it as: you own what you create, because that thing would not have existed without you. It is the product of your mind and your labor. If you create a spear, you own it. The proof is that, barring the presence of other humans, you would have exclusive right to it. When others become present, you still have exclusive right to it until you either abandon it, give it away, or it is taken from you. The first two are manifestations of the same free will that lead to the creation of the spear. The last one leads to laws.
Can you share what you’re trying to get at—specifically—with the questions you’ve had for Liberal?
A bit of nuance, I think. But I’m not sure.
Rights are a concept of ethics, and thus are concerned with man’s relation to man. Rocks don’t violate your rights for the same reason that rocks don’t post here. (Ocasional evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.)
No. Again, that is not the sense in which rights come from nature. You said that without societies, rights would not exist, and that therefore rights come from societies. I was just pointing out why that was a fallacy of division.
Consider the following argument:
Societies are composed of people.
People have rights.
Therefore, societies have rights.
And compare it to this one:
People are composed of atoms.
Atoms are invisible.
Therefore, people are invisible.
Atoms aren’t invisble.
A reasonable if irrelevant point. If it assuages your concerns, you may add the phrase “to the naked eye”.
What makes you say this?
I agree. Rights are defined by any society’s ruling class and the power it can wield to define them — or not define them. Rights are no more Og-given or natural than a no-parking bylaw; they are bestowed or removed by whatever human entity that has the power, however gained, to do so. To the victor go the rights — or lack of them. Rights is nothing more than a word, as malleable as any other.
Not so. If the golden rule functioned as advertised, it would be the selfish person’s dream come true.
Only if you buy the notion that near-death experiences are anything more than the ravings of an oxygen-starved brain shutting down.
Your question assumes that everyone who has what they believe was a near-death experience becomes kinder and gentler. The literature you favour expunges the accounts of those who turn into tin Hitlers, especially religious. Not doing so would be bad for business.
He likely means the ability of SEM electron microscopes to “see” a width of about 2 angstroms.
As any other? Really? Including all the ones you used in your post? Is there some way, then, that we can determine what it is your post was meant to say?
There are gadgets that make atoms ( and even lone electrons ) visible. IIRC they were designed by a scientist who was irritated at being told in school that atoms and electrons were effectively “only theories” because they couldn’t be seen. As I remember, they consist of a magnetic trap, an illuminating laser and a reversed telescope.
He even gave the atoms and electrons names but I don’t remember them or his, for that matter.
I bet it wasn’t Werner Heisenberg.
Yes thanks.
It seems to me that you just picked a list of rights you liked and decided that they were “implictly given by our creator”. For instance I don’t see “acting in your own best interest” as a major message of the gospels. “Turning the other cheek” or “who lives by the sword…” (in basically a self-defence situation) don’t point much at a right to protect yourself and your family (not even to mention this passage about actually rejecting your relatives). Forget also about benefiting or lay claim to property, since the first thing you should do to follow Jesus would be to give it away as he said to this reluctant wealthy guy.
Actually, there isn’t much about “rights” at all in the gospels. They’re essentially about what you should do (or refrain from), what god expects from you, how to be reunited with him and so on, and not about your rights. "Give back to Caesar "and all that. Your rights in society are mostly irrelevant in christianism. His kingdom isn’t in this world, remember.
And your free will is irrelevant (apart from the two first items about deciding what to think and what to do). Even deprived of all rights, you’d still have free will and be able to follow God’s will.
What you’re doing is just arbitrarily attributing to an undisputable source the rights that you personnally think you should have and call “priviledges” whatever you don’t fancy that much, by deciding all by yourself that they aren’t implied anywhere in the scriptures.
And I would add that, if I weren’t an atheist, I would think that trying to give credence to your own opinions by atributing them to God borders on blasphemy.
More fully, the definition of the word “rights” changes, depending upon the type of government under which one lives. The definition of rights and their reality in China are different than in the United States, for instance.
I said in my initial post that a definition of rights is critical for any discussion about them. So far, we have people arguing for natural (or God given) rights (attributes inherent to human existence), societal rights (permissions granted from authority), and utilitarian rights (rights as practical abilities). Until we pin these down and agree to discuss the same thing, we’re just a bunch of ships passing in the night.
I hope I didn’t cause offense: BobLibDem was the first one to mention a notion that intrigues me: that rights are “natural” yet not necessarily derived from some Creator/Divinity.
I also wasn’t sure you’d articulated your own ideas on the origins of rights: the first couple paragraphs in post #15 begin with “Some people…” and “Others…” so I couldn’t be sure whether you shared these ideas or if you were expressing the range of thinking out there on rights.
