Straw man?
You wrote: “Just about anything anyone can define as a right is something that can be taken away… Ergo, I’m forced to conclude that Rights are a figment of the collective imagination.”
Emphasis mine.
Maybe you could explain why something is a figment of your imagination just because it can be taken away.
Only one term need be defined because they have a genitive relation: owner’s property. Ownership is the agency by which property is realized, and vice versa. Wherever there is ownership, there is property, and wherever there is property, there is ownership. Therefore, as I’ve said, property ownership conveys a copula of identity. The owner and his property are one and the same.
Because ownership of the house is a part of one’s bounds. The life experiences of one’s existence includes having taken ownership of the house. Suppose John were the person who took ownership of the house on such and such a date. (Note the copula.) Inasmuch as no other person on earth, other than John, took ownership of the house on that date, John may be individuated (i.e., identified) by describing his ownership of the house.
One’s mind and body are the agencies by which other property is acquired — e.g., one might labor or use one’s wits to acquire money to buy a house. The investment of one’s property (mind and body) has yielded an increase in one’s property (the house), and thus a change in one’s bounds.
Fair enough. That you own your body and mind is indeed taken as axiomatic. But the very least you could do is show why the axiom makes no sense; in other words, why some arbitrary person has ethical license to take the life or appropriate the mind of another. And in fairness, I should tell you why the axiom makes sense to me. The human consciousness is inviolate and subjective. What this means is that you can never experience my consciousness, and I can never experience yours. When you were born, a consciousness began that was entirely subjective. The same for your life. I can never turn back the clock and experience your birth. I can only experience my own. Since what you have accomplished and what you are (even as an infant) can never be experienced by me, it stands to reason that the entire experience is uniquely yours. Thus, any agent taking possession of your body and mind is taking from you what is uniquely yours. Now, why does the axiom’s opposite (that which would render it false) make sense to you?
No. The bounds are the bounds. You own your idea that you own the world, but until you in fact own the world, all you own is a falsehood.
Again, that is not an appropriate question for me, since I do not adhere to an advantage theory of rights. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the parcel is unowned. (We will set aside how it is defined as a parcel without being owned.) And let’s assume an electromagnetic miracle — that is, that my foot touches ground on the parcel at the exact same instant in time that your foot does the same. How either of us may claim anything other than what our feet have touched is unclear. It would seem to me that each of us owns nothing more than a footprint. What happens next? Do we make snow angels in the dirt (assuming there is dirt) to identify what we’ve claimed? Do we fall on our sides and roll all around until we bump one another, thus identifying our borders? That sort of metaphysical weirdness is one reason that I do not subscribe to an advantage theory of rights. What I subscribe to instead is the theory that rights are attributes. If you were, say, the first to plant crops on the parcel, thus investing equity in it, then I would happily concede that the parcel belongs to you. It has, in fact, become a part of you.
And now you’re asking for an opinion from a rights by authority theorist. As far as I’m concerned, whatever I’ve acquired peacefully and honestly by the investment of what I already own belongs to me. Making my own decisions bestows my life with sufficient complexity. Making decisions on behalf of other people is something that I have neither the time nor the inclination to do. Moreover, I do not need and do not want an authority making decisions for me. Unless his life is completely empty of events, the erstwhile authority cannot possibly give enough time or care to living my life for me. My life requires 100% of one person’s careful and deliberate attention. I believe that that person should be me.
I don’t quite get your point - steel does exist in the natural world, but it does not exist naturally. Rights (or ethics) are not “things” but “processes” (or derive from processes). You seem to want to give priority to the notion of rights/ethics as things (and, hence, ground them empirically). But I reject it - I give priorty to the notion that rights/ethics is a process (or derive from processes).
If I were to accept your priority, then I would have to conclude that many items could also not be proven in an empirical sense - society, culture, mind, language, mathematics, etc.
Who defines the bounds?
I can accept that I own my own body and mind axiomatically. And I can accept that I, myself, can make a valid claim to possess/own each as each bounds my own, personal existence. What I have a problem with is extending the boundaries away from myself (as it the case with real property). At what point do those extended boundaries stop? When someone else says stop? What if no one says stop? Or I don’t care what the other person says?
Because that person may feel that another person isn’t the same (is sub-human or not human). If the bounds of my existence encorporate other human beings, but I don’t recognize them as having the same qualities/attributes/capabilities as I do, then why not? We (as humans) certainly do so for other entities (animals). What makes it ethically OK to own the minds/bodies of animals, but not OK for humans? Because animals do not have the capacity to stop us? What? Where does one draw the line, and on what basis? And how is that line more valid/justifiable than some other line?
