Where do rights come from?

[GePap]

Elok, any moral code will define certain privileges as inviolable or nearly so. Saying that no one is permitted to kill you is identical to saying that you have a right to life. So yes, Christian morality has rights.

The bible does not forbid killing, it forbids murder. There is a difference.

And how would a human being have "rights" with regards to "God"? "God", as the source of morality, would not be bound by it, as it gets to decide what is moral, which is why the Bible includes some commands for genocide.

[Kuciwalker]

The bible does not forbid killing, it forbids murder. There is a difference.

I'm aware. The fact that the rights are situational isn't terribly important - rights under almost any framework are typically a bit situational, e.g. "it's okay to kill in self-defense".

And how would a human being have "rights" with regards to "God"? "God", as the source of morality, would not be bound by it, as it gets to decide what is moral, which is why the Bible includes some commands for genocide.

If morality doesn't apply to God then it doesn't seem terribly relevant whether rights apply to him either. The fact that hurricanes also display a blatant disregard for our rights doesn't seem to convince anyone that they [our rights] don't exist.

[Aeson]

You do not have the right to have your hair unruffled by strong winds, unless you are bald. <---- NATURAL RIGHTS

[GePap]

If morality doesn't apply to God then it doesn't seem terribly relevant whether rights apply to him either. The fact that hurricanes also display a blatant disregard for our rights doesn't seem to convince anyone that they [our rights] don't exist.

I thought that Oerdin had already answered the question. Rights are a legal construct. Rights have no meaning outside of interactions between humans, and each different group of humans gets to define what privileges are granted to the members of the group. There is no metaphysical source of rights.

[Kuciwalker]

And that claim is equivalent to denial of objective morality. As soon as you accept nontrivial objective, universal moral axioms, metaphysical constructs indistinguishable from rights appear.

[GePap]

And that claim is equivalent to denial of objective morality. As soon as you accept nontrivial objective, universal moral axioms, metaphysical constructs indistinguishable from rights appear.

Rights and morality are not the same thing. You can have moral rules without them conferring some sort of privilege to an individual with relation to other individuals or temporal authority.

[Kuciwalker]

Rights and morality are not the same thing. You can have moral rules without them conferring some sort of privilege to an individual with relation to other individuals or temporal authority.

It may be theoretically possible to construct a set of moral axioms that actually apply to people and don't confer anything functionally indistinguishable from rights, but you'd have to work at it and you're not going to find one that people actually believe in.

[GePap]

tside of a legal system, the notion of rights mean nothing.

It may be theoretically possible to construct a set of moral axioms that actually apply to people and don't confer anything functionally indistinguishable from rights, but you'd have to work at it and you're not going to find one that people actually believe in.

What does "functionally indistinguishable from a right" mean, in the real world?

To state again, rights are a legal construct, and moral sentiments predate civilization.

You said earlier that a biblical injunction against something is akin to the granting of a positive right (you used the example that banning killing is equivalent to granting a right to life) - I would argue that that is wrong, that they are not the same thing, certainly not functionally, and I think there is simply no historical evidence to show your assertion is true.

Did serfs have rights? They lived in a system of obligations between them and the lords, but those obligations are not the same thing as rights, as their recourse to make up for a violation of those ties of obligation were commonly non-existent. Therefore there was no "functional equality" with what we would call rights today. But clearly folks in the middle ages had strict moral codes.

[Kuciwalker]

What does "functionally indistinguishable from a right" mean, in the real world?

Holy ****, GePap, I've only gone over this point half a dozen times already.

To say "I have a moral right to X" is, essentially, to say "it is morally impermissible for other people to prevent me from X".

aside: the negative/positive distinction isn't terribly relevant to this conversation, since you can reformulate a positive right to some good as a negative right to freedom from interference in acquiring that good, etc.

[Elok]

Well, it's generally morally impermissible for other people to prevent me from doing just about anything, provided the activity in question isn't harming anyone. But GePap has a point in that the language and notion of rights simply doesn't apply everywhere. Certainly the concept of natural rights is alien to ancient Christianity. The closest equivalent to the idea is Free Will, but while that's often invoked like a right it's really more a description of the way human beings are. It's not that I have a right to live, just that nobody has the right to kill me without good cause--because the action is not authorized. The language of "rights" is the invention of a later, more individualistic age. That the two have the same general consequence does not make them identical concepts.

[Kuciwalker]

Well, it's generally morally impermissible for other people to prevent me from doing just about anything, provided the activity in question isn't harming anyone.

Which is why we say there is a general right to individual liberty.

But GePap has a point in that the language and notion of rights simply doesn't apply everywhere. Certainly the concept of natural rights is alien to ancient Christianity. The closest equivalent to the idea is Free Will, but while that's often invoked like a right it's really more a description of the way human beings are. It's not that I have a right to live, just that nobody has the right to kill me without good cause--because the action is not authorized.

Those amount to the same thing. This is my entire point.

That the two have the same general consequence does not make them identical concepts.

That's not what the duck test says.

[Elok]

No, they have the same consequence. But they get there from completely opposite directions.

[flash9286]

But they get there from completely opposite directions.

How so? If you say that it is morally wrong to murder people that is the same as saying people have a right to live. How are those propositions coming from opposite directions? They both agree that it is morally wrong to murder people. It seems just semantics to me.

[Elok]

Not at all. There can be any number of reasons not to murder people that have nothing to do with individual rights. It's wrong to murder people because it scares the people who don't get murdered. It's wrong to murder people because it raises your blood pressure. It's wrong to murder people because their rotting carcasses smell bad. Invent your own, if you like. One classical Judeo-Christian take on it is that you're taking a power (to determine who lives and dies) that rightfully belongs to God alone. You could also find it wrong in that in springs from malice and/or anger, which are sins. But those are purely religious reasons. The important thing is, none of them have anything to do with an idea of individual rights. People have a right to not have Enlightenment-era thought patterns retroactively superimposed on their thinking.

[GePap]

How so? If you say that it is morally wrong to murder people that is the same as saying people have a right to live. How are those propositions coming from opposite directions? They both agree that it is morally wrong to murder people. It seems just semantics to me.

Absolutely not true, especially since murder is a prohibition only on illegal killing - there are other categories of killing (executions being the most obvious one) that are allowed.

Let me give an example - banning the drinking of alcohol as illegal is not just another way of saying that you have the right to be free from drunken people, even if you start arguing that "the consequences are the same."