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Do Humans really have inalienable rights?

Are we really born with inalienable rights?

  • Yes

    Votes: 21 53.8%

  • No

    Votes: 17 43.6%

  • Other (explain)

    Votes: 1 2.6%
  • Total voters
    39
The silenced majority said:
My concept & the inherent concept of natural rights remains consistent regardless of any regime foreign or domestic that legitimizes the deprivation of them.
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Would you even know you had those rights if someone never told you? No. Because they don't exist.
 
celticlord said:
Except you are conflating your terms. First you describe an agreement "between individuals" and transpose that as a right granted by "the society".
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I transposed nothing. Society is comprised of individuals, and as such anything agreed upon in a society is agreed upon between individuals.

The agreement "between individuals" is the society--and the first part of that agreement is to endeavor to preserve each others' lives. As society is inevitable, the agreement is inevitable, and the the right to life--being the substance of that agreement--must be inalienable to the individual.
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And I disagree. Throughout history we have shown time and again exactly how the right to life is most certainly NOT inalienable. It is an agreement for mutual survival. You don't kill me, and I'll agree not to kill you. This is an agreement and by no means "inalienable". We need not make that agreement. We could continue to war with one another until one of us dies, at which point the survivor need no agreement to life whatsover. He or she has WON that 'right' and will continue on until someone more powerful denies them that right.

Societies completely disregard others' supposed right to life constantly. Through the death penalty or just because they believe that only SOME people have said right to life. We also war with other societies, with whom we have no agreement to some inalienable 'right to life'. We kill constantly, sometimes indiscriminately, completely disregarding any inalienable 'right to life'. Why? Because we have no such agreement with those societies we war with until one society succumbs to the more powerful one and some agreement is then forged.

Such 'rights' are not inalienable, they are earned or granted by the powerful.
 
kaya'08 said:
How so?
(ten words)
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Well, you are using "force" to legitimize the power to bestow or take away rights - making "force" the basis of rights. I claim that those "rights"
are inalienable regardless of what force seeks to deprive men of them.

Even if a man is deprived or ignorant of such rights doesn't mean that man isn't entitled to such rights.
 
The silenced majority said:
Well, you are using "force" to legitimize the power to bestow or take away rights - making "force" the basis of rights. I claim that those "rights"
are inalienable regardless of what force seeks to deprive men of them.

Even if a man is deprived or ignorant of such rights doesn't mean that man isn't entitled to such rights.
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Rights are an entitlement?
 
kaya'08 said:
Would you even know you had those rights if someone never told you? No. Because they don't exist.
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Ah...I'd like to contest this.

If no one ever told me I had a right to life, yet I would still desire to live. Desiring to live, I would resent and resist any effort to deprive me of that life. In essence, I would be asserting that I had a right to live when I resisted someone trying to take that from me. This is instinctive in virtually every living creature, and therefore self-evident.

If no one ever told me I had a right to liberty, I would still want to do as I willed, not as others willed for me. I would resent capricious constraints on my liberty, and if possible I would resist them. It is the nature of Man to wish to do as he will, unless his independent spirit has been beaten down into cowering slavishness. That this is natural to human beings is self-evident, imo.

If no one ever told me I had a right to the pursuit of happiness, I would still pursue it, as unhappiness is an unpleasant state of being. Do I need to even go over this one?

Property, the other thing our Founders considered including in that short list, is possibly arguable. The Bantu, if I recall correctly, have little concept of personal property other than one's clothing and one's bow. Of course, they also have almost nothing else BUT those things, so it isn't much of a sacrifice for them. Still when I look at little children arguing "that's MY doll and you can't have it!" I tend to think possession is inborn.

All other rights derive from these.

Now...to pull up some Heinlein from the novel Starship Troopers, one could argue that a man has no natural rights whatsoever. If I am drowning the sea will not respect my right to life... my liberty can be imposed on in several ways...property too... pursuit of happiness is something that cannot be taken from me but it can be made very difficult. Nonetheless without these three or four things you cannot build a civilization for humans that is remotely just or reasonable, so to consider them "inalienable" is a good basis for building a civilization.

If you wish to believe them a made-up construct, go ahead...but please don't teach this belief to others. The more people who believe these fundamental rights are not inalienable, the more likely that someone will try to take them from us.

Some traditions are best left alone... when you pry at the very foundations of your civilization, you are doing so at peril to us all.
 
No, the moral validity of rights is based on the consequences that they as a rule can be generally expected to produce. Inalienability is effectively based on a deontologist perspective rather than a consequentialist one.
 
The silenced majority said:
Well, you are using "force" to legitimize the power to bestow or take away rights - making "force" the basis of rights. I claim that those "rights"
are inalienable regardless of what force seeks to deprive men of them.

Even if a man is deprived or ignorant of such rights doesn't mean that man isn't entitled to such rights.
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I believe people SHOULD be entitled to rights, in a moral sense. But to say they ARE by God, or any other divine force, bestowed rights since birth, cannot be proven.
 
damn thats a good question. no humans dont. humans are stupid thats why its necessary to always lie to them. sometimes you have to lie to them to protect them from being lied. which is a little weird isn't it ?
 
So self-preservation is a right, not an instinct?
 
independent_thinker2002 said:
So self-preservation is a right, not an instinct?
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It is an instinct, sure. I also recognize it as a self-evident right, because any society that fails to recognize it as such is doomed to fail itself. You can't have a "society" that doesn't believe its individual members have a right to life that cannot be taken from them without just cause. It would quickly become the worst sort of anarchy.

