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What is a "Right"???

If rights are natural and inalienable, then how are the injustices we see possible? Take the "natural" and "inalienable" right to liberty. If it existed, it would be impossible to enslave or even wrongfully imprison someone.
 
Sword of Apollo said:
They are protections against the depredations of others (including government) on an individual, and on what that individual has earned.
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Your definition is mostly OK by me, but it is incompatible with the notion that rights are natural and inalienable.

And if they're protections, you have to admit that they don't always work. That's why I think they're a principle of how things ought be. IMO, the principle can still exist even when it's violated. But does a "protection" exist if it fails to protect one?
 
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How about this: a "right" is something that we enjoin the government from blocking; something the government must provide for you would not fall under that even if it is a law. Even if it is a good law.
 
Robert Prey said:
A "Right" is the room that Nature allows us to go about the business of staying alive. Natural rights cannot be granted by government. We are born with them.
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Too mystical to me. A law is a promise by a government to kidnap (arrest) assault (subdue) and forcibly infect with HIV (imprison) someone, under some specified circumstances. Individual A has a right to engage in activity X if the government of the territory within which A resides has promised not to interfere with A when A attempts to do X, and further has promised to interfere with all individuals B,C, etc. if they attempt to interfere with A when A attempts to do X. "Natural rights" or other such conceptions refer to understandings about the limits and place of organized coercion so ingrained that they were not explicitly codified.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
Your definition is mostly OK by me, but it is incompatible with the notion that rights are natural and inalienable.

And if they're protections, you have to admit that they don't always work. That's why I think they're a principle of how things ought be. IMO, the principle can still exist even when it's violated. But does a "protection" exist if it fails to protect one?
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Rights are "natural" only in the sense that they are required for human life to flourish, by our nature. If you look at the periods and societies where rights aren't established or respected, you find poverty, disease, suffering, death. If you look at the places and periods where individual rights are established and respected, you see growth, enjoyment, wealth, flourishing. That flourishing is the goal of morality, properly understood.

Of course, rights can be violated, but not with impunity. There are destructive and deleterious consequences, not only to those whose rights are violated, but to the violators, to the extent of the violations. (The American South found this out in the Civil War. Modern criminals find this out when they live on the run, or are caught. Human-sacrificing primitives live with the bad results constantly.) Rights are "inalienable," in the sense that their necessity cannot be removed from human nature. We violate them at our peril, and their forcible defense will always be morally right.
 
Rolfe said:
A right is nothing but a privilege which is guaranteed to you by the society you are a part of.

The concept of being born with "inalienable rights" is so much woo.

Rolfe.
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Agree.
The more advanced societies tend to have more rights as they have found those rights to be beneficial to a functional society.

E.g access to healthcare, access to food and housing.
 
Comparing flourishing societies is a bit difficult. Right to bear arms? Right to health care?

Anyway, how do we determine whose definition of "rights" is right? I know many who say positive ones (right to health care) are not True Rights... under their definition of what a Right is.

Personally, I try to avoid bringing up rights as often as possible. It seems everyone will try to invoke one on every side of a given debate. (That is not to say that all rights are wrong. I just don't know of a good way to deal with them.)
 
Toke said:
Agree.
The more advanced societies tend to have more rights as they have found those rights to be beneficial to a functional society.

E.g access to healthcare, access to food and housing.
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The problem with "right" so defined, as access to the products of other people's time and talent applied to resources is that such a conception turns those other people into slaves. There is no sense in enunciating a "right" of individual A to a resource X unless the State, the guarantor of this right, places on some other individual B an obligation to supply X. In the US, the ratio of private sector workers (employees + business owners) to welfare recipients + government employees is pretty close to 1:1.
 
Toke said:
Agree.
The more advanced societies tend to have more rights as they have found those rights to be beneficial to a functional society.

E.g access to healthcare, access to food and housing.
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Access to Healthcare, Food and Housing -- these are not rights but are a trespass. A "right" cannot be a right if it is a trespass on another person's rights.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
If I'm shipwrecked on a desert island, what natural rights do I have?

I can do whatever the hell I like because there's nobody around to stop me, so I guess my 'natural rights' are unbounded. If a bunch of other people turn up, maybe they would try to impose some restrictions on my activities. So I can still do whatever the hell I like except for stuff they prevent me from doing.

