This doesn't seem to be a useful question—you have the rights afforded to you by natural laws; for instance, the right not to implode because you live on a planet with an atmosphere. Nature affords you that "right." I'm just not clear on what good it is to discuss that.
I suppose it is difficult to define rights in the first place, isn't it?
I never said I believe in natural rights, just that I don't dismiss them. I really don't have an opinion either way on this issue. I'm in this thread to see others' thoughts on it are, and perhaps form an opinion of my own.
When exactly did the colonists not exist under the rule of a government? The Declaration of Independence was a governing document. (It failed horribly as such, but it was one.)
The Declaration of Independence was a strictly negative document: it said the colonies were not governed by the King and Parliament. The document establishing the new American government was the Articles of Confederation, and then, of course, the Constitution.
It ultimately seems like this question has to be theistic in nature, because in an atheist worldview there can be no arbiter/granter of "natural" rights.
I disagree. I am an atheist, but I don't completely dismiss the idea of natural rights.
And in any case, if rights are granted by a lawgiver, they're not "natural".
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And in any case, if rights are granted by a lawgiver, they're not "natural".
Nitpick: if an omnipresent Creator does in fact exist, any rights afforded by "nature" would of necessity actually derive from the being that created nature.
Nitpick: if an omnipresent Creator does in fact exist, any rights afforded by "nature" would of necessity actually derive from the being that created nature.
"Nature" as in "the universe" and "nature" as in "natural rights" are two different concepts. Natural rights are not a part of nature the way, say, a tree is. Rather, they are rights that we have by nature. They're supposed to emerge logically and automatically from the facts of our existence. Think of them as akin to the natural logarithm of mathematics, not the natural objects of the world around us. Could God have created the natural logarithm? I don't see how the suggestion is even coherent: the natural logarithm simply is, an inevitable consequence of the logic of numbers.
I am in disagreement with Locke and Jefferson on this point. Jefferson, of course, wrote that people "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights", and his thinking is strongly informed by Locke's Second Treatise on Government, which discusses God's role in the institution of rights at some length. But again, these God-given rights they talk about can hardly be called "natural"; for a model natural-rights argument, look instead to Thomas Hobbes, who may or may not have been an atheist.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
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Our rights were given to us by our forefathers, our military, and are currently enforced by our government.
What does it mean to have the right to property? It means that if that property is stolen, there is someone (the police) who will intervene on your behalf. If you take that entity away (the police/military/law/whatever) then the right ceases to exist.
Therefore, government is what gives us our rights, though I always do like to give credit to our military veterans, and not so much to Congress.
What does it mean to have the right to property? It means that if that property is stolen, there is someone (the police) who will intervene on your behalf. If you take that entity away (the police/military/law/whatever) then the right ceases to exist.
But why do the police intervene on your behalf when someone steals your property? And why don't they intervene when someone listens to a Linkin Park song? What differentiates the former act from the latter? And if the police did break heads over a person's taste in music, why would we consider the government totalitarian and bad?
If the police act to enforce a right, that means their action is caused by the right. And if their action is caused by the right, then of course the right can't be caused by their action - that would be circular. The right has to stand prior to the law. Otherwise there is no way to justify why the police do anything.
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What does it mean to have the right to property? It means that if that property is stolen, there is someone (the police) who will intervene on your behalf. If you take that entity away (the police/military/law/whatever) then the right ceases to exist.
But why do the police intervene on your behalf when someone steals your property? And why don't they intervene when someone listens to a Linkin Park song? What differentiates the former act from the latter? And if the police did break heads over a person's taste in music, why would we consider the government totalitarian and bad?
If the police act to enforce a right, that means their action is caused by the right. And if their action is caused by the right, then of course the right can't be caused by their action - that would be circular. The right has to stand prior to the law. Otherwise there is no way to justify why the police do anything.
Except that there are places where the police do intervene where people listen to certain music. And while we may view that as totalitarian and bad, I don't think that claim can be objectively verified. I don't necessarily think something is objectively wrong because it doesn't align with my learned values.
I just wanted to point out that the results of this poll shows there is no overwhelming consensus on the philosophical origin of rights, whether they are natural or government derived.
People's personal beliefs and perceptions look to be all over the map.
I just wanted to point out that the results of this poll shows there is no overwhelming consensus on the philosophical origin of rights, whether they are natural or government derived.
People's personal beliefs and perceptions look to be all over the map.