That doesn't mean every instinct is a right, though. I have the instinct to want to kill people who make me angry... I suppress it for a variety of reasons, not least of which is a belief in the right to life. :mrgreen:
 
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Goshin said:
It is an instinct, sure. I also recognize it as a self-evident right, because any society that fails to recognize it as such is doomed to fail itself. You can't have a "society" that doesn't believe its individual members have a right to life that cannot be taken from them without just cause. It would quickly become the worst sort of anarchy.

That doesn't mean every instinct is a right, though. I have the instinct to want to kill people who make me angry... I suppress it for a variety of reasons, not least of which is a belief in the right to life. :mrgreen:
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I bolded the part that illustrates that it is a social construct. Alienating one's right to life due to just cause is not universal.
 
independent_thinker2002 said:
I bolded the part that illustrates that it is a social construct. Alienating one's right to life due to just cause is not universal.
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I would correct that by saying "what constitutes just cause is not universal but rather specific to a given society...but the right to life itself, absent whatever is considered just cause by that society, is universal."


That is, the right to life is universal...what constitutes just-cause for violating that right is specific to a given society.
 
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Goshin said:
I would correct that by saying "what constitutes just cause is not universal but rather specific to a given society...but the right to life itself, absent whatever is considered just cause by that society, is universal."


That is, the right to life is universal...what constitutes just-cause for violating that right is specific to a given society.
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If that right was inalienable, society couldn't arbitrarily revoke it.
 
independent_thinker2002 said:
If that right was inalienable, society couldn't arbitrarily revoke it.
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You're confusing inalienable with something like invincible, I think. Bullets don't bounce off my chest, but that doesn't mean I don't have a right to life.

If rights were invincible, there would be no need to safeguard them in society or even talk about them. They wouldn't be rights, they'd be laws of nature like gravity.
 
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In theory, I would say that all humans could have inalienable rights so long as those who have the power to uphold those rights were to extend them to everybody. To me, there is no more noble cause we can embark upon, than to promote and expand the idea of inalienable rights in every society and in every corner of the globe. However, the economics of that ideal are currently unfeasible.

The beauty of the Constitution, is that mans inalienable rights are not granted by the government, but from without the government. This sets into motion the idea that those rights belong to all men, regardless of government because they aren't granted by a government. However, as in another discussion thread, what rights and prvileges you desire, you must be willing to enforce at gunpoint. It is folly to think that the existence of inalienable rights protects anybody from having that right infringed upon. It requires endless protection by those with the power to do so.

The reason lesser animals than ourselves have no inalienable rights(and should not) is because they lack the power to grant themselves such a thing. Should they ever gain inalienable rights, it will be through the grace of those who have power over them(us). The reason we enjoy our rights, particularly in the West, is because we have the power as individuals and states, to fight for and protect those inalienable rights.

So, do we really have them? Yes, we do. We have them, because we have the power to hold them and we have the power to extend them. Can we lose them? Absolutely. When we no longer have the power to hold onto those rights, we will lose them to those that have the power to take them away.
 
Goshin said:
It is an instinct, sure. I also recognize it as a self-evident right, because any society that fails to recognize it as such is doomed to fail itself. You can't have a "society" that doesn't believe its individual members have a right to life that cannot be taken from them without just cause. It would quickly become the worst sort of anarchy.

That doesn't mean every instinct is a right, though. I have the instinct to want to kill people who make me angry... I suppress it for a variety of reasons, not least of which is a belief in the right to life. :mrgreen:
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All animals have a self preservation instinct. And, social animals protect each other as well. Do they, too, have an inalienable right to life? We are all animals and the desire for self preservation is no different for us than it is for most other animals. The desire to protect our young, or even those in our herd, colony, etc (social groups) is no different. If that's all that constitutes "inalienable rights" then all animals must have inalienable rights to life.
 
It's obvious that "rights" are just human inventions and vary from time to time and place to place. There isn't a single "right" that anyone can assert that you couldn't find a time or place where said right didn't exist. The idea that "rights" are this ethereal thing that just floats around out there with no human intervention is absurd. You have whatever rights happen to be granted to you by the nation and by the society in which you live. If you go elsewhere, all bets are off.
 
kaya'08 said:
The term "inalienable" rights only came about on the founding of the constitution. How about before then? Was our rights inalienable? Why are humans subject to "inalienable rights", yet other animals are not, and who says we should have such rights, what makes us deserving of such rights, is the term inalienable rights simply a factor of social construct aimed at providing the Human a false term of importance, or a system of civilization?

Are we really born with Inalienable rights? Or is it merely a figment of the social structure we have developed as humans?
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We are born with inalienable rights, it's true. It's something inherent to humans. You can list whatever source you want, God or Nature or whatever floats your boat. But no other animal is capable of the insight and intellect of the human race. None can do what we've done in the short period we've been on this planet. Because of our intellect and our empathy we are able to recognize rights as a natural existence, innate to ourselves.
 
Rights are nothing more than a cultural belief, a system of moral values that supposedly helps structure the operation of our government. Rights, like laws, are only as effective as the naked force by which they are enforced-- and thus, like laws, mainly serve to benefit the people capable of wielding that force.

Personally, I find rights-based systems of moral and political reasoning to be repulsive; they promote neglect for the most basic obligations between individuals and members of groups, whether they be families, tribes, or states. The only proper basis for moral reasoning, whether on an individual or a societal level, is the set of duties and moral obligations that are owed between individuals and groups.
 
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