Basic Rights

I don't believe that anyone has innate rights- rights are either given or claimed.

sparklecat said:

What rights would you say every person has, always? Why?

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None. Always? No, but based on God's will.
God allows some things as testing or as an example of good or bad. Even my life is forfeit to His will, so to say that I 'deserve' or 'have' something above God's Authority would be incorrect.
BTW - that is not to justify injustice, those words must of course be balanced with more elaboration.

DailyBlessings said:

I don't believe that anyone has innate rights- rights are either given or claimed.

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I completely agree; rights as we commonly define them are priveliges, granted by those in power.

"rights" are a human political/social creation. Only thing supposedly backing them up (as seemingly no one does anything when rights are violated) are weapons and threats. Rights are kept in existance by one of the same factors that helps to remove of them.

I dont believe any higher power gave us any inherent rights. I believe that we should establish some (as we did in the Bill of Rights) for moral and ethics sake, but I dont believe that they were granted by the divine.

I think everyone should have the right to the persuit of happiness, barring that it detracts from others' happiness. This is idealistic jibber jabber that will never fly in the real world though, just fight over some meat and avoid getting your eyes clawed out.

DailyBlessings said:

I don't believe that anyone has innate rights- rights are either given or claimed.

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I completely disagree. A government that stops enforcing rights, and then puts its citizens in concentration camps, is violating their rights.

Rights aren't simply acts of government -- they are moral-social principles that justify government's very existence. The government codification and enforcement of rights is merely the visible tip of the iceberg.

In my view, rights are metanormative principles that define a spheres of choice with which individuals may flourish. They are "meta"-normative in that they don't specify what people should do with their lives, but rather specify the boundary conditions that people need in order to have the freedom to flourish.

The right that people always have is the right to flourish, which could also reasonably be called the right to pursue happiness. My view of what sorts of rights are implied by this right are roughly along the lines of classical liberalism -- the right to private property, to trade, to perform productive work, to keep the fruits of one's labor, to thought, to conscience, to speech, etc.

sparklecat said:

Why do/should people always have these rights?

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Because it is morally right for all individuals to flourish, and because we all flourish best in a free society in which other people are free to flourish. We cannot morally justify a "right to enslave".

Eudaimonist said:

Because it is morally right for all individuals to flourish, and because we all flourish best in a free society in which other people are free to flourish. We cannot morally justify a "right to enslave".

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I think I missed where you said where this morality comes from? Is it a part of nature? Did you make it up? Does it come from God?

sparklecat said:

What rights would you say every person has, always?

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We have the right to do whatever we want. Anything we do or say may or may not be used against us in the highest court of law, God's court, where justice is always done and the law of righteousness and love eternally prevails


God Bless!

One man flourishes at another man's expense- that is the way of the world.

John812 said:

We have the right to do whatever we want. Anything we do or say may or may not be used against is in the highest court of law, God's court, where justice is always done and the law of righteousness and love eternally prevails.


God Bless!

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Ooo that is a Good answer, Better then the one I was going to say.

I was just going to say "You have the right to Die" it's the only thing you are promised, eveything else is a bonous.

God Bless
Vigil.

sparklecat said:

What rights would you say every person has, always? Why?

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The right to live, by virtue of being alive, and the right to live by one's conscience. Perhaps nothing more. And none is "inalienable."

DailyBlessings said:

One man flourishes at another man's expense- that is the way of the world.

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Fortunately, that is not the case.

Code-Monkey said:

I think I missed where you said where this morality comes from? Is it a part of nature? Did you make it up? Does it come from God?

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Morality is the method by which human needs are satisfied. It's rooted in human nature.

Eudaimonist said:

I completely disagree. A government that stops enforcing rights, and then puts its citizens in concentration camps, is violating their rights.

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In the situation you have provided, the purpose of the government is to represent the will of the people. Not all governments are, in fact, representations of the will of the governed. I would agree that governments should enforce the rights afforded by itself, but I would disagree that we have intrinsic rights.

Rights aren't simply acts of government -- they are moral-social principles that justify government's very existence. The government codification and enforcement of rights is merely the visible tip of the iceberg.

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Rights are acts of government at the bequest of those that are represented by the government. There is no morality involved in rights.

In my view, rights are metanormative principles that define a spheres of choice with which individuals may flourish. They are "meta"-normative in that they don't specify what people should do with their lives, but rather specify the boundary conditions that people need in order to have the freedom to flourish.

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If you define rights to include boundaries by which to flourish, it seems that rights necessarily place limitations on the individual. If this is the case, it would seem to me that rights are merely guidelines by which to prosper. A right should be something which does not infringe upon the privelage of those that are endowed with them. Yet you are placing a boundary that one must not cross (in the very definition of rights).

The right that people always have is the right to flourish, which could also reasonably be called the right to pursue happiness. My view of what sorts of rights are implied by this right are roughly along the lines of classical liberalism -- the right to private property, to trade, to perform productive work, to keep the fruits of one's labor, to thought, to conscience, to speech, etc.

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What right do you have to flourish? To what extent do we allow you to flourish? You have the right to private property at the expense of whom? You have the right to trade what? You have the right to productive work, why not counterproductive work? Who defines productive? You have the right to keep the fruits of your labor, although another may actually need the fruits of your labor to survive. Do they not have the right to survive, so that that they too may flourish? The right to thought, well, that's a tough one since noone but you can know what you think. The same with conscious. Now the right to speech, to what extent should speech be a right? Can we defame another? Can we speak out against rights?