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Do You Believe In Natural Rights?

Do You Believe in Natural Rights?

  • Yes

    Votes: 36 41.4%
  • No

    Votes: 51 58.6%

  • Total voters
    87
oh, so you have it within you to create a right?

It's within people as a group. It's a collective concept. Rights don't really exist unless you have more than one person in consideration, and then their existence comes from the power to enforce or exert.

If you are by yourself, no other people anywhere on the planet, do you need rights? No. Because there is no one else there. But as soon you add that second or more people, you start to consider their relationship to you and how they can affect you or you them. That is where rights come into play. And it is dependent on power and ability to defend them, as well as willingness.
 
Well, the way it arose involved theft on a grand scale, and so what they did is not justified by natural rights. Still, someone could in theory own all that land and not violate anyone's rights.

Yes, that is correct.

So if any action you can perform is a right then is it a natural right to operate a car?

Why are some natural rights codified but others not?
 
I don't concede your point, but, regardless, it has no bearing on the validity of the argument concerning the existence or not of natural rights. It's faulty logic, whether you want to admit it or not. I mean, if you're arguing that "There is no such thing as natural rights because the founders were hypocritical scumbags who clearly didn't believe in them" then my retort is "There are natural rights because Honest Abe and Martin Luther King did believe in them."

So you're saying, "In the absence of government" rights exists. And that human's aren't capable of creating rights for themselves???

So basically we're biological transceivers, which really can't really originate our own rights, but rather we receive them from outside ourselves in order to use our built-in moral reasoning mechanism, which allows us to decipher the rights transmitted to us and transfer them to parchment.

Is that close to what you believe?
 
It's within people as a group. It's a collective concept. Rights don't really exist unless you have more than one person in consideration, and then their existence comes from the power to enforce or exert.

If you are by yourself, no other people anywhere on the planet, do you need rights? No. Because there is no one else there. But as soon you add that second or more people, you start to consider their relationship to you and how they can affect you or you them. That is where rights come into play. And it is dependent on power and ability to defend them, as well as willingness.

fine if you bellive in that, can you express that concept IN america and in american law.
 
I don't concede your point, but, regardless, it has no bearing on the validity of the argument concerning the existence or not of natural rights. It's faulty logic, whether you want to admit it or not. I mean, if you're arguing that "There is no such thing as natural rights because the founders were hypocritical scumbags who clearly didn't believe in them" then my retort is "There are natural rights because Honest Abe and Martin Luther King did believe in them."

Actually it is key and central to any claim that the founders believed in natural rights because without that statement from the Declaration you have zip - nothing - squat.
 
I don't concede your point, but, regardless, it has no bearing on the validity of the argument concerning the existence or not of natural rights. It's faulty logic, whether you want to admit it or not. I mean, if you're arguing that "There is no such thing as natural rights because the founders were hypocritical scumbags who clearly didn't believe in them" then my retort is "There are natural rights because Honest Abe and Martin Luther King did believe in them."

None of which matters. Whether someone you like believed in a thing or not has no bearing on whether that thing actually exists in the real world. It's just throwing around the argument from authority and that's fallacious. What matters is if it can be demonstrated, entirely separately from who might have liked the idea or not.
 
So you're saying, "In the absence of government" rights exists. And that human's aren't capable of creating rights for themselves???

In the state of nature natural rights exist. Yes, humans can create rights. If, for example, they create a state, they can ensure that it has the right to collect taxes.
 
None of which matters. Whether someone you like believed in a thing or not has no bearing on whether that thing actually exists in the real world. It's just throwing around the argument from authority and that's fallacious. What matters is if it can be demonstrated, entirely separately from who might have liked the idea or not.

Explain that to Haymarket, please. He's the one who keeps bringing it up.
 
The only diference between a Natural Right and a Human Right is that a Natural Right cannot be taken away or given up. Other than that they are identical.
Who makes that distinction?


You're talking about Civil Rights, which are not the topic of this thread.
No, I am comparing natural rights to civil rights to distinguish between the two, just as you brought up human rights to distinguish between the two.

A Natural Right is any Human Right which cannot be forcibly denied by any means whatsoever. That distinction is the reason for the diferent lables. Can you think of any Human Rights which cannot be given up or forcibly denied?
Where are you getting that this is a distinction between natural and human rights that people actually use? I don't know of any natural rights philosopher that uses the term in the way you are. You are saying natural rights do not exist by redefining the term.
 
Actually it is key and central to any claim that the founders believed in natural rights because without that statement from the Declaration you have zip - nothing - squat.

:doh Okay, if you really want to go here, I have Lincoln...

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

... and Martin Luther King:

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But this, I think, is still the best part:

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

That passage is absolutely orgasmic. :july_4th:

But, anyway, yeah, I've got something.
 
Rights are whatever you can defend, be it through individual strength or collective teamwork.

Fidel Castro would agree with you that he earned the "right" to oppress the population of Cuba using such "logic". Rights are inalienable and God-given.
 
Fidel Castro would agree with you that he earned the "right" to oppress the population of Cuba using such "logic". Rights are inalienable and God-given.
You can support establishing and extending civil rights without attributing them magical powers and origins. The two are not mutually exclusive.
 