In this strange little corner of the internet, that's correct.
I would argue that rights are merely ideas, and exist in the same sense any idea does. From there a government chooses which of these rights if feels should be enforced (their choice could be based on religious convictions, optimal societal outcomes, random preference, etc.)
Thereby, you only have the rights that a higher power recognizes, because otherwise they only exist as ideas with no power beyond people's minds. So, yes, they do exist, but people only possess them at the whim of the governing power.
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"Proving god exists isn't hard. Proving god is God is the tricky part" - Roommate
If when I walk down the street and get mugged there is a system in place to retrieve my items, then it can be said that I have a right to property.
If when I walk down the street and get mugged, there is no system in place to retrieve my items then I have no right to property.
Like it or not, the police and the legal system decide which rights you have as a human being, since if they choose to abandon you, you can be killed, raped, whatever and nothing will happen as a consequence.
What does it mean to have the right to property? It means that if that property is stolen, there is someone (the police) who will intervene on your behalf. If you take that entity away (the police/military/law/whatever) then the right ceases to exist.
Why is such a "right" created in the first place?
In other words:
1. Nothing exists to protect property.
2. ???
3. Something exists to protect property.
It seems to me that #2 is a bunch of people saying, "something ought to exist in order to protect our property."
And that seems to indicate that a whole bunch of people are convinced that the protection of property is important before government (or a protection agency) exists. They are recognizing that a "right" is not being protected and working to fix the problem.
What does it mean to have the right to property? It means that if that property is stolen, there is someone (the police) who will intervene on your behalf. If you take that entity away (the police/military/law/whatever) then the right ceases to exist.
If the police act to enforce a right, that means their action is [I]caused[/I] by the right. And if their action is caused by the right, then of course the right can't be caused by their action - that would be circular. The right has to stand prior to the law. Otherwise there is no way to justify why the police do anything.
This is incorrect. It means their action is caused by the [i]law[/i]. Not the [i]right[/i]. The [i]law[/i] has to stand [i]prior to the enforcement of the law[i/]. There is a governmental entity that decides we ought to protect property and thus declares a law that property can be protected by enforcement agencies. This says nothing of rights, but of laws and enforcement.
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Asking people to remove quotes in their signatures is tyranny! If I can't say something just because someone's feelings are hurt then no one would ever be able to say anything! Political correctness is stupid.
What does it mean to have the right to property? It means that if that property is stolen, there is someone (the police) who will intervene on your behalf. If you take that entity away (the police/military/law/whatever) then the right ceases to exist.
If the police act to enforce a right, that means their action is [I]caused[/I] by the right. And if their action is caused by the right, then of course the right can't be caused by their action - that would be circular. The right has to stand prior to the law. Otherwise there is no way to justify why the police do anything.
This is incorrect. It means their action is caused by the [I]law[/I]. Not the [I]right[/I]. The [I]law[/I] has to stand [i]prior to the enforcement of the law[i/]. There is a governmental entity that decides we ought to protect property and thus declares a law that property can be protected by enforcement agencies. This says nothing of rights, but of laws and enforcement.
Great. As I asked above, what stands prior to the law?
What does it mean to have the right to property? It means that if that property is stolen, there is someone (the police) who will intervene on your behalf. If you take that entity away (the police/military/law/whatever) then the right ceases to exist.
If the police act to enforce a right, that means their action is [I]caused[/I] by the right. And if their action is caused by the right, then of course the right can't be caused by their action - that would be circular. The right has to stand prior to the law. Otherwise there is no way to justify why the police do anything.
This is incorrect. It means their action is caused by the [I]law[/I]. Not the [I]right[/I]. The [I]law[/I] has to stand [i]prior to the enforcement of the law[i/]. There is a governmental entity that decides we ought to protect property and thus declares a law that property can be protected by enforcement agencies. This says nothing of rights, but of laws and enforcement.
Great. As I asked above, what stands prior to the law?
Nothing needs to. It is an artifice. Society creates agreed upon consensuses and then passes laws to mimic the consensus.
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Asking people to remove quotes in their signatures is tyranny! If I can't say something just because someone's feelings are hurt then no one would ever be able to say anything! Political correctness is stupid.
Nothing needs to. It is an artifice. Society creates agreed upon consensuses and then passes laws to mimic the consensus.
That's it? Society just "creates agreed upon consensuses"? There's no causal process we could explore, no predictable reason why one consensus appears instead of another? It just happens magically and spontaneously, ex nihilo?
