I like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy definition of rights:
That sounds great. The problem is when we go meta- and ask for the roots of rights, which I think is indispensable in determining which rights exist and which don't. The easy and IMO useless response is to say that rights are given by God. Okay, but this still doesn't give me a justification for specific rights, and only appeals to something akin to divine command theory.
Secularly (which can be adopted by any religious person) things seem a little bit better with the position that rights are based in biological states handed down by evolution. We have the right to individual liberty because that's how organisms (or selves) flourish the most, judging by biomarkers such as stress hormones, e.g., there are higher stress hormones involved with very close physical proximity to strangers, therefore we're wired and thus have a right to having physical space as a right.
We can extend from this biological idea to an Aristotelian notion of flourishing, i.e., that which allows the individual to flourish in an analogous sense to a tree flourishing, the flourishing being Eudaimonia, or happiness in a deeper sense than is commonly used. A person has a right to something if it results in his or her flourishing without negatively affecting the flourishing of others. Free speech is a right because it gives the person the freedom to speak as he'd like, without which he'd feel constrained and so his flourishing would be more likely to be limited.
But I'm still struggling here, as you might tell. What do you guys think: what set of rights are justified in the sense of being rooted into a deeper framework which justifies them?
Rights are entitlements (not) to perform certain actions, or (not) to be in certain states; or entitlements that others (not) perform certain actions or (not) be in certain states.
To be entitled to something is, roughly, to deserve something. To speak of rights, then, is to speak of which actions or states we and others should or shouldn't be in as a matter of what we deserve.
That sounds great. The problem is when we go meta- and ask for the roots of rights, which I think is indispensable in determining which rights exist and which don't. The easy and IMO useless response is to say that rights are given by God. Okay, but this still doesn't give me a justification for specific rights, and only appeals to something akin to divine command theory.
Secularly (which can be adopted by any religious person) things seem a little bit better with the position that rights are based in biological states handed down by evolution. We have the right to individual liberty because that's how organisms (or selves) flourish the most, judging by biomarkers such as stress hormones, e.g., there are higher stress hormones involved with very close physical proximity to strangers, therefore we're wired and thus have a right to having physical space as a right.
We can extend from this biological idea to an Aristotelian notion of flourishing, i.e., that which allows the individual to flourish in an analogous sense to a tree flourishing, the flourishing being Eudaimonia, or happiness in a deeper sense than is commonly used. A person has a right to something if it results in his or her flourishing without negatively affecting the flourishing of others. Free speech is a right because it gives the person the freedom to speak as he'd like, without which he'd feel constrained and so his flourishing would be more likely to be limited.
But I'm still struggling here, as you might tell. What do you guys think: what set of rights are justified in the sense of being rooted into a deeper framework which justifies them?
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