Thumpalumpacus wrote:Seth wrote:One has a natural right to pursue life, not a guarantee of obtaining that goal in perpetuity, or at all. Again, a "right" is merely a freedom of action that may be defended against intrusion or interference by another. It's not a statement of policy or an invulnerable shield against such intrusions.
In other words, there are no rights granted by nature, but only those granted, defended, and abrogated by man. Glad we've found agreement here.
Rights are not granted by anything or anyone, they exist as a natural function of life. All organisms have rights because all organisms have freedoms of action that can be defended against intrusion or interference by another. Whether they are capable of recognizing or discussing such issues philosophically is irrelevant.
The four Organic Rights as they apply to human society are derived from first principles of the natural behavior of all living creatures.
The Organic Rights are founded in natural principles, which is what gives them their moral strength when applied to human behavior. I derive the Organic Rights from the observed laws of nature.
The first is that every organism on earth seeks to preserve it's own life. This instinct is seen everywhere in the natural world as a function of evolution. Every individual organism seeks autonomous life in that it will defend its life when attacked by another organism. Therefore, the First Organic Law is that all living creatures pursue autonomous survival and will engage in self-defense to prolong life.
From this I infer that the First Organic Right is the right to life.
The Second Organic Right is the right to individual liberty, because all living creatures strive for organic autonomy and individual liberty.
The Third Organic Right is the right to self-defense, because all living creatures naturally defend their lives when attacked, to one degree or another.
Next, we observe in nature that all living creatures will seek to find and obtain that which is necessary for organismic survival. Fundamentally this is energy, which comes in many forms. In this case, food. In addition, higher creatures will seek out shelter as well, as a part of the necessities of survival. From this natural behavior I derive the Second Organic Law; all creatures seek to obtain and secure to their own use the resources necessary for survival.
And from this Second Organic Law I derive the Fourth Organic Right; the right to seek out, obtain and reserve to one's exclusive use the resources necessary for survival, which is more simply stated as the right to the exclusive ownership and use of private property.
Thus, I believe one can derive natural rights directly from natural behavior, simply by reference to our nature as living beings. Those rights are inherent, and superior, and unalienable, and not derived from any social construct of mankind because they are necessary components of our very existence and being, without which no man, and no living creature, can survive and flourish.
This places at least these four Organic Rights above any inferior human social construct, and therefore places them beyond the power of others to disparage or deny as a matter of general social policy.
Society may not morally deprive an individual of his Organic Rights absent some misbehavior on the part of the individual that makes it necessary to do so.
Interestingly, even Marx agrees with me in some respects. Marx is correct in saying that life is pointless without producing other life, and that social relations are a necessary part of propagating life. I also agree that "free conscious activity constitutes the species-character of man." In fact, in that statement Marx is in complete agreement with my explication of the organic basis of human rights. According to Marx, as restated by me, the natural condition of mankind is that of the exercise of Organic Rights, or as Marx puts it "free conscious activity."
Karl Marx wrote:The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It is not distinct from that activity; it is that activity. Man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity directly distinguishes man from animal life activity. Only because of that is he a species-being. Or, rather, he is a conscious being – i.e., his own life is an object for him, only because he is a species-being. Only because of that is his activity free activity.
Man's life activity, at the fundamental level, is the individual exercise of liberty, of self-determination, of will, through conscious action, free activity, an exercise of Organic Rights.
In Estranged Labor from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx wrote:In a physical sense, man lives only from these natural products, whether in the form of nourishment, heating, clothing, shelter, etc. The universality of man manifests itself in practice in that universality which makes the whole of nature his inorganic body, (1) as a direct means of life and (2) as the matter, the object, and the tool of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body — that is to say, nature insofar as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature — i.e., nature is his body — and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it is he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.