As an explanation, "society did it" is no better than, and is in fact formally equivalent to, "God did it". I know it's hard, but try to pretend for a moment that you weren't trained as a social scientist, and show some freaking critical thinking.
If when I walk down the street and get mugged there is a system in place to retrieve my items, then it can be said that I have a right to property.
If when I walk down the street and get mugged, there is no system in place to retrieve my items then I have no right to property.
Like it or not, the police and the legal system decide which rights you have as a human being, since if they choose to abandon you, you can be killed, raped, whatever and nothing will happen as a consequence.
Wrong. The reason the police are perceived as justified in their actions, and in turn the reason why we support having a police force tasked specifically with such things as stopping muggings, is because of our recognition of our right to property.
One's rights are not contingent upon what punishment is inflicted upon someone who breaks them. They are still rights, and that person is still a violator of rights regardless of whether or not he is ever caught.
By your logic, if I were to lock someone up in jail, that person would be guilty, because what would make him guilty is the fact that I locked him up. But that's not true, is it? He must be guilty in order for me to take him to jail, right? Were he not, I would have no justification in locking him up, because it's not the punishment that determines the guilt, but rather the justification to punish a criminal comes from his guilt, right?
So, by that logic, he would continue to be guilty whether I locked him up or not, because what would make him guilty would be his crime, right?
Well, his crime was his infringement upon my rights, and so it follows then that this would be a crime regardless of what punishment was meted out to him, or if he received any punishment at all.
Nothing needs to. It is an artifice. Society creates agreed upon consensuses and then passes laws to mimic the consensus.
That's it? Society just "creates agreed upon consensuses"? There's no causal process we could explore, no predictable reason why one consensus appears instead of another? It just happens magically and spontaneously, ex nihilo?
As an explanation, "society did it" is no better than, and is in fact formally equivalent to, "God did it". I know it's hard, but try to pretend for a moment that you weren't trained as a social scientist, and show some freaking critical thinking.
Gonna have to disagree. "Society did it" is a much different proposition than "God did it".
In a one sentence reply, "God did it" is a discussion ender. It's irrefutable, non-verifiable, and there's nowhere for the conversation to go from there.
"Society did it" invites the obvious reply: "How did society do it?" It is not a discussion ender, because it's something that can be legitimately discussed.
_'s point - if I understand him correctly - isn't that it happened magically, but that it had nothing to do with natural rights. It's not that it happened with no cause, it's that an investigation of the process will be fundamentally unsatisfying for someone who is looking for the law to be based on some kind of natural rights, and doesn't especially bear on this topic.
Nothing needs to. It is an artifice. Society creates agreed upon consensuses and then passes laws to mimic the consensus.
That's it? Society just "creates agreed upon consensuses"? There's no causal process we could explore, no predictable reason why one consensus appears instead of another? It just happens magically and spontaneously, ex nihilo?
As an explanation, "society did it" is no better than, and is in fact formally equivalent to, "God did it". I know it's hard, but try to pretend for a moment that you weren't trained as a social scientist, and show some freaking critical thinking.
Gonna have to disagree. "Society did it" is a much different proposition than "God did it".
In a one sentence reply, "God did it" is a discussion ender. It's irrefutable, non-verifiable, and there's nowhere for the conversation to go from there.
"Society did it" invites the obvious reply: "How did society do it?" It is not a discussion ender, because it's something that can be legitimately discussed.
_'s point - if I understand him correctly - isn't that it happened magically, but that it had nothing to do with natural rights. It's not that it happened with no cause, it's that an investigation of the process will be fundamentally unsatisfying for someone who is looking for the law to be based on some kind of natural rights, and doesn't especially bear on this topic.
Except it doesn't make any sense. Society is not an organism, it is not an entity, it is not a thinking being. It is a group of people who make the conscious decision to be a society.
It is this group of people who decide to pass laws.
With that in mind, Blinking_Spirit's point, as I understand it, is that simply saying, "Society is the reason why" is not a valid answer at all, because it doesn't answer WHY the people in that society chose to pass those laws in the first place. _'s argument is that nothing stands prior to the law, which does not serve to explain why people chose to make that law in the first place.
He tries to explain this problem by saying, "Society did it," but that's not an answer. A society is the people who make up the society, so his statement becomes, "the people who make up the society created the consensus because the people who make up the society created the consensus," which is not an explanation. _'s argument does absolutely nothing to answer WHY the people in the society chose that consensus.