I’m not disagreeing with the axiom (ownership of one’s own mind/body). I just have problems in building upon this axiom to extend it to ownership of property as the bounds of my existence (something outside myself).
The bounds are the bounds? Based on what? What constitues ownership? Possession? The ability to possess? Proximity? Labor? Some combination? By what criteria do you get to reject my claim that the world bounds me?
But what if I reject your notion? There’s no apriori rationale for accepting your explanation versus some other explanation.
Note: I can accept the theory of rights as attributes if one means that rights are derived from these attributes (or arise from them). Sort of like latent powers (or aspects of human agency), so to speak, that are “triggered” when humans interact/come in contact with one another in various ways. Rights as processes versus rights as things.
It follows from the belief that there are no rights, that there are also no wrongs. Remind me not to lend you anything.
Anything you lend me will be returned, probably in better shape than when you gave it to me 
I try to be fair that way.
But rights? They’re too abstract. Inalienable rights granted by God, the Creator, Nature, the laws of Man or the quintessential essence of Existence are broken and violated thousands of times a day. They’re a nice concept, but bear little or no relationship to the real world.
Hence, they’re a figment of the collective imagination. Everyone goes around pretending these things called rights really exist, but they don’t.
Are you suggest that, prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks had no rights? I’m not talking about legal rights, mind you. I’m talking about intrinsic, moral, ethical rights.
If there are truly no intrinsic human rights – if rights are nothing more than a socially imposed convention – then whatever a society deems acceptable must be the rule of law. There can be no society that violates human rights, since the society itself is the some determiner of which rights are legitimate and which are not.
I apologize for suggesting that you might live by the philosophy you espouse.
How can rights be violated if they don’t exist?
For that matter, traffic laws are violated everyday. Should we conclude that traffic laws do not exist?
The life experience defines the bounds. Read again the source I gave if you missed that part of it.
If I may ask, why does it seem that you are always waiting for someone besides yourself to make decisions, or define things, or determine things? I daresay that your mind is sharp enough that ceding these processes to others diminishes your capabilities. At any rate, the extended boundaries stop where they stop. Your experience is your experience. If you have stopped creating anything new then poof, there it is. The bounds have ceased expanding.
We’ve already covered that. I’m not sure why it befuddles you that the entities concerned with politics are people.
If you are having problems, feel free to use what I gave you. You accept the axiom. You find no flaw in the logic. You don’t need me to tell you that you are therefore compelled by your intellectual honesty to accept the conclusion.
What equity have you put into it? Recall the chain of inferences. It is property that begets property, just as it takes money to make money. Unless you have invested your body and mind into acquiring the world, then your claim to ownership flies in the face of reason.
That is why I synthesized a rationale for you. Three ways. And explained repeatedly.
Believe it or not, it is entirely possible that you subsribe to attributes theory already, despite whatever theory you might espouse. I encounter it all the time. Consider the power theorist who is beaten up and has his car stolen. Few will concede, “Oh, well, it’s the other guy’s now fair and square.” Or consider the advantage theorist who is conned out of his car by a smarter man. Same same. What one encounters almost always is that a thief, con man, squatter, or bully has no right to the newly acquired property. The lone exception is the authority theorist, who sometimes believes that the decisions of the authority to take his property so long as the authority is established by some sort of ritual or ceremony, like voting or taking a magistrate’s oath, is a sort of necessary evil. In many circumstances, however, today’s attributes theorist is yesterday’s victim of authority.
Liberal,
Thanks for the clarification - you helped fill in the gaps.
The rest of my post described rights, in case I was unclear, as freedoms recognized and supported by the society.
I might feel I ought to have the freedom to shoot anyone anytime, but your average human society would not recognize or support that freedom for me.
In the case of the Emancipation Proclamation, it was the announcement of The United States’ recognition and support of blacks’ freedom to steer their own lives and participate in society as equals. Prior to that, US society did not support that freedom for blacks (at least in writing), although the blacks wanted that freedom for themselves.
Human rights, I think, in this context, are freedoms that most societies (at least those that have not proven detrimental to themselves and their members)recognize almost universally as beneficial to the individual, and, by extension, to the society itself.
Rights do not exist without other people around to declare them to, IMO. Alone, I have complete freedom. No need to outline my rights, because there’s no one I need to outline them for. Within a society, I have the freedoms others are willing to grant me or are unable to stop me from exercising. The ones they are willing to grant me are my rights, as they see and agree to them.
In fact I don’t consider any of those things to exist in the same way that steel does. Except possibly the mind, but only the grey matter which isn’t what I think you were referring to. I’ve never heard anyone refer to a natural language, for example.
