Natural Rights

[Sava]

Rights are moral claims to distinguish between right and wrong conduct between humans, not animals and humans.

You just proved my case... thanks.

[GePap]

Berz: can you tell us whether animals have rights, even if among themsleves?

[Sava]

Berz: can you tell us whether animals have rights, even if among themsleves?

If "natural rights" existed. They would have the same as humans... right to life, etc.

[Berzerker]

Agathon -

So even if people do have natural rights, it doesn't follow that they must have the particular scheme of rights that Libertarians argue for.

True, but libertarianism is certainly closer than any other ideology with perhaps only anarchism being closer.

The whole Lockean notion of natural rights was essentially devised as a set of rights for white, property-owning males. It continues to retain this deficiency.

Were there non-white male property owners under this Lockean notion? Yup. The fact white males came up with it doesn't invalidate it and Lockeans didn't invent slavery or caste systems, but they, with their religious (Christian in most cases) background did help lay the groundwork for abolishing such systems.

You are confusing two different issues:

1) Whether moral realism is true: that is moral principles are binding on people independently of whether any or all of them think they are, or whether there are moral "facts" like scientific facts.

with

2) Whether a particular conception of morality (a deontological conception with certain limitations) is the correct one.

These are independent questions since the standard of correctness in 2 need only be that the theory is the most coherent with our pre-theoretical moral practices.

If 2) is the moral system in 1), how are they different (or how am I confusing them)? My point is that we all understand the rationale for the system of morality I'm proposing since it is based on universalities. The problem arises because some people don't want to treat others as they want others to treat them, i,e, some people want to murder others but don't want to be murdered.

[Berzerker]

Imran -

Then how are they 'natural'? Aren't animals also in nature? Why are humans singled out for 'rights'?

They are natural because they stem from the creator of nature.
And again, I don't know why you guys don't read my posts, rights don't involve animals. When you eat an animal because the creator made your survival dependent on consuming other life forms, we don't say you violated the rights of the animal nor do we say a lion that eats you has violated your rights.

Sava -

natural = being in accordance with or determined by nature

A definition that makes no mention of that which created nature, quite a glaring omission. But since we cannot identify this creator, an understandable omission.

GePap -

Don't use Definitions Sava: they don;t work with berz.

Hmm...I haven't even responded to you and you already start in with the insults? But that's funny coming from someone who thinks no murder ever occured until a group of politicians invented the definition. The Framers believed nature was created and they often referred to this creator as "nature's God". Were they ignorant of definitions too for including a creator?

Templar -

How do you get from universal desires to rights?

No trip is necessary, rights - moral claims - are expressions of universal desires.

(1) People universally desire happiness.
(2) An X-box would make me happy.
(3) I have a right to an X-box predicated on my desire?

A universal desire to be happy doesn't equal a universal desire to play video games. However, you certainly have the right to play video games as long as you don't infringe upon the right of others to be left out of your pursuit of happiness.

How do you go from rights to ownership? Going from a right to a property scheme is, to say the least, odd.

Whose life is it anyway? If your life is yours - a right - then your labor is yours as well. If you expend your labor building a home, you have a right to that home - an extension of your labor and life. If "society" - a group of people - take away your home, they've taken the labor you spent building the home and that means they've taken away part of your life. Now, does anyone want someone else taking away the house they've spent years acquiring? No, hence a universal desire to life, labor, and the property built with that labor...

We might say you "own" your labor insofar as we cannot compel your labor and you may direct it as you see fit. But, to use an example from the last thread in which we argued this, how does owning your labor translate into owning the spear made with your labor?

You don't own your labor if what you build doesn't belong to you, your labor belongs to those who've taken what you built.

So much for rights being universal. Oh, I get it, universal among humans!

You needed that spelled out? Thanks for identifying a flaw. Oh wait, I did spell that out in my opening post when I made a distinction between humans and animals...

Of course, this was the same logic as racists - universal rights, univerasal among whites! So Berz, do you have a good, non-ad hoc reason for drawing the line as you do?

The "logic" used by racists is similiar to the logic used by those who say rights are given (or taken) by "society". Slavery usually occured when a majority - "society" - decided a minority shouldn't have rights.

I'll walk with you a moment on this "creator" business. But only to say - didn't the creator also make animals? So why don't cats have equal rights? (As far as I can tell, cats don't want to be murdered or enslaved.)

I've spelled that out too. Rights involve human interaction, not interactions between humans and animals. And rights exist within the context of the natural world, i.e., animals eat other life forms to survive. And a right to live is not an immunity from disease or being eaten by animals. But good luck enslaving a cat, if anything, they enslave us.