Nor does it address why societies throughout the world and throughout time seem to pass the same sorts of laws. Like "don't be an ******* who runs around murdering people." Notice how laws against murder seem to appear in all sorts of different societies. It's almost as though there might be some kind of rational argument against murder that people with sense would say, "Hey, we should totally have a law against that."
Otherwise, why have a law against murder, as opposed to a law that says all forms of murder are a-ok? Why have a law against theft instead of saying, "Everything's up for grabs!" and encouraging looting? _ wants to argue that it's completely arbitrary, but obviously this is not the case. We make those things illegal because we have rational reasons for saying such behavior should not be condoned, and that people should be protected from those who would perpetrate such acts.
It's obviously not completely arbitrary. I just don't think it has anything to do with anything like natural rights (however we might justify it after the fact).
Murder seems like a special case to me, in that just about every society has rules against it. Property rights aren't universal (looting doesn't come with a lack of property rights, by the way; looting doesn't make sense in a society that lacks property rights, since you don't get to keep what you loot anyway) to all societies.
Here's a just-so story - and as such, I'm not suggesting that this is really how it happens, only that it's the kind of thing that could have happened - regarding the creation of property law without some prior property rights. In a tribe, a few high status individuals - individuals who had accumulated some power in whatever way, physical strength or lots of healthy relatives or whatever, there are lots of ways for that to happen - started to monopolize some resources for themselves. Their children, born into a high status, powerful group, were able to continue this notion that resources should be held by them. As the society grew from ancient times, people grew to accept this, simply because it had been true since when they were born. It was enshrined in their religion. When groups took over the top power spot by coup or peaceful succession, they found it convenient to keep the custom. When the society started writing laws, they were written by the powerful and it was enshrined in law that people couldn't take the stuff from the powerful. Then, in the later middle ages and renaissance times, as egalitarian sentiment rose, the law - "You can't take stuff from the powerful" - became generalized to "You can't take stuff from others."
Another one for murder - societies below a certain size needed no prohibition against murder. As they grew beyond a small tribe, those groups that didn't practice a fairly absolute prohibition against murder fell apart almost immediately, either wiping themselves out with too many killings to be able to gather the food they need to survive or weakening themselves to the point that another neighboring group stepped in, exterminated them and claimed their land. So, as it happens, only those societies which had rather stern taboos against killing survived, leaving us to live in the world where murder is strictly forbidden.
These are just-so stories. They're not scientific explanations. They're plausible ideas which could be investigated (or, if not, it's only because not enough historical evidence happens to survive to support or disprove them), but they're meant only to illustrate the kind of answer we might look for when we do seek out the actual processes by which this happens.
In short, it could have happened from relatively chaotic inputs (not random or spontaneously generated, but sensitive to small differences of input) and become enshrined in law as historical artifact. It's a causal process (possibly a wide variety of causal processes), but it has nothing whatsoever to do with natural rights.
On the flip side, the idea that it stems from some kind of natural rights runs into difficulties immediately. First, it has no explanatory power. You still need to explain how it came to be enshrined in law; in the vast majority of cases excepting a handful of modern democracies, it wasn't by sitting around and thinking about natural rights. So how did we come to enshrine natural rights into law? It seems like a great coincidence. Second, it has little hope of explaining the enormous differences in laws between different cultures. There are remarkably few points where law is consistent from culture to culture, except in closely related cultures or where they've been trading law for some time (e.g. French and English laws enshrine very similar rights, but they're really just an example of subtle riffs on one legal framework, since their laws developed in tandem and with reference to each other). There's a general prohibition against murder, but lots of leeway given regarding killing, where it can be justified by this or that thing. There's a general clamp on sexual relations, but in lots of cases it's not a prohibition against rape, it's a prohibition against damaging the father's or husband's goods by despoiling the daughter or wife. We'd expect this if it was the result of rather capricious, chaotic processes driven by specific, usually very powerful individuals. Would we expect it if the law were somehow an expression of a fundamental right?
And most societies before modern times (and a lot of societies in modern times, possibly the majority of societies if we're counting ones that have legal frameworks based on English, French, Portuguese and Dutch law - all of which are closely intertwined - as really the same thing) have denied equal rights to women - are we supposed to say that where societies agree on principles that we agree with, it's evidence of a fundamental and immutable universal law, but when there is substantial agreement on principles like the second class status of women, it's an historical artifact?