So are my 'natural rights' an exhaustive list of everything society doesn't prevent, or just a restricted list of whichever things society agrees to guarantee that nobody will stop me from doing?
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All persons are free in liberty to do as they wish so long as they do not infringe upon the rights of others. You don't need a desert island to be free in liberty -- just a state of mind.
"The God that Gave us Life gave us Liberty at the same time. Though tyrants may destroy, they cannot dis-join them." -- Thomas Jefferson
 
Robert Prey said:
Access to Healthcare, Food and Housing -- these are not rights but are a trespass. A "right" cannot be a right if it is a trespass on another person's rights.
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Your "right" to property trespasses on my "right" to take your stuff.
It seems were at at loggerheads.
 
Sword of Apollo said:
Rights are "natural" only in the sense that they are required for human life to flourish, by our nature.
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That doesn't sound like rights to me at all. It sounds like needs.


Rights are "inalienable," in the sense that their necessity cannot be removed from human nature. We violate them at our peril, and their forcible defense will always be morally right.
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The logic is still messed up. Even if it makes sense to talk about necessities of life as "rights", it doesn't make sense to say that they are simultaneously inalienable and violable.

It sounds like you're talking about an aspiration or an "ought"--as I've been arguing. The "ought" is what's part of human nature, not whether or not the things we claim to be rights are inalienable or even necessary for life (people survive without their liberty, for example).
 
Robert Prey said:
Life, Liberty, Property.
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So people who have no property or who are in prison have somehow lost their inalienable natural rights? (I'll cede life, but that's trivial. It makes no sense to talk about the "rights" of anyone who has no life. Or if you try, it's obvious that the majority of people who ever lived on the Earth have had that particular "inalienable" right stripped from them.)
 
Robert Prey said:
Life, Liberty, Property.
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What are we going to do about old age which constantly infringes on the rights of people across the world?

Some people have property and some people don't. Would you be in favour of redistributing the property of those who own a lot to those who have none in order to restore their natural rights?

Liberty is somewhat vague don't you think? It makes a good slogan such as in the American and French Revolutions but no one has absolute liberty and almost no one has absolutely no liberty, so it is fairly useless to list it as a right unless you can quantify the type and amount of liberty that each person must be granted by right. Of course, you may end up with something that looks a little too arbitrary to convince everyone that this is some cosmic right.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
That doesn't sound like rights to me at all. It sounds like needs.
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What's the point of morality if it isn't needed? Morality tells us the fundamental (that is, broadest, most abstract) requirements of maintaning life. Gods and corpses don't need morality, only mortal living beings. (Not meant to imply that I believe in gods.) I can't get food if I am tied to a tree. I can't go through the distinctively human process of life if I am a slave.

JoeTheJuggler said:
The logic is still messed up. Even if it makes sense to talk about necessities of life as "rights", it doesn't make sense to say that they are simultaneously inalienable and violable.
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If I say that someone is violating my rights, I am also, by implication, saying that I retain my rights. If he can truly negate my rights whenever he wants, then it makes no sense to talk of violation. Rights would be essentially baseless in that case; only held by his permission.


JoeTheJuggler said:
It sounds like you're talking about an aspiration or an "ought"--as I've been arguing. The "ought" is what's part of human nature, not whether or not the things we claim to be rights are inalienable or even necessary for life (people survive without their liberty, for example).
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Certainly, morality is all about "oughts." To say that I have a right to liberty means that other humans ought to refrain from enslaving me, that I ought to defend my freedom, and that the government ought to retaliate for attempts to enslave me. But these "oughts" are all based on the requirements of human life as the basis of morality. (See video above and The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand.)

People can exist in an unhealthy state for a while without their liberty, but life in the full sense, is a process that, for human beings, includes being able to act in the pursuit of values, based on their own judgment. If someone is lying, on life-support, braindead in the hospital, are they living? In a bare biological sense, yes; in a human sense, no. They are not acting in their distinctively human way to gain and keep the values that keep them alive. Since they have no capacity to act, they also have no need of morality, and no capacity to save themselves from the slightest obstacle to their biological survival.

A slave is in a similar position to the above, but to a lesser degree.
 
What most Americans fail to realize that the Declaration of Independance, while an inspiring piece of rhetoric, has absolutely no legal standing. We weren't even a country when it was written, and did not legally become one for quite some years afterwards.
 
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