:doh Okay, if you really want to go here, I have Lincoln...



... and Martin Luther King:



But this, I think, is still the best part:



That passage is absolutely orgasmic. :july_4th:

But, anyway, yeah, I've got something.

This is still just you relying on people you admire as support for natural rights. It doesn't prove anything. They were great men in many ways, but still just men and subject to being wrong like the rest of us.
 
Fidel Castro would agree with you that he earned the "right" to oppress the population of Cuba using such "logic". Rights are inalienable and God-given.

Which "God", and what proof do you have that rights came from that God?

In reality, you can't prove a God exists, let alone that he/she/it gave us "natural rights". Plus, why would this higher power give us "natural" rights, but not other animals?
 
:doh Okay, if you really want to go here, I have Lincoln...

You are badly missing the point. Many here have stated that our founding fathers believed in natural rights. Proof of this is the clear statement in their document - The Declaration of Independence. You bringing up both Lincoln and King does not impact this at all since both men were NOT Founding Fathers.
 
This is still just you relying on people you admire as support for natural rights. It doesn't prove anything. They were great men in many ways, but still just men and subject to being wrong like the rest of us.

No, this is evidence these words actually meant something to some very persuasive people who hold a special place among freedom-loving people the world over and who can't be painted by people like Haymarket as hypocrites. What I rely on is is reason, just like they did. They found it unreasonable for men to enslave other men and to deprive them of their natural rights. They happened to believe the giver of these rights was a divine, providential God, and their message certainly resonates profoundly even today among millions who believe as they did. But I'll settle for the idea that man's ability to reason, experience, and feel places him in a special place in a universe that we haven't come close to understanding. I'll also settle for my ability to use my brain and accept that not everything can be quantified, at least until someone can prove to me why Mao, Hitler, and Stalin didn't collectively deprive 80-90 million people of their natural right to live.
 
You are badly missing the point. Many here have stated that our founding fathers believed in natural rights. Proof of this is the clear statement in their document - The Declaration of Independence. You bringing up both Lincoln and King does not impact this at all since both men were NOT Founding Fathers.

You're right. Lincoln and King weren't Founding Fathers. They got their inspiration from the Founding Fathers, among others, not so much from who they were but from what they wrote. But then where do you think the Founding Fathers got their inspiration from? Marvel Comics? :confused:
 
You're right. Lincoln and King weren't Founding Fathers. They got their inspiration from the Founding Fathers, among others, not so much from who they were but from what they wrote. But then where do you think the Founding Fathers got their inspiration from? Marvel Comics? :confused:

I have no idea - nor does it matter. People get so called inspiration from many different things - some of them very different from one another and even contradictory. So it really does not matter.
 
I have no idea - nor does it matter. People get so called inspiration from many different things - some of them very different from one another and even contradictory. So it really does not matter.

It does matter, unless you think reason doesn't matter, that human life doesn't matter--that nothing matters.
 
Which "God", and what proof do you have that rights came from that God?

In reality, you can't prove a God exists, let alone that he/she/it gave us "natural rights". Plus, why would this higher power give us "natural" rights, but not other animals?

Which is why everybody who understands the concept of 'natural rights' do not need God in the equation in order to understand them. Many people of faith do believe that God created humankind and the natural laws that allow humankind to be the best that it can be. But others who do not believe in God came to the same conclusion of the concept but called it 'natural rights' instead of 'God given rights' or 'rights endowed by their Creator.'

"Natural rights" are not the same thing as civil rights or Constitutional rights or legal rights just as 'social contract' is not the same thing is a legal or informal contract or 'financial institution' means something specific and different from other kinds of institutions. Those who get caught up in the word used instead of the concept demonstrate a lack of understanding and get it wrong.
 
General mayhem doesn't increase productivity of desirable resources.

Is that a universal or conditional statement? If it's conditional, under that conditions, do you think, would general mayhem increase productivity and desirable resources?
 
Which is why everybody who understands the concept of 'natural rights' do not need God in the equation in order to understand them. Many people of faith do believe that God created humankind and the natural laws that allow humankind to be the best that it can be. But others who do not believe in God came to the same conclusion of the concept but called it 'natural rights' instead of 'God given rights' or 'rights endowed by their Creator.'

"Natural rights" are not the same thing as civil rights or Constitutional rights or legal rights just as 'social contract' is not the same thing is a legal or informal contract or 'financial institution' means something specific and different from other kinds of institutions. Those who get caught up in the word used instead of the concept demonstrate a lack of understanding and get it wrong.
If humans had a natural right to life, then God could never have killed anyone since natural rights cannot be alienated.

Are you saying natural rights don't exist, or that God doesn't exist?
 
If humans had a natural right to life, then God could never have killed anyone since natural rights cannot be alienated.

Are you saying natural rights don't exist, or that God doesn't exist?
You are misunderstanding the concept of innate rights. My right to life does not mean you have no ability to take that life. It simply means that my life belongs to me, by right. My thoughts belong to me, by right. My hands belong to me, by right. My labor belongs to me, by right. That is what is meant by the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is 'to secure these rights that governments are instituted among men.' The important aspect of that statement is to demonstrate that rights exist outside of the state and are not created by the state.
 
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