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this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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So where do these rights come from, if not the laws? I wonder if you may be taking free speech as a right as a given because of the time you grew up in. You speak of it as an absolute, but where does that belief come from? You say "rights" as if they're something enshrined in our souls by a god, but like, how do you know that? Where does this information come from?
This is purely a philosophical question. I'm on the free speech wagon here. But realistically, Who gets to decide what's actually an inalienable right that everyone has vs. rights that are encoded in laws?
The rights are natural. Yes it is ideological to believe people have rights and are not just slaves to their masters. But that is an ideology that is rightfully more and more widespread over time.
So who decides what rights are natural ones and which ones need a government to enforce? And what are the natural rights? Not just that you believe it to be so, but why? And what you use to make that decision.
Forgive me, but I've been doing a lot of research lately on natural rights and their protections, limits, and origins. I've been reading a lot of philosophy on it and it's extremely interesting. I'm genuinely curious how people come to these conclusions and I love hearing different viewpoints.
I'm going to argue this in reverse, by proposing one core right then talking about who gets to decide it, followed by if it even exists:
Let's take the most basic right, that one has the right over their own body and actions*, what flows from this are the following rights:
One has the right to life
One has a right to defend their life from others wishing to take it (what is the value of a right if you don't have the right to defend the right from being taken?)
One has the right to not be a slave (and as above, the right to defend your right to not be a slave)
Violating any of these would violate one's right over their own body and actions. Do you have a right over your body if you don't have the right to life? No. Many (if not all) rights can be derived from this core right.
*Yes, literally everything has exceptions. You don't have the right to infringe on another's rights, and penalties for people who violate other's rights are both a thing, for example. I'm talking in general here to keep the paragraph count lower.
Why do I consider the right to your own body and actions a natural right? Well, without it being a natural right but instead something created by the government, one could logically say that legalized slavery is A-OK. That if the government says slavery is OK, then therefore slavery is OK. That logically doesn't follow. Governments are wrong on the regular, thus a truism such as 'the government is correct because the government says they are correct' is fundamentally flawed. So, it has to come from somewhere else.
Could it come from The People of a country? What if the majority of The People voted that slavery is OK. Does that mean slavery is therefore OK? No. The People are regularly wrong as well, thus such a truism can't work either. So, it has to come from somewhere else.
Where else can it come from except being inherent, except being a natural right?
Now, one could argue that rights are not a thing. That murder and slavery is perfectly fine. But the vast, vast majority could probably agree that this isn't correct, that there is something baked into being a human that makes such basic things like murder not acceptable.
You've got some good points there, but it feels a little naive of nuance in parts.
Like, if these are natural rights, presumably this still counted before humans banded together to form the first societies. Before, even, we were small roving migratory groups that only just managed to climb out of the trees. humans, as they were, are basically animals at that point, right? I mean, we're still animals, but you know what I mean. So we still have those rights? What makes us different than the other animals (or even other ape descendants) that we see as food? As a species, we were evolved to eat meat, which requires killing something else that presumably has these same rights that we have to violate to enforce our own right to life. Or did natural rights come later, when we were "better" and "more advanced" than the animals we hunted? Does that mean we get these rights when we reach a certain point in self-awareness?
It's tough to argue with the base arguments you present, and I don't disagree with them... but they can be argued against. Like your slavery argument. It goes against these natural rights that we have always had, yet we started taking our first steps toward stopping it, like, 600 years ago? Slavery predates writing. As far as we know, mankind was enslaving other people as far as we can track, and definitely hundreds, if not thousands of years before. So were they not aware of these natural rights or just didn't care?
It sounds like you're saying these are natural rights that everyone has because it feels right to you dues to the society you grew up in that appreciated these rights. They have to come from somewhere to be natural but only really count for some living things and not others.
Personally, I don't believe in natural rights. We're animals that grew opposable thumbs and learned to make tools. Human rights come about only because we live together in societies. In a way that sounds contradictory, we formed groups and gained rights among those other humans, and in the same instant traded some of those away for that group to function. Rights have to come from somewhere. Without groups agreeing on what those rights are, then the decider of rights is whoever is strongest. Might makes right started to decline only because we got into groups large enough to defend against outside forces, and even then it was only within the group in which those rights existed. Rights themselves are part of the social contract we all participate in when we exist in society and universal human rights is a relatively recent advancement, and we definitely haven't come to a consensus as to what they all definitely are. But if society breaks down, those rights definitely disappear overnight. But I've always been the kind of person who needs reasons to believe a thing and have sound reasons to believe it.
I'm with you on right to life, and bodily autonomy are things that all humans should have. I think we just differ in their origin and universality.