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What is a "Right"???

Darat said:
Yet many people do and many people are dead set against the idea that only the living can have rights e.g. that's what inheritance is based on.
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No. Inheritance is not about the dead trying to claim the right to life.

Actually inheritance laws are about property rights while living. While you are alive, you have the right to name who your property will go to (even with some conditions) after you die. It's not actually a voice from the grave. It's just part of the property rights they had when they were alive.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
No. Inheritance is not about the dead trying to claim the right to life.

Actually inheritance laws are about property rights while living. While you are alive, you have the right to name who your property will go to (even with some conditions) after you die. It's not actually a voice from the grave. It's just part of the property rights they had when they were alive.
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Nope - it is saying that the dead still retains ownership of their property after they are dead and therefore control of what happens to it. If I'm dead I can't own anything, it's just one of those silly concepts we have grown up used to so we think it is rational - it aint. :)
 
Robert Prey said:
Natural Rights are inherent whether society recognizes them or not.
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You are obviously equivocating. This type of "right" is not at all the same thing that was raised in the OP by the union.

Again, I think what you mean by "natural rights" which can't be removed (even if they're violated) is a sense of what ought be.

As someone else said, that's what is part of human nature. (Although even that part is debatable, unless you think human nature changed drastically just a few hundred years ago.)

At any rate, clearly what the union was talking about was recognition by society (indeed, legally) of new "rights".

Equivocation is when you use an ambiguous word as if it weren't ambiguous.

Clearly, what the union meant by "rights" and what you mean by "natural rights" are not the same thing at all.
 
Darat said:
Nope - it is saying that the dead still retains ownership of their property after they are dead
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You are kidding, right? Sometimes it's hard to tell, because people do have funny ideas.

So we settle probate disputes by seances?
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
You are obviously equivocating. This type of "right" is not at all the same thing that was raised in the OP by the union.

Again, I think what you mean by "natural rights" which can't be removed (even if they're violated) is a sense of what ought be.
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Agreed. Seems to me what's being called a right for an individual is either a duty on everyone else not to interfere with them or (in the union's version) are actually a burden on everyone else to provide for them.

Apples and oranges.
 
Tricky said:
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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Yep.

And, as I pointed out, the Constitution (including the Bill of Rights) draws its authority from "we the people" and not some notion of a deistic Creator.

But I think primarily what's going on here is just ambiguity. Inalienable natural rights and the rights in the Bill of Rights are two very different concepts. The former, as I've been arguing, is a principle that (it is claimed) is part of human nature that these are things every human ought have. (Even if they're violated, we still hold that principle--it is inalienable in that way.) The latter are legal rights, which can often be thought of as limitations on the authority of government.

Claiming you have a right to 3 square meals, for example, is something different than claiming you have the right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure by the government. The latter is something that we can always enforce, but the former really isn't. If no one gives you food, whom do you sue?

I think the union is introducing another idea yet, that would be better described as entitlements. They think the government should have a duty to provide certain things as a safety net. In contrast to the idea of a right to 3 square meals a day, if you have this sort of entitlement to 3 square meals, and no one gives you food, then you sue the government whose duty it is.
 
BenBurch said:
And that country never adopted that document legally in any form.
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Indeed, it was primarily a document that provided a really flakey argument to justify violent revolution. Taken literally, as I've pointed out, it makes no sense.

Taken the way I say it should: that the axiom it starts with (in the trappings of Deism) is that what is inalienable is a sense of ought or a sense of right and wrong wrt to the things all humans should have. When in the course of human events, some tyrant commits injustice, that sense is so deeply offended that we have no choice but to take up arms.

Really, this notion of "natural rights" is just the idea that humans have morality that exists even beyond governments. It just doesn't sound strong enough put that way. It's basically saying that the violence (which we already started prior to drafting and ratifying the Declaration, BTW) is justified because our sense of right and wrong demands it. In other words, the revolution is right because we think it's right.
 
Darat said:
Nope.
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Then you're wrong. One of the prime examples of this taught in Property classes in law schools is someone leaving land in his will with the condition that it be used for a buggy whip factory. The courts have long held the principle that we don't want dead people controlling property this way. Once automobiles came about, it would be absurd to waste the land, so subsequent owners of the property aren't bound by the dead guy's wishes. (In other words, property transferred at death. Dead people don't own property.)

ETA: At any rate, I was commenting on the problem of trying to treat inalienable natural rights (including the right to life) as legal rights. That the "right to life" isn't inalienable is proven by the fact that most people who ever lived are now dead. Indeed, if it were a right, it's one whose violation is certain.

And if you think dead people have property rights, what about their "inalienable" right to liberty? We typically imprison them in caskets and bury them underground!!
 
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Darat said:
Yet the "right to own property" (in the USA) came about as an excuse and a veneer of respectably to take the property of other people by force....

So your initial statment is simply wrong.

The "right to own property" in many countries was created (as in the case of the USA) to take the property of others without their consent, and often the right was only extended to certain classes of people. So in the UK we've only really had the right to property ownership for everyone for about a hundred years (and in the USA about 50 years).

The history of the creation of the "right to own property" by societies presents one of the clearest examples of how rights are created by a society, and do not exist unless the society creates the right.
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And before that it was just violence. Hence the recognition of rights is a magnificent philosophical development. I'm not going to argue timestamps of when various nations got around to it, nor about various shameful histories. It's here, and should be. Good.

What you said is like, "People murdered each other so the right to life is just a gift from those people." Really?

Civilization is the process of thwarting the hunter-gatherer impulse so people can make nice things without fear of it being taken. That's why communist societies suffer from the same general poverty as failed states rampant with warlords, and nominal democracies like Mexico and India struggle along, largely suffering from massive corruption and kickback requirements.

It's "government" itself entrencing itself as a hunter-gatherer extraordinaire.
 
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Rights are a convention, but are not a gift from others deigning to stay their hand. Many of you are confused on this. This includes it being a gift from a group of people calling themselves "government", and wielding weapons.

If rights are stripped away by a mass of people following a demagogue, that doesn't erase the right -- it just means there are a massive number of violators.

The concept remains, whether your right is violated by one guy with a club or a hundred million.
 
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Beerina said:
Rights are a convention, but are not a gift from others deigning to stay their hand. Many of you are confused on this. This includes it being a gift from a group of people calling themselves "government", and wielding weapons.
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Rights are the underscored demands of the people taken as a whole upon the government and the people at large.

A Constitution is a pact between the people agreeing as to where the line is between what the State may regulate and what the State must respect. That's all a Right is; those things on the "respect" side of that line.
 
Who wants to join my convention, and permanently philosophically disable the hunter-gatherer impulse of people to take things they didn't create?
 
BenBurch said:
Rights are the underscored demands of the people taken as a whole upon the government and the people at large.

A Constitution is a pact between the people agreeing as to where the line is between what the State may regulate and what the State must respect. That's all a Right is; those things on the "respect" side of that line.
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Perhaps you missed the part where rights are not contingent on others recognizing them, and that "government" is just another group of people with a label, and has no moral special place in all this?
 
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When talking about rights and the American Revolution, it is important to remember that many of the colonists considered themselves British citizens, and when the King began to lay onerous taxes on them (without representation), they felt like they were being deprived of their rights as Englismen. They thought all this stuff had been worked out in the Magna Charta.
 
Only people have rights, and a properly-formed government is created by the people who grant the government certain powers over those rights, and none others. This is government 101, people.
 
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