The law is the law. It is created by people to serve those people, or very occasionally to serve what they think is best for their society. We don't need to postulate prior natural rights to account for its existence or its form and postulating prior natural rights doesn't help us understand either how it came to be or in what form it came to be.
It doesn't mean that there's no such thing as a natural right, but the law isn't a great way to get at the topic.
In short, it could have happened from relatively chaotic inputs (not random or spontaneously generated, but sensitive to small differences of input) and become enshrined in law as historical artifact. It's a causal process (possibly a wide variety of causal processes), but it has nothing whatsoever to do with natural rights.
What makes you think that isn't what a natural right is? If allowing murder in a community has natural and predictable consequences such that people regularly decide to forbid it, that smells like a natural right to me. (And also to Thomas Hobbes, if the opinion of the man who developed the concept means anything.)
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In short, it could have happened from relatively chaotic inputs (not random or spontaneously generated, but sensitive to small differences of input) and become enshrined in law as historical artifact. It's a causal process (possibly a wide variety of causal processes), but it has nothing whatsoever to do with natural rights.
What makes you think that isn't what a natural right is? If allowing murder in a community has natural and predictable consequences such that people regularly decide to forbid it, that smells like a natural right to me. (And also to Thomas Hobbes, if the opinion of the man who developed the concept means anything.)
Honestly, if that's what we're going to call natural rights, I'm fine with it. I don't have any particular objection to that, but I don't think it's what is generally meant.
Bear in mind just how generalized this right would have to be to cover the facts. Virtually every society has a prohibition against murder, but lots of societies are just fine with a whole lot of killing. They except everything from "It's ok to kill anyone, as long as they're not a member of our immediate group" to "It's ok to kill anyone, as long as our religious leader says they might be putting a curse on you." The generalized natural right that you'd arrive at if you took that approach is something like, "You have the right not to be killed, unless the particular culture which you're a part of says you've violated one or another of their particular customs, which stem from fundamentally chaotic and capricious inputs." The minimum standard for a murder prohibition is cultural stability, not right to life.
And it's not like these are outliers. They're very common across virtually every culture. It's only in the last few centuries that something like e.g. a nobleman killing a commoner in a fit of rage would be punished, and still only in select societies (granted, these societies control nearly the entire population and land area of the world, still, they stem from only a handful of the cultures which have arisen). It's only in the last hundred years that we've come to hold something like female genital mutilation as abhorrent.
Why enshrine something like that with so dignified a phrase as "Natural Rights"?
And it's not like these are outliers. They're very common across virtually every culture. It's only in the last few centuries that something like e.g. a nobleman killing a commoner in a fit of rage would be punished, and still only in select societies (granted, these societies control nearly the entire population and land area of the world, still, they stem from only a handful of the cultures which have arisen). It's only in the last hundred years that we've come to hold something like female genital mutilation as abhorrent.
And our societies are more peaceful, stable, and prosperous. Natural consequences. We are closer to the full expression of the natural right than our ancestors were.
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And it's not like these are outliers. They're very common across virtually every culture. It's only in the last few centuries that something like e.g. a nobleman killing a commoner in a fit of rage would be punished, and still only in select societies (granted, these societies control nearly the entire population and land area of the world, still, they stem from only a handful of the cultures which have arisen). It's only in the last hundred years that we've come to hold something like female genital mutilation as abhorrent.
And our societies are more peaceful, stable, and prosperous. Natural consequences. We are closer to the full expression of the natural right than our ancestors were.
Or it could be that our societies are more peaceful, stable and prosperous because we've leveraged rapid technological progress alongside a complete disregard for the rights of everyone outside of our societies to dominate the resource base of virtually the entire planet. It's really a lot easier to be stable and prosperous when you've inherited the lion's share of resources from your less scrupulous ancestors.
Yes, that still speaks to something about our society causing our society to ultimately end up ahead - but that something is technological prowess and willingness to aggressively colonize those we viewed as inferior, not being less tolerant of murder.
Or it could be that our societies are more peaceful, stable and prosperous because we've leveraged rapid technological progress alongside a complete disregard for the rights of everyone outside of our societies to dominate the resource base of virtually the entire planet. It's really a lot easier to be stable and prosperous when you've inherited the lion's share of resources from your less scrupulous ancestors.
Yes, that still speaks to something about our society causing our society to ultimately end up ahead - but that something is technological prowess and willingness to aggressively colonize those we viewed as inferior, not being less tolerant of murder.
