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What is a "Right"???

Robert Prey

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"AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says his organization is pushing for a 'Second Bill of Rights" for the United States of America.

Trumka and the AFL-CIO are calling for a new bill of rights that would guarantee "full employment," a "living wage," and a "healthy future."

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/afl...ng-rights-full-employment-living-wage-healthy

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. But a right cannot be a right if it is a trespass upon others. What Trumka and his members want is for government to trespass on the rights of others to fulfill his utopian fantasy of "a living wage" and "healthy future." America is already far down the Road to Surfdom. We do not need any "Second bill of 'rights'." to move us any faster in that direction.
 
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.
 
At least some of the most important rights are better conceived of as limitations on what government can do (rather than something that pertains only to some category of people).
 
Rolfe said:
The concept of being born with "inalienable rights" is so much woo.
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I always think of that in (the Declaration of Independence) of an expression of an aspiration. Taken literally, it makes no sense at all (even if you concede the existence of a supernatural Creator). It's basically trying to present an argument that justifies violent revolution. The revolution is necessary, it says, to secure our inalienable rights that have been alienated from us.

Basically it's making the same sort of error little kids make (at least in older language conventions) when they say "Can I?" but mean "May I?" The Declaration says the rights are inalienable (i.e. cannot be taken away), but it must mean they ought not be taken away.

Of course the tip off that a fast one is being pulled is when the argument begins by claiming that its first premise is "self-evident".
 
Robert, a right is a legal construct. Legal constructs are something that are created by the society in which they exist.

Women for example did not have the right to vote prior to a Constitutional Amendment. If this something that existed separate from the legal construct of the constitution then why where they unable to vote before that?

Slavery was a valid legal condition of existence in the US until the 13th Amendment was passed. Is it your contention that these people could not have had the legal status of slave, as that right existed separate from law? Or is it that the US government overstepped its authority by regulating private property rights?
 
Robert Prey said:
Sieg Heil.
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I agree with Rolfe and Border Reiver. There are no such things as natural rights which are granted at birth. I mean, our births probably didn't differ much at all, yet we have different rights. Sometimes the difference is significant, for example the right to bear arms, which you have and which is expressly forbidden for me. Never mind the rights people in China of Somalia have.

However that doesn't mean that I am against the whole idea of (human) rights. In fact, it is precisely because we don't have inalienable rights that are granted at birth that some sort of system to codify the rights and some way to enforce them.
 
Point of Order: The Declaration does not say people are "born" with their rights, but that they are "endowed by their Creator" with them. One could as easily say that would mean their parents gave them their rights by the simple fact of having sex to "create" them as saying that "God" or whatever did. Just a thought.
 
you have the right to remain silent. If you give up that right, let mockage commence.
 
Robert Prey said:
Natural rights cannot be granted by government. We are born with them.
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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?
 
A change of direction commencing in a clockwise manner.
 
BNRT said:
However that doesn't mean that I am against the whole idea of (human) rights. In fact, it is precisely because we don't have inalienable rights that are granted at birth that some sort of system to codify the rights and some way to enforce them.
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That's pretty much the same point I made about the Declaration of Independence. If our rights really were inalienable, there could be no justification for revolution based on a violation of rights.

I would say rights are a special class of privileges. They're the most basic ones that ought apply to everyone and ought not be violated by a government whose authority comes from "we the people" (not from any supernatural entity).

FWIW, the Declaration has no legal status. The Constitution doesn't seem to view rights in the same way. In fact, the debate over the Bill of Rights touched on this point. Some people thought there was no need for it (what with rights being of mystical origin and inalienable), and even feared that enumerating rights would limit them. Fortunately, saner heads prevailed.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
...snip...

I would say rights are a special class of privileges. They're the most basic ones that ought apply to everyone and ought not be violated by a government whose authority comes from "we the people" (not from any supernatural entity).

...snip...
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I think this is a peculiarly USA viewpoint, in the UK our "rights" are not to be violated by anyone, which of course includes the government but isn't limited to the government.
 