It seems pretty easy to figure out where rights don’t come from:
-
Existence doesn’t create rights (no one would seriously argue that rocks have rights)
-
Being alive doesn’t create rights (see above, but for plants)
-
Being intelligent might create rights, but our neighbors in the intelligence field - chimps and bonobos, parrots, aren’t considered to have more rights than, say, a rat. And what about human children, or those suffering from mental illness? We should agree they have the same rights as a far more intelligent person.
-
Being human probably doesn’t create rights. An embryo is definitely human, yet many people would disagree that it has the same rights as an adult, while other rights are meaningless to it: Free Speech, Freedom of Religion.
-
Saying you have rights doesn’t make it so: I can assert my right to paint my free-expression artwork all over one of Clear Channel’s billboards, but I will go to jail just the same, and rightly so.
-
Force does not create rights: We would all probably agree that the North Korean government does not have the right to control its citizens’ choice of who and how to worship, and that it is wrong to do so. (If you want to bother with the distinction, I’d agree that force can create legal rights since force determines the nature of a society’s legal system, but I’m far more interested in moral rights than legal ones.)
As far as “natural” rights go: I don’t really see much that’s “natural” about it. If one’s moral code determines the rights that one has and percieves in others, moral codes are definitely an aspect of nurture, and change over time. There has been a drastic revision in what are believed to be the average person’s rights over the last several generations, which would indicate to me that rights are less a function of being born, and more a function of the society of humans one is born into. This leaves us with a relativist problem, though. I see North Koreans as having rights that their government asserts they do not have. I think I believe in a better model of society, which should be adopted by North Korea, while an advocate of “natural” rights might say the individuals have those rights: it makes no effective difference, since we both agree on that issue.
Let’s take a case where we might disagree: You discussed Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones. Let’s imagine the 10 things Mr. Smith has include all the arable land in a province of Guatemala. Mr. Jones is a peasant with no land. I would support land reform policies which would redistribute land from Mr. Smith to lots of different Mr. Joneses because it’s likely that the land reform will allow an entire class of people to lift themselves out of an abject dependence on Mr. Smith and into a position where they are able to make their own economic decisions, and create greater wealth for the entire community. (Please note that this doesn’t mean I would advocate any land reform plan: Zimbabwe’s seems to be particularly reprehensible and focused on political kickbacks rather than actual benefit to society.) Mr. Smith doesn’t appear to me to have a more powerful right to the property than the people’s right to have an opportunity to make more than a subsistence living working and living on someone else’s land. What does the “natural” rights theory have to say on this controversy?
Ack! I’m looking at these, and I’m not even sure which rights I’m talking about… does it make much difference if your right to own land is an inherent attribute or a practical ability? What I’m interested in is whether people are morally obligated to respect that right or not…
I have to disagree.
We might talk about a person having the right to express himself. However, you must change around what kind of rights he has when discussing if he is justified in his actions or not.
He wants to express himself.
So he writes on a bill board.
Depending on the circumstances, he may or may no have the right to do what he is doing. Is it a “Conform or die” billboard, or an ad for soda pop? I would say that you have to swap out kinds of rights, and not point out that they are baised off of diffrent reasons when dealing with diffrent situations.
Actually, at least 56 people thought of it first …
(No doubt they, and the rest of Enlightenment thinkers) were idiots.
I see the fallacy in that argument, but that isn’t my argument.
I don’t believe that societies have rights. I believe that individuals have rights, but those rights “come from” society in the sense that their origin is to be found in the formation of societies. It’s not that societies have inherent rights which they then pass down to individuals. It’s that rights are defined by the existance of other people, therefore outside of society an indivdual has no rights.
As you said:
Now we’re getting somewhere. I believe that ethics are an abstract concept that only exist in the human mind. The fact that two or more people must come into conflict before any of them could possibly come up with the concept of ethics, means that ethics (and, by extension, rights) do not originate with the individual. The thoughts themsleves are individual, but they wouldn’t have existed but for the human interaction. That is the sense in which I say that rights originate or “come from” society.
I’ve reread your exchange with John Mace and I think the mistake I’ve been making thus far is in thinking that your birth example was meant to prove natural rights imperically. You’re using logic (which I admit not being very good at), and here’s where I think we differ.
I believe that nature is amoral, so imperically speaking noncoercion is false. Your axiom is based on an ethical claim. It’s an ethical claim with which I tend to agree, but since I don’t consider ethics to be a product of nature I can’t accept that rights come from nature.