You think technology is what causes peace and stability? Not, "I can go to bed without the fear that I won't be murdered, I won't be taken away in my sleep, my children won't be kidnapped, I won't have my house looted, and my land won't be invaded?"
I suppose it is difficult to define rights in the first place, isn't it?
I never said I believe in natural rights, just that I don't dismiss them. I really don't have an opinion either way on this issue. I'm in this thread to see others' thoughts on it are, and perhaps form an opinion of my own.
And in any case, if rights are granted by a lawgiver, they're not "natural".
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Nitpick: if an omnipresent Creator does in fact exist, any rights afforded by "nature" would of necessity actually derive from the being that created nature.
Standard: W/R Aggro
"Nature" as in "the universe" and "nature" as in "natural rights" are two different concepts. Natural rights are not a part of nature the way, say, a tree is. Rather, they are rights that we have by nature. They're supposed to emerge logically and automatically from the facts of our existence. Think of them as akin to the natural logarithm of mathematics, not the natural objects of the world around us. Could God have created the natural logarithm? I don't see how the suggestion is even coherent: the natural logarithm simply is, an inevitable consequence of the logic of numbers.
I am in disagreement with Locke and Jefferson on this point. Jefferson, of course, wrote that people "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights", and his thinking is strongly informed by Locke's Second Treatise on Government, which discusses God's role in the institution of rights at some length. But again, these God-given rights they talk about can hardly be called "natural"; for a model natural-rights argument, look instead to Thomas Hobbes, who may or may not have been an atheist.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
What does it mean to have the right to property? It means that if that property is stolen, there is someone (the police) who will intervene on your behalf. If you take that entity away (the police/military/law/whatever) then the right ceases to exist.
Therefore, government is what gives us our rights, though I always do like to give credit to our military veterans, and not so much to Congress.
But why do the police intervene on your behalf when someone steals your property? And why don't they intervene when someone listens to a Linkin Park song? What differentiates the former act from the latter? And if the police did break heads over a person's taste in music, why would we consider the government totalitarian and bad?
If the police act to enforce a right, that means their action is caused by the right. And if their action is caused by the right, then of course the right can't be caused by their action - that would be circular. The right has to stand prior to the law. Otherwise there is no way to justify why the police do anything.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Except that there are places where the police do intervene where people listen to certain music. And while we may view that as totalitarian and bad, I don't think that claim can be objectively verified. I don't necessarily think something is objectively wrong because it doesn't align with my learned values.
Standard: W/R Aggro
People's personal beliefs and perceptions look to be all over the map.
In this strange little corner of the internet, that's correct.
Thereby, you only have the rights that a higher power recognizes, because otherwise they only exist as ideas with no power beyond people's minds. So, yes, they do exist, but people only possess them at the whim of the governing power.
Enforcement = rights
If when I walk down the street and get mugged there is a system in place to retrieve my items, then it can be said that I have a right to property.
If when I walk down the street and get mugged, there is no system in place to retrieve my items then I have no right to property.
Like it or not, the police and the legal system decide which rights you have as a human being, since if they choose to abandon you, you can be killed, raped, whatever and nothing will happen as a consequence.
Why is such a "right" created in the first place?
In other words:
1. Nothing exists to protect property.
2. ???
3. Something exists to protect property.
It seems to me that #2 is a bunch of people saying, "something ought to exist in order to protect our property."
And that seems to indicate that a whole bunch of people are convinced that the protection of property is important before government (or a protection agency) exists. They are recognizing that a "right" is not being protected and working to fix the problem.
Did you just call that poster "ignorant of American history" because he didn't think the Declaration of Independence established a government? Heh.
This is incorrect. It means their action is caused by the [i]law[/i]. Not the [i]right[/i]. The [i]law[/i] has to stand [i]prior to the enforcement of the law[i/]. There is a governmental entity that decides we ought to protect property and thus declares a law that property can be protected by enforcement agencies. This says nothing of rights, but of laws and enforcement.
Great. As I asked above, what stands prior to the law?
Nothing needs to. It is an artifice. Society creates agreed upon consensuses and then passes laws to mimic the consensus.
As an explanation, "society did it" is no better than, and is in fact formally equivalent to, "God did it". I know it's hard, but try to pretend for a moment that you weren't trained as a social scientist, and show some freaking critical thinking.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Wrong. The reason the police are perceived as justified in their actions, and in turn the reason why we support having a police force tasked specifically with such things as stopping muggings, is because of our recognition of our right to property.