Here too Marx recognizes and explicates man's fundamental association with nature, and his fundamental attachment to the "dialog" with nature required for simple survival. He, like I, explicates the principle that man lives only from "these natural products," which comports with my explication of the Organic Rights, that of the right to seek out and appropriate to one's exclusive use those resources essential to life. Marx is deriving man's essential nature from nature, just as I have, and he and I agree in the organic constitution of man and his relationship with nature, and that all morality flows from that basic organic relationship.
Thump wrote:Nature observes no rights.
Seth wrote:"Nature" does not exist. Only animate and inanimate objects exist. Animate objects have rights. Inanimate ones do not. Animate objects observe rights through the process of struggling to survive and replicate their DNA for another generation.
Then why, pray tell, would you write:
Seth wrote:One has a natural right to pursue life [Emphasis added by Thump]
If nature doesn't exist, you have no "natural" rights at all; and if you have natural rights, then obviously this subjective existence must have an objective substrate. You need to clarify your thinking before you propound it.
In short, you cannot deny nature, and still claim "natural rights."
I'm sorry, I was unclear. "Nature" as a creature of sentience and volition that "grants" rights through some conscious act, as would a society of sentient individuals as in your construct, does not exist. The word "nature" describes the organic and inorganic world, that is all. "Nature" has no functioning ability, it's an abstraction. It is living organisms that have volitional ability to one degree or another, and it is that volitional ability, that freedom of action, that endows the organism with rights.
You yourself may well die in the middle of composing a reply to this post of mine: you don't even have the right to your next breath. You only -- I repeat, only -- have the sufferance of the current moment.
Wrong. I have the "right" to take as many breaths as I am able to take. Having the right to exercise some freedom of action, like breathing, is not a guarantee of success, it is merely an exercise of will against the intrusions of others, or even the intrusions of physics.
Neither you nor I have any call, at all, upon the resources of this universe (which really is what is meant when the word "right" is used).
I disagree. We have a call upon that which we may lay claim to through a physical act, be it instinctual or an act of knowing will. We have a right to seek out and obtain to our exclusive use those resources necessary for our survival. Nothing and no one can vitiate this claim if we have the force and ability to make it so.
The Universe doesn't owe us a damned thing.
Quite right. But you are explicating an
entitlement, not a right. The universe "owes" us nothing, but we have a right to seizes from the universe that which we require or desire for our continued survival. Just as the universe owes us nothing, we owe nothing to the universe, or to "nature", and may take from it what we will.
Your example here is actually self-rebutting. Animals observe no rights at all. The crocodile doesn't eyeball the zebra, only to say to himself, "Y'know, I'll go hungry today; that zebra, after all, has a right to live."
Flawed logic. That one species sees another as a valid resource does not vitiate the fact that both crocs and zebra have their own system of rights within their social grouping. That a croc doesn't make a philosophical judgment doesn't mean that it does not exercise freedoms of action. You falsely assume that RECOGNITION of the rights of others is an inherent natural function. It's not. Rights are, at the core, self-enforced, and only to the extent that one has the capacity to do so. Thus, the zebra's right to life may be vitiated by the crocs right to obtain exclusive use of resources (the zebra) for its continued existence. This is a classic conflict of rights that, in lower animals, is resolved by force. Survival of the fittest is the metric for the natural resolution of such conflicts. But this does not mean that neither the croc nor the zebra have rights, merely that one's rights may be inferior to the rights of another.
No, nature doesn't work like that at all. Earthquakes swallow up creatures. Tornadoes skip entirely over the barn, only to carry the pigtrough several miles through the air. Gravity pulls down the odd airplane suffering engine failure, and the odd comet wandering into our neighborhood.
Natural phenomena do not have rights because they are not freedoms of organic action, they are events.
In short, shit happens. Life is tough and then you die, and the only promise you may rely on is that you will one day die. Nothing else is promised us.
Indeed, but none of that disparages the existence of the Organic Laws or the Organic Rights. The fact that a particular organism may not be able to successfully defend its organic rights against intrusion does not mean the right does not exist.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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