I suppose I’m just torturing the word “natural” to death by defining it too narrowly. You seem to be saying that my arms and legs are natural in one way, while my rights are natural in another. And the way in which rights are natural is analogous to the way that language and culture are natural. Not a product of nature but derived from nature. Is that right?
One more question if I may. Would you call your theory of rights a sort of “natural rights from the ground up”? I ask because I believe it was you who linked to the Dershowitz review (rights from wrongs) and he seems to flatly reject that rights are natural.
Exactly…
Yes, I suppose I would. It does have somewhat an evolutionary flavor to it, although not entirely. And I should point out that my theory is really more an attempt on my part to understand rights better. Liberal makes a much more compelling case for rights as attributes, though.
If I am interpreting Dershowitz correctly, I think he is basing his premise (on the un-naturalness of rights) that the “natural state” of humanity has been one where rights have not been recognized - a sort of Burkean view of humanity in its natural state (nasty, brutish, and short). So in a sense, rights are atypical if we view humanity from this perspective (atypical = unnatural).
And I don’t necessarily disagree with his assessment (if rights are viewed in a historical context). But I think he’s using the term in a way that lessens the naturalness of rights (think Rousseau, I guess, in this context as my counter to Dershowitz’s Burkean view of humanity; although personally I lean more towards Burke than Rousseau - go figure).
Lots of things that are a product of humanity are “atypical” - slavery, for example, once was widely practiced. If viewd in the same perspective as rights, then the prohibition or abolishment of slavery is “unnatural” (not the normal state of affairs in human history). I suppose Dershowitz would concur!!
Well that’s the problem, isn’t it? Right now we all agree blacks had those moral rights and their legal status was wrong. Two hundred years ago it would have been controversial, and some people would have agreed, others would have disagreed. Nothing inherently has changed about human beings in that time. Society has changed drastically in that time. I think that’s a compelling arguement that rights, even moral rights, are a product of the society people belong to.
What else can rights be? Not believing in either a soul or the supernatural, I really can’t see where these “intrinsic” rights come from. They aren’t so fundemental that they don’t change with the winds of society, so I have problems accepting that there is some intrinsic set of rights applicable for all time. Who is to say what our descendants three hundred years hence will think of as human rights?
This is one reason I resist my own belief. I want there to be an inalienable set of human rights that all people agree on, I just don’t have a lot of hope that it can happen. So I hope fervently that we carefully choose the scale on which society sets standards for rights. Case in point: by the standards of the entire world, North Korea is indeed violating human rights. It’s somewhat stunningly mudane and obvious to say that North Korea doesn’t see it that way, but I would bet that given the opportunity to express themselves, most people in North Korea would also argue for greater personal rights.
I hope the definition of rights people settle on is created by a democratic, liberal, free society, because the alternative is terrible to contemplate.
Having recently received my first (!) speeding ticket, I have to say that traffic laws do exist. But man-made laws are made to be broken 
However when it comes to a subject like rights, I’m approaching it from out of left field. I think the concept is a nice one, but one that many, if not most, people disagree with when it comes time to apply it to others. Maybe I just think it’s wrong to use the word “rights” and they should be called “privileges” instead.
I know this is from way back in the thread, but I’m wondering about this because it doesn’t seem to encompass my own (admittedly amorphous) ideas on rights. For example, I’d imagine most of us could agree on a right to pursue one’s own livelihood (insofar as it does not conflict with the rights of other people). This is neither a permission: we’re not saying it’s only OK if the people around you say so. In fact, I’d bet most of us would stand up for a person being denied this. It’s also not a attribute of property ownership: hunter/gatherers pursue their livelihood with little or no property. Is there another option for us to look to?
It’s still property. Your body and/or your mind are the tools by which you pursue your livelihood, just as they are the tools by which you acquire other property (and the rights with respect to it).
I see what you’re thinking, although it conflates the two definitions of “property” a bit much for me to ascribe to it myself.
I’m essentially in agreement with you so far as “value-added property” (like having the right to a spear you make), but I don’t think it makes a lot of sense for the same idea to apply to property one has not added any value to (why should one person get to “claim” the land a community lives on? Especially insofar as the individual cannot cultivate the land by him/herself - food production is a great example of the necessity of communal effort.).
Natural Law Theory would say that something in nature can only become yours if you improve it through your work. So you can remove rocks from a field, plow it and plant and susequently claim ownership to it because the land has been improved. Now, as you mentioned, there is a limit to the amount of land someone can improve in this manner all by himself. But I am able to hire people (possibly they do not have the knowledge I have) and lay claim to the land that is improved through my “employees” who I’ve struck agreements with.