One's rights are not contingent upon what punishment is inflicted upon someone who breaks them. They are still rights, and that person is still a violator of rights regardless of whether or not he is ever caught.
By your logic, if I were to lock someone up in jail, that person would be guilty, because what would make him guilty is the fact that I locked him up. But that's not true, is it? He must be guilty in order for me to take him to jail, right? Were he not, I would have no justification in locking him up, because it's not the punishment that determines the guilt, but rather the justification to punish a criminal comes from his guilt, right?
So, by that logic, he would continue to be guilty whether I locked him up or not, because what would make him guilty would be his crime, right?
Well, his crime was his infringement upon my rights, and so it follows then that this would be a crime regardless of what punishment was meted out to him, or if he received any punishment at all.
Gonna have to disagree. "Society did it" is a much different proposition than "God did it".
In a one sentence reply, "God did it" is a discussion ender. It's irrefutable, non-verifiable, and there's nowhere for the conversation to go from there.
"Society did it" invites the obvious reply: "How did society do it?" It is not a discussion ender, because it's something that can be legitimately discussed.
_'s point - if I understand him correctly - isn't that it happened magically, but that it had nothing to do with natural rights. It's not that it happened with no cause, it's that an investigation of the process will be fundamentally unsatisfying for someone who is looking for the law to be based on some kind of natural rights, and doesn't especially bear on this topic.
Except it doesn't make any sense. Society is not an organism, it is not an entity, it is not a thinking being. It is a group of people who make the conscious decision to be a society.
It is this group of people who decide to pass laws.
With that in mind, Blinking_Spirit's point, as I understand it, is that simply saying, "Society is the reason why" is not a valid answer at all, because it doesn't answer WHY the people in that society chose to pass those laws in the first place. _'s argument is that nothing stands prior to the law, which does not serve to explain why people chose to make that law in the first place.
He tries to explain this problem by saying, "Society did it," but that's not an answer. A society is the people who make up the society, so his statement becomes, "the people who make up the society created the consensus because the people who make up the society created the consensus," which is not an explanation. _'s argument does absolutely nothing to answer WHY the people in the society chose that consensus.
Nor does it address why societies throughout the world and throughout time seem to pass the same sorts of laws. Like "don't be an ******* who runs around murdering people." Notice how laws against murder seem to appear in all sorts of different societies. It's almost as though there might be some kind of rational argument against murder that people with sense would say, "Hey, we should totally have a law against that."
Otherwise, why have a law against murder, as opposed to a law that says all forms of murder are a-ok? Why have a law against theft instead of saying, "Everything's up for grabs!" and encouraging looting? _ wants to argue that it's completely arbitrary, but obviously this is not the case. We make those things illegal because we have rational reasons for saying such behavior should not be condoned, and that people should be protected from those who would perpetrate such acts.
Murder seems like a special case to me, in that just about every society has rules against it. Property rights aren't universal (looting doesn't come with a lack of property rights, by the way; looting doesn't make sense in a society that lacks property rights, since you don't get to keep what you loot anyway) to all societies.
Here's a just-so story - and as such, I'm not suggesting that this is really how it happens, only that it's the kind of thing that could have happened - regarding the creation of property law without some prior property rights. In a tribe, a few high status individuals - individuals who had accumulated some power in whatever way, physical strength or lots of healthy relatives or whatever, there are lots of ways for that to happen - started to monopolize some resources for themselves. Their children, born into a high status, powerful group, were able to continue this notion that resources should be held by them. As the society grew from ancient times, people grew to accept this, simply because it had been true since when they were born. It was enshrined in their religion. When groups took over the top power spot by coup or peaceful succession, they found it convenient to keep the custom. When the society started writing laws, they were written by the powerful and it was enshrined in law that people couldn't take the stuff from the powerful. Then, in the later middle ages and renaissance times, as egalitarian sentiment rose, the law - "You can't take stuff from the powerful" - became generalized to "You can't take stuff from others."
Another one for murder - societies below a certain size needed no prohibition against murder. As they grew beyond a small tribe, those groups that didn't practice a fairly absolute prohibition against murder fell apart almost immediately, either wiping themselves out with too many killings to be able to gather the food they need to survive or weakening themselves to the point that another neighboring group stepped in, exterminated them and claimed their land. So, as it happens, only those societies which had rather stern taboos against killing survived, leaving us to live in the world where murder is strictly forbidden.
