Defining "rights"

J

jcoiii

New member
I've had these thoughts and expressed them in other threads. And in light of the recent thread on self defense/national defense, which has remained very civil, and which I have no desire to highjack, I pose this question:

What rights are inherent to every individual on the planet?

Since I'm the OP, I'll take the easy ones first :)

1. Life. Everyone has a right to be alive.
2. Self-determination. Choosing one's course through life
3. Self defense. Protecting one's self from attack by another

I've been involved in threads discussing what "rights" are given and which are inherent, and I find it to be an enlightening subject. So, if we can keep this thread from moving into the type where posters quote another member and then extrapolate their entire worldview, I think this could be an interesting topic.

Discuss:)
 
Are you trying to define rights or enumerate rights?

See, for instance, Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty, or google "substantive rights."
 
Jcoiii, you are encountering the very same problem the founders faced (Which was why many didn't want a bill of rights). If you try and enumerate rights, you will fail to mention some. The problem is that those you do mention will become the only rights recognized.

The founders tried an end run around this problem by including the 9th amendment. We can see how well that worked out!

Consider the right to privacy. Where is this right found? Or is it even a right?

How about the right to protect your own property?

Back in those days, both the above rights were so inherent in their thinking, that they were not even mentioned. But by not enumerating those rights, most people, today, don't believe we have them.

Look at any discussion of defensive shooting. Most will tell you that while you can protect your life, you cannot protect (with lethal force) your property. The founders would have scoffed at this modern concept. Protection of property was a fundamental liberty of freemen.

What does a "privacy" right entail? Do you have the ultimate and exclusive right to your name? Your personal data? The founders couldn't have conceived of the databases of information that are routinely compiled, both by the government and business. They would be shocked senseless if they could see how we are monitored and profiled today.

Do you have the right to travel? Freely and without restriction? With any means at your disposal? At the time of the founders, any restrictions as to where or how you got there, would have been soundly smacked down as an invasion of a basic and fundamental right.

The more you think about these things, the larger the list grows.
 
Antipitas...

you bring up a good point about privacy and the right to defend your property with lethal force. This is where I wish the law would say EVERYWHERE, not just select states, that you can defend your property with lethal force. Consider this: Back then there were no "police" per se and definately the idea of the "well regulated milita" meant that people would have the right to call to arms collectively to defend their own property. (Shay's Rebellion, Whiskey Rebellion, etc.) Those who didn't want to give up their property for other groups to use as stategic position would've defended their property. Nowadays there are places that require duty to retreat? What gives? If I personally feel like defending my property that I paid for, pay taxes on etc. I should be allowed to use lethal force to defend it, if I die well that was my choice I made. If people are taught the mentality of always having to retreat all the time, how will that reflect if ever there was a conflict where the American people HAD to fight and had no choice to retreat? (Not trying to sound all doomsday-ish just bringing up a possibility.) Sometimes I wonder, if nations like Iran, China, or North Korea decide to attack America and civilians get caught up, would they fight or would they run? What about if/when the government pushes the envelope and causes a civl war/rebellion type scenario? Just some things to think about, and I'm sure that's why the Founding Fathers supported the right to bear arms, a fine right indeed!


Epyon
 
I see rights more as powers to prohibit.

You really don't have a right to life. You are going to die. But you do have an inherent power to prohibit the taking of your life.

Your right to pursue your chosen course in life is really your power to prohibit someone else from stopping you.

Your right to self-defense is really your power to prohibit the taking of your life in some particular way and at some particular time.

I guess I'd call them "natural powers", and that means, to me, the powers I grew up and learned how to use effectively. For example, I have a right to take drugs if I want to, by virtue of my power to keep you from knowing whether I do. If I'm not so good at that, then I've lost that power to prohibit you from stopping me if you don't like it. But if I am good at it, then I have retained that power to prohibit you from doing so.

I have the right to, if on a jury, decide my view based on whether I like the law rather than just on the facts. That is really because I have the power to prohibit you from knowing just how I arrived at my part of the verdict. It is therefore a natural power.

