Svartalf wrote:Seth wrote:Svartalf wrote:Rights as a natural function of life? Where will the victims of these last 10 years' earthquakes and tsunamis take Nature to court for violating their basic rights?
Just because you cannot defend your rights against a natural disaster or disease doesn't mean you don't have the rights.
Just because I may die of cancer doesn't mean I don't have a right to life. If I have no right to life that it inherent to me as a function of my humanity, then whatever organization or group decides who has what rights may take my life if it decides I don't meet their criteria for having a right to life.
I don't know about you, but I find it unacceptable that my rights might be "granted" to me at the whims and caprices of whatever culture I happen to reside in. That's how women get stoned to death for adultery in barbaric Islamic cultures. Are you arguing that those women don't have a right to life, and that it is justifiable for Islamic authorities in Islamic countries, who make the determination who enjoys what rights, to stone women to death?
You really aren't thinking very deeply about this subject, you know.
you seem to be sadly mistaken about what a right is.
Perhaps, but at least I've given it deep and thoughtful consideration and formulated a complex theory of rights, something you haven't done.
a possibility is something that can happen/be done. living a happy life in your home, or having that life/home destroyed by natural catastropher are both possibilities.
a right is something you can get protection, generally by law, against it being infringed. It's something you can get enforced.
Is it? I agree. But I go back one step further to find the basis and origin of the concept. That "something" you refer to is a freedom of action, like living, or speaking, or having the exclusive use of property. And before you can "get [a right] enforced" through the advent or assistance of government, someone or something must be capable of doing the enforcement. Again, at the beginning, it is the individual himself who "enforces" or defends his rights against infringement.
But you are describing how a right is vitiated or defended, you're describing it by the functions that surround it, you're not describing the thing itself. But that's what I'm doing, I'm cutting through the rhetoric of how social groups recognize, assign, mediate and defend rights to what a right ACTUALLY IS.
Further, I'm describing where some fundamental rights emanate from, how it is that they come to exist and be recognized in the first place, by reference to natural behavior of living organism.
So, you say, "a right is something you can get protection, generally by law, against it being infringed. It's something you can get enforced."
I agree. A right is a freedom of individual action that the individual can defend against intrusion or interference by another. I further maintain that the four Organic Rights are not granted by one individual to another individual, but rather they exist because they are claimed by the individual as a component of individual existence and the functions of biology.
There's no right when both parties in a dispute, like that bear that wants to eat you for lunch and whose skin you want to use for a rug have equal justification to their actions. You don't speak of rights about predators trying to eat animals, or prey trying to evade them.
Of course rights exist in such situations, at least the four Organic Rights, because we see in nature that a predator is exercising its right to life, its right to personal autonomy and liberty, its right to seek out and obtain exclusive use of resources necessary for its survival, and it defends its life against attack by its prey.
The prey is doing exactly the same thing. The method of enforcement in lower animals is "survival of the fittest," and unfit organism's rights are vitiated by their inability to escape a predator.
Within a species, as we see in the wolf pack, rights are enforced and recognized differently and more complexly. With humans, rights are much more complex, and whole systems of recognition and adjudication, and entire categories of rights are acknowledged as existing that are meaningless in lower animals, but the core principle is the same: a right is an individual freedom of action that can be defended against intrusion or interference by another. This applies to every sort of right we humans recognize, without exception.
More importantly, there is no right in the absence of other people to agree that your actions are right (or not). Rights exist only within the framework of human society, and the concept of natural rights has sense only within the frame of how much society can or should infringe on the prerogatives of individuals.
Obviously, I disagree. We see the actions in other, lower animals that are functionally identical to the exercise and administration of rights in humans all the time, to a lesser degree.
It is true that the adjudication of the conflict of competing rights that occurs in any group setting is what makes the concept of importance to the individual, because the lone individual, free of any constraint, has complete autonomy and sovereignty and need not be concerned about defending intrusions or interference with his rights. But that's simply a matter of how rights interact in a society, not a description of what a right actually is or where it comes from.
Yes, certain rights we humans recognize as valuable and worthy of protection on the part of the individual are philosophical in nature, such as the right to free exercise of religion, but every such right is the same "thing," which is as I have said, a freedom of individual action that may be defended against intrusion or interference by another. Note that the definition does not state who or what or how a right may or must be defended. Thus, a right may be defended by the individual (as in the Organic Rights) or it may be defended by others on behalf of the individual, in the interests of complex social behavior memes.
But the key to my argument is two-fold: First, the definition of a right, and second, the synthesis or genesis of the four Organic Rights: The Right to Life; the Right to Individual Autonomy; the Right to Self-Defense; and the Right to Property.
Beyond those four Organic Rights, the system becomes much more complex, and I haven't gone beyond the Organic Rights in my theory so far, though I'm working on it.
"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
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
You really ought not try to teach your grandpa to suck eggs. And when it comes to understanding the ESA, you ought to admit your ignorance and STFU before you make an even bigger fool of yourself.
