rEvolutionist wrote:As I said, rights imply an authority/authorisation to do something.
Correct.
So regardless of who's definition of rights you accept, they all still imply this.
Correct.
The natural philosophers back then were all looking for ways to either shoehorn god into the equation, or replace god with some other authority.
Well, they were indeed seeking a root authority because they found the notion that rights are a creature of government to be both socially unworkable and prone to abuse, not to mention intellectually, logically, rationally and philosophically baseless and incorrect.
Remember the age these people came from. Humans were conditioned to think that we needed authority to control us and our immoral thoughts.
Quite clearly we do.
This notion is antiquated and frankly quaint to modern thinkers.
This explains a lot with respect to the corrosion and rot in our societies. It doesn't, however, support the notion that human culture can exist without external authority to control behavior. That, my friend, is precisely what government is chartered to do. The only difference between God as the external authority and Obama as the external authority is that Obama's judgement is substantially inferior to what theists claim God's judgments about moral and ethical behavior are. Demonstrably so.
You're not being successful in trying to do away with the idea of natural rights, you're just shooting yourself in your metaphorical foot by exchanging Karl Marx for God in the quite obvious and long-term practice of exercising external authority to control us and our "immoral thoughts."
And Marx has much less going for him than God does insofar as being an effective regulator of human behavior.
Rights are bestowed and supported from within our own societies, not some external objective being/force/thing/wibble.
I didn't say rights don't exist within the society, I said that certain rights are derived from our basic nature as living creatures. If the notion of rights doesn't originate in something tangible and falsifiable the notion becomes nothing more than an abstract philosophical theory that becomes entirely subjective and which then drifts aimlessly in the universe, untethered from anything fixed, and therefore becomes a useless concept. You say rights are this, I say rights are that. Without a foundation for assessing our arguments my notions are exactly equal to yours insofar as making any practical use of the notion in the first place, which makes everything entirely subjective and arbitrary, and therefore useless.
Examining human behavior shows us that there are universal fundamental attributes that apply to both humans and every other living organism, as I have stated. Every culture known to us has some fundamental social behaviors common to all, which include defense of the life of, at a minimum, the individual and members of the family unit or tribe, a common goal of seeking and obtaining the resources necessary for survival of the group, the willingness to defend the exclusive possession and use of those resources by the group, and the urge to procreate.
No human society on earth, ever, has not had these fundamental behavioral characteristics. No living creature in fact lacks these basic characteristics.
It is from those characteristics that I derive the Organic Rights, which apply to interactions between all living organisms, but especially humans, who have evolved complex hierarchies and rules about which rights have precedence under what circumstances. But all can be traced back to fundamental evolved organic behavior and needs.
"Rights" as a concept is about adjudicating conflicts regarding the needs of competing organisms.
But it is the organisms and their needs that come first, with the adjudication of rights coming second, only as a response to a conflict between individual organisms. Therefore, certain Organic Rights cannot be "bestowed," they are evolved, natural and inherent and are therefore superior to rights which may be bestowed by a society and are unalienable because the authority to bestow or remove rights is inferior to the natural Organic Rights.
"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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