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. But a right cannot be a right if it is a trespass upon others.
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Nature, "red in tooth and claw", absolutely allows trespass upon others. Encourages it, even. Rewards successful trespassers with increased numbers of offspring, and better fed. Nature also does not provide any individual with room to go about the business of staying alive. Under Nature's law, you get as much room -- and only as much -- as you can sieze and defend.

Humans, like wolves, chimpanzees, and many other creatures, are most successful at siezing and defending territory when working cooperatively in groups -- and, because individual interests are often at odds with group interests, successful cooperation requires rules. The strength of the group suffers if every internal conflict is settled by a fight to the death. The loser in a dominance struggle between wolves bares his throat in a symbolic gesture to indicate that he is ready to return to cooperative behavior -- and in the process, he eliminates any motive for the winner to actually rip out the proffered throat: the payoff for ripping out a throat is not the same if it belongs to an ally rather than an adversary.

What we call "rights" are the artificial constructs that serve as the basis for our system of rules (which we call "laws"). There are other systems. Absolute Monarchy, for example. The concept of "inalienable rights" was, for all its grounding in the belief in a divine creator, a fundamental challenge to the notion of the sovereignty of kings (made at a time when that notion was already in retreat). When Jefferson cribbed from Locke's notes, he made some changes. "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" was a tweak. Locke had it as "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property".

The idea that we are born with a right to property (I would include "wages" as "property"; living or otherwise) is probably not a tough sell to a US public which already seems to suffer from a rather overinflated sense of entitlement. But what "the American people need and deserve" and what the US government has either the power or the obligation to guarantee are two entirely different things. It may be true that there was a time when "full employment" was taken for granted by "the broadest possible swath of our population" -- but then, there was a time when eighty percent of our population was directly involved in agriculture. If you want full employment, nothing will do the trick like subsistence farming. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Vegetables.
 
Darat said:
I think this is a peculiarly USA viewpoint, in the UK our "rights" are not to be violated by anyone, which of course includes the government but isn't limited to the government.
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I don't think so. I think that's a misuse of the word.

That's why people are confused when they rail against the rights of the accused by asking what about the rights of the victims.

For example, consider the right to free speech. You do not have that "right" if you're in my private venue (or, for example, on a discussion forum owned by JREF). You do have that right in public places.

And it also leads to the strange idea repeated often in the U.S. that the Bill of Rights only pertains to citizens. At least some of these rights are explicitly expressed as limitations on the government ("Congress shall make no law. . . "), and others make no sense at all to conceive of as pertaining only to a category of people (as if Congress could impose a state religion on non-citizens in the U.S.)

I think common law and criminal codes address the issue you're speaking of--when people other than those acting as agents of the government violate my "rights". But then we speak of it as a crime or a tort rather than a violation of rights.
 
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.
Click to expand...
I agree. The society already finds reasons to deprive people of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

There is no such thing as an "inalienable" right. Any right can be taken away, if there is not sufficient power and resolve to defend it.
 
marplots said:
you have the right to remain silent. If you give up that right, let mockage commence.
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And in some cases, to quote the first Mass Effect game, "You have the right to remain silent, and I wish to god you´d exercise it."
 
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. But a right cannot be a right if it is a trespass upon others. What Trumka and his members want is for government to trespass on the rights of others to fulfill his utopian fantasy of "a living wage" and "healthy future." America is already far down the Road to Surfdom. We do not need any "Second bill of 'rights'." to move us any faster in that direction.
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This is very close to my view, but that view could use a little more explanation.

A right is a moral principle defining and sanctioning an individual's freedom of action in a social context. Rights are not claims on the incomes of others, or the goods or services produced by others. They are protections against the depredations of others (including government) on an individual, and on what that individual has earned. Businesses' rights derive from the rights of the individuals who own them.

Here's a fuller discussion of what rights are and why we have them:



The above is a part of this playlist: Link.
 
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