- Joined
- May 19, 2006
- Messages
- 156,720
- Reaction score
- 53,497
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Undisclosed
I think that you still don't quite understand. Perhaps like your compatriots you are more given to make snide comments than try to understand a premise.
It comes down to this. Do you think murder is unequivocally wrong? Not self-defense or things of that nature. Is one human in cold blood murdering another human always wrong? Regardless of race, regardless of location, regardless of social status. I'm pissy and grumpy, I'm walking down the street, I see some guy...maybe he reminds me of a rude server at Starbucks, I pull out a gun, shoot him in the back of the head. Is that act always wrong?
The answer to that question will tell you what side of this debate you are on. If you believe that it is always wrong to outright murder people in cold blood, the question becomes why? If social and legal "right" is all we have, those can be changed. You can have a society say were murder is encouraged. But if you think that murder is always wrong, then there has to exist something outside of legal and social "right", something that is inherent to all humans and makes cold blooded murder against humans always wrong. That would be natural rights.
If the answer to the question is no, then you'll never accept the concept of natural rights. If you think it personally ok under some circumstance for me to have shot that guy in the back of the head for no reason; you won't accept natural rights. It doesn't mean that maybe you can't understand the arguments for them (unlike others who would rather blatantly engage in nothing but insult instead of debate), but you're not going to accept it as valid. Morality is in essence completely subjective.
I'm of course in the natural rights club. I am never justified to murder someone who has done nothing to me in the least. I do not have the right to take his life.
Here's the fallacy of your example, Ikari, and why rights are NOT natural. Even if I agree that it is always bad to murder someone in cold blood, unless everyone that ever lived feels the same way, the right is not natural. It is a construct instilled in each of us, either through social learning or through societal culture. Further, even IF every person who ever lived felt that way, then it would be an instinct, not a right.
And I STILL haven't seen a viable definition of "rights". Everything the pro-natural rights crowd are discussing are desires or instincts.