Your main flaw is that you make a series of conclusions with no arguments. Again, my main complaint - how do desires (even universal ones) translate into rights? You assume that, you don't tell me how or why.

A right is nothing more than a moral claim of ownership, and universal desires help illustrate "ownership". If any act is moral, it is an act based on a universal desire since we all agree on the desire. The reason we run into problems discerning what is or is not moral is because the act is not based on a universal desire.

[loinburger]

Originally posted by Berzerker
You inherit genes.

Sure, but you don't have to divide up the genes with your siblings (or with your aunts/uncles, or cousins, or your business partners, etc.).

I thought you wanted to keep it simple?

Yeah, it was worth a try, but probably doomed to failure from the start.

This problem you identify doesn't change the fact the first inhabitants to a plot of land have the moral claim - right - to that land.

The problems I identified question the relevance of a natural rights claim to any piece of property, when nobody currently alive can claim to be the original owner of a piece of property (this extends to manufactured goods, since nobody currently alive can claim to be the original owner of the raw materials), and (more importantly) when nobody currently alive can claim to have ancestors who were the original/legitimate owners of a piece of property -- europeans stole property from amerindians, amerindians stole property from other amerindians, etc. Even if people had natural rights to property circa 100,000 BC, nobody today can have a natural right to property. (Unless such a property rights claim is legitimized by the length of time that has elapsed since the last act of stealing/killing/swindling/etc., in which case the obvious follow-up question would be "how much time has to elapse.")

If you go off and live on other land, then any claim you have to the previous land becomes tenuous.

Why?

If you choose to move away from your land, then trying to reclaim the now occupied land you gave up adds complexity to a simple question: do you have a moral claim to land you didn't leave?

The problem with the claim that there is a natural right to property is that it's possible to come up with arbitrarily complex property disputes that cannot be resolved by a simple "first come first served" natural rights rule -- contract theory (or some other ethical theory along similar lines) can produce arbitrarily complex rules to deal with arbitrarily complex disputes, but natural rights just can't scale up to handle problems that scale up. (Disputes in the domains of life/liberty don't really have this arbitrary complexity, so the non-scalability of natural rights doesn't present a problem with the claim that there is a natural right to life/liberty.) Practically speaking, everybody wants to be alive and free. But, practically speaking, nobody can agree as to what constitutes a reasonable claim to property. ("A ten mile radius is fine by me." "Screw you, an eleven mile radius is superior." "Hey, I only went on month-long trip to visit my Uncle Slocum, get your squatter ass off of my property!")

To live on.

That's still too vague, though. F'rinstance: do you by default own the mineral rights, water rights, airspace, etc. to a piece of land (the follow-up question being, "to what extent do you have the right to pollute your land, air, water, etc., when said pollution can indirectly affect the property of others")? Who decides how much land you reasonably need to live on (e.g. if I claim a million acres of land but never even touch 99% of it, then does a squatter's claim to the land that he lives on trump my claim to the land that I own in name alone)? In other words, did the first person (or the first clan, whatever) who crossed the land bridge into North America thereafter have a moral claim to all of North and South America, or did they only have a moral claim to everything within a 50 mile radius of their village, or what? And why?

[GePap]

Hmm...I haven't even responded to you and you already start in with the insults? But that's funny coming from someone who thinks no murder ever occured until a group of politicians invented the definition. The Framers believed nature was created and they often referred to this creator as "nature's God". Were they ignorant of definitions too for including a creator?

You keep mangling the use of the word "murder", using your own personal definition which has little bearing or back-up form any accepted definitions: you can not hold meaningful arguements if you do not use the same words to mean the same things, and YOU do not use murder as everyone else does here.

As for the founders: they thought a black man was 3/5th a white man: so it falls unto YOU to come up with your own arguements, for the Founding Fathers were in no way Libertarians.

And I await an answer to the important animal question.

[Berzerker]

Sava -

You just proved my case... thanks

You had a case? All I've seen from you is repeated references to animals even though my opening post dealt with that issue. Your other "rebuttal" was "natural rights don't exist because society gives us rights". But when I asked you to explain upon what basis you'd condemn societies that practice slavery or genocide, I get no response.

[Imran Siddiqui]

They are natural because they stem from the creator of nature.

What if you don't believe in a God? Why would the impersonal process of evolution give humans more rights than animals? Why don't animals have a right to property against other animals for instance?