I have a right to defraud someone by making them believe I like them for my financial benefit while I in fact despise them. That is really my natural power to prohibit them from discovering how I really feel.

You get the idea. That's what I call "natural powers".
 
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

I have long thought that there is only one right: the right use what power you have, your own and any obtained from others, to do what you want. All else is derivative. Among humans, the one right is a universal and not merely human right, much ill occurs because the good guys are so slow to pool their power to block the bad.
 
I don't think that there are rights that are inherent. To me, a right is like an entitlement. It requires someone else relinquish control over whatever activity you are talking about at the moment, and if someone else can relinquish (or not) it, then it isn't inherent.

You do, on the other hand, have powers. Call them capabilities if you want. They are inherent because nobody gives them to you, except in the sense that whoever you learned them from does. You are born with some of them and soak up the rest mostly during the earlier, more protected, years of your life and also thereafter.

You don't have a right to life if I can kill you. You may have the power to keep me from doing that. You may lend that power to a larger group so that they override my power to kill you. That group might put their trust in some founding fathers who write, in a document, that you have a right to life, among other things. But in reality all that is is the collective power to override my power to kill you.

So, if I take your meaning of "given rights" correctly, your right to life is a given right. And it works because, due to its presence and acceptance, some plan to kill you may be abandoned. But it isn't a natural right.

This is not inconsistent with looking at the bill of rights as a bill of powers to stop the government from taking an action against you that you have a listed right to be free from.

I'm not sure it's actually practiced that way.:D
 
Well...the Founding Fathers referred to them as "God Given" rights, but apparently they were only given to Americans.
I look at the BoR as a contract between the government and the people and the rights are ultimately guaranteed by the people themselves.
 
GoSlash, I think the FF referred to them that way primarily to make them more understandable to the masses. The concept of the rights of man is more relevent if one looks at it from the perspective of Enlightenment thinkers who sought to place man in Nature with a capital N.
 
You have the right to be taxed from birth to death.

You have the right to remain silent. If the gov't could tax that, they would.

You might have a right to free thought as long as you remain silent.

Anymore, just about everything else is a collective issue w/ my rights ending when they step on your rights toes.
 
I believe you have the right to do anything you want. Period. You are “endowed” with the right to act as you please.

Recognizing that it’s pretty tough to have a functioning society in which everybody does whatever they want, our founders came up with a “social compact”, voluntarily entered into between the citizens of that society, whereby each citizen chooses to relinquish the exercise of some rights. Any limitation on a right comes from "might" or from a voluntary submission in order to promote a "more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty".
 
I've seen a lot of people describe it this way:

You "have" only those rights that you can assert. If someone has taken away your right to speak freely, because they have the power to do it, then you don't (as the argument goes) actually "have" the right to speak freely. That is different from saying that you, or any other free person, should have that right.

It all depends on whose point of view is being employed. The person who wants the right to speak says, "I have an inalienable right to freedom of speech." The dictator who doesn't want him to speak freely says, "Oh yeah? No you don't," and by virtue of the fact that the dictator puts the guy in jail when he speaks, the guy really doesn't "have" the right to speak freely.

Others will say, "Yes, everyone does have that right; it's just that someone has gone and infringed upon it."

But it really seems that the notion of what rights are "inherent" in a human being is dependent on the society in which the discussion is taking place.


-azurefly
 
This is much more on the right track to understanding the concept of 'rights' around the globe. I would say that they are culturally defined as they beyond just socio-political circumstances as how rights are recognized may include other factors such as religious ideology. Such 'rights' can be added, removed, or otherwise modified by the society in question depending on additional factors that can involve things such as social, political, religious, and even economic change.

The founding fathers may have felt some rights were God-given, as noted by GoSlash27, but what wasn't noted was that the founding fathers only thought such rights were given to only certain types of people.

I believe you have the right to do anything you want. Period. You are “endowed” with the right to act as you please.
Click to expand...

If the society doesn't believe you have a given right, then you don't. You may be able to do many things, but ability isn't the same as a right. Said endowment is by the society in which the right is being defined and/or enforced.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top