These are just-so stories. They're not scientific explanations. They're plausible ideas which could be investigated (or, if not, it's only because not enough historical evidence happens to survive to support or disprove them), but they're meant only to illustrate the kind of answer we might look for when we do seek out the actual processes by which this happens.
In short, it could have happened from relatively chaotic inputs (not random or spontaneously generated, but sensitive to small differences of input) and become enshrined in law as historical artifact. It's a causal process (possibly a wide variety of causal processes), but it has nothing whatsoever to do with natural rights.
On the flip side, the idea that it stems from some kind of natural rights runs into difficulties immediately. First, it has no explanatory power. You still need to explain how it came to be enshrined in law; in the vast majority of cases excepting a handful of modern democracies, it wasn't by sitting around and thinking about natural rights. So how did we come to enshrine natural rights into law? It seems like a great coincidence. Second, it has little hope of explaining the enormous differences in laws between different cultures. There are remarkably few points where law is consistent from culture to culture, except in closely related cultures or where they've been trading law for some time (e.g. French and English laws enshrine very similar rights, but they're really just an example of subtle riffs on one legal framework, since their laws developed in tandem and with reference to each other). There's a general prohibition against murder, but lots of leeway given regarding killing, where it can be justified by this or that thing. There's a general clamp on sexual relations, but in lots of cases it's not a prohibition against rape, it's a prohibition against damaging the father's or husband's goods by despoiling the daughter or wife. We'd expect this if it was the result of rather capricious, chaotic processes driven by specific, usually very powerful individuals. Would we expect it if the law were somehow an expression of a fundamental right?
And most societies before modern times (and a lot of societies in modern times, possibly the majority of societies if we're counting ones that have legal frameworks based on English, French, Portuguese and Dutch law - all of which are closely intertwined - as really the same thing) have denied equal rights to women - are we supposed to say that where societies agree on principles that we agree with, it's evidence of a fundamental and immutable universal law, but when there is substantial agreement on principles like the second class status of women, it's an historical artifact?
The law is the law. It is created by people to serve those people, or very occasionally to serve what they think is best for their society. We don't need to postulate prior natural rights to account for its existence or its form and postulating prior natural rights doesn't help us understand either how it came to be or in what form it came to be.
It doesn't mean that there's no such thing as a natural right, but the law isn't a great way to get at the topic.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Honestly, if that's what we're going to call natural rights, I'm fine with it. I don't have any particular objection to that, but I don't think it's what is generally meant.
Bear in mind just how generalized this right would have to be to cover the facts. Virtually every society has a prohibition against murder, but lots of societies are just fine with a whole lot of killing. They except everything from "It's ok to kill anyone, as long as they're not a member of our immediate group" to "It's ok to kill anyone, as long as our religious leader says they might be putting a curse on you." The generalized natural right that you'd arrive at if you took that approach is something like, "You have the right not to be killed, unless the particular culture which you're a part of says you've violated one or another of their particular customs, which stem from fundamentally chaotic and capricious inputs." The minimum standard for a murder prohibition is cultural stability, not right to life.
And it's not like these are outliers. They're very common across virtually every culture. It's only in the last few centuries that something like e.g. a nobleman killing a commoner in a fit of rage would be punished, and still only in select societies (granted, these societies control nearly the entire population and land area of the world, still, they stem from only a handful of the cultures which have arisen). It's only in the last hundred years that we've come to hold something like female genital mutilation as abhorrent.
Why enshrine something like that with so dignified a phrase as "Natural Rights"?
And our societies are more peaceful, stable, and prosperous. Natural consequences. We are closer to the full expression of the natural right than our ancestors were.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Or it could be that our societies are more peaceful, stable and prosperous because we've leveraged rapid technological progress alongside a complete disregard for the rights of everyone outside of our societies to dominate the resource base of virtually the entire planet. It's really a lot easier to be stable and prosperous when you've inherited the lion's share of resources from your less scrupulous ancestors.
Yes, that still speaks to something about our society causing our society to ultimately end up ahead - but that something is technological prowess and willingness to aggressively colonize those we viewed as inferior, not being less tolerant of murder.
You think technology is what causes peace and stability? Not, "I can go to bed without the fear that I won't be murdered, I won't be taken away in my sleep, my children won't be kidnapped, I won't have my house looted, and my land won't be invaded?"