The question is why don't animals have rights? I don't think evolution decided to ONLY give one species rights. It's a big hole in your argument.

[Sava]

But when I asked you to explain upon what basis you'd condemn societies that practice slavery or genocide, I get no response.

You did get a response... you seem to have selective reading... not paying attention to the points that shatter your position. Slavery and genocide have nothing to do with this argument, it's a red herring... and I'm not going to allow you to divert attention from the heart of the matter.

My case is that natural rights don't exist. Rights are created and granted by humans, not nature.

[Berzerker]

Gepap -

You keep mangling the use of the word "murder", using your own personal definition which has little bearing or back-up form any accepted definitions: you can not hold meaningful arguements if you do not use the same words to mean the same things, and YOU do not use murder as everyone else does here.

The definition you used in the other thread ignored that "murder" can occur even if no government exists. The laws pertaining to murder only adopted a concept that existed before government, you know, the customs and norms you mentioned. Cain murdered Abel before "government" defined murder. Now, if you and I were the only people on the planet and I intentionally killed you without justification, that would be murder - and that's the definition adopted by governments. But you're welcome to take a poll to see if everyone here thinks no murder ever occured before government "invented" the crime.

As for the founders: they thought a black man was 3/5th a white man: so it falls unto YOU to come up with your own arguements, for the Founding Fathers were in no way Libertarians.

That isn't true either, the 3/5's was a compromise between slave and non-slave states wrt the census. The slave states wanted slaves (not black people) to count when tallying up the census and the non-slave states didn't want slaves to count at all, so they settled on 3/5's. There were free blacks in both the north and the south who counted just like every other free person toward the census. Btw, not all the Founders owned slaves and some worked to abolish the practice.

And I await an answer to the important animal question.

I answered that repeatedly.

[GePap]

Just to make clear to you Berz why the animal question is so vital:

You say that fundamental universal rights stem form the fact of creation, and that they are a manifestation of desired universally shared by all members of the species.

But if this is the estent of your arguement, then the fact is that this applies fully to all animals, since they were, as man, created, and all naimals have desires, desires which are fundamental at leats within their own species (al tigers have universal tiger desires and so forth)

This leads, as far as I ca see, to two different possbile paths:

Either, when you say rights have no bearing in iman-animal relations, you mean that all species have rights as so far as thier conduct within their own species applies, and perhaps, becuase desires ae not universally shared accross species boundaries, rights can not either. if this is what you mean, then you must still:

a) show rights in actions within the interactions of other species
b) show why some utterly universal desiresa, like that for life, are still not basis for shared values and rights.

Or you mean that animals have no rightsd; If so, then your original arguement has a huge porblem, as Imran said, since all animals fit the two categories you have given us as the foundation of rights: so then there must be somehting else about man that makes him different: you have yet to outline what that would be.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Berzerker
Gepap -

The definition you used in the other thread ignored that "murder" can occur even if no government exists. The laws pertaining to murder only adopted a concept that existed before government, you know, the customs and norms you mentioned. Cain murdered Abel before "government" defined murder. Now, if you and I were the only people on the planet and I killed you without justification, that would be murder - and that's the definition adopted by governments. But you're welcome to take a poll to see if everyone here thinks no murder ever occured before government "invented" the crime.

You keep saying people do not want to be murdred, so murder is against fundamental rights. But urder is defined as "Illegal and malicious killing", and thus simply can not exist outside of the law. This is the porblem with the use of the word murder. as long as you keep using "murder", and not "killing", you inherently bring in the notion of law, since murder is defined as such.

That isn't true either, the 3/5's was a compromise between slave and non-slave states wrt the census. The slave states wanted slaves (not black people) to count when tallying up the census and the non-slave states didn't want slaves to count at all, so they settled on 3/5's. There were free blacks in both the north and the south who counted just like every other free person toward the census.

And even that violates your sense of morality, so you still can't seek haven with the Founders.

I answered that repeatedly.

So why do temnplr and Imran think you haven't, along with me?

[Sava]

actually, I think it's Berz vs everyone

[Berzerker]

Sava -

You did get a response... you seem to have selective reading... not paying attention to the points that shatter your position. Slavery and genocide have nothing to do with this argument, it's a red herring... and I'm not going to allow you to divert attention from the heart of the matter.

Translation: you didn't answer my question.

My case is that natural rights don't exist. Rights are created and granted by humans, not nature.

For the last time, I didn't say nature grants rights, nor did you explain why you'd condemn a society that practiced slavery and genocide since "society" can grant or take away rights.