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We as a community decide what is a right and what is not.
That is what happens in real terms of practice, but the basis for making decisions of "rights" is the important factor. A community deciding rights comes down to democracy, which in a sense is mob rules. That leaves the majority controlling the minority. America has a system that limits the majority from doing whatever they want to do. A community can create a law, but the court can strike it down if it falls under intruding on individual rights, but then even judges are biased.
Which is why I think it is important to regard life and liberty as natural rights bestowed from a "higher power" regardless if you are religious or not. I don't consider any human or group of humans to be a higher power over me. It is not their right nor their place to determine what makes me happy or define my freedom for me.
Unfortunately it doesn't always play out that way, because people's self interest or ideals of deciding morals and bringing them upon to others happens. I support people using freedom to persuade others to agree or follow them, but not by legislating it. For instance I support a religious group knocking on my door to try and persuade me to their idea, but it must be of my own free will, I don't support that group or any other group legislating their belief on others.
The law should come into play when someone's right to life , liberty and pursuit of happiness has been intruded on.
I will say in the case of health care the community looking out for one another when need be (using taxes to help someone in desperate need) when other options failed I can see and support. We can't be a nation that says it has morals and regards life in high regard and then turn around and let people's life be destroyed by a treatable situation. No matter who we are or how we live, a medical situation is going to come along sooner or later.
Natural rights are rights which are derived from nature. They are universal;
that is, they apply to all people, and do not derive from the laws of any
specific society. They exist necessarily, inhere in every individual, and can't
be taken away. For example, it has been argued that humans have a natural right to life. They're sometimes called moral rights or inalienable rights.
Legal rights, in contrast, are based on a society's customs, laws, statutes
or actions by legislature. An example of a legal right is the right to vote of
citizens. Citizenship, itself, is often considered as the basis for having legal
rights, and has been defined as the "right to have rights". Legal rights are
sometimes called civil rights or statutory rights and are culturally and
politically relative since they depend on a specific societal context to have meaning.
As has been said, rights can be and are stepped on all the time. Just because we don't like the reality that we are ultimately at the mercy of our fellow man doesn't mean that we can invent an alternate reality.
The foundation of "American" freedom in regards to that phrase 'life , liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and the laws in place to defend it namely the bill of rights has been a battle to limit a person being at the mercy of another ever since.
Which is why you'll see arguments of someone seeing it as theft or being forced to when they talk about taxation. Or when a gay person talks about their right to marry and pursue happiness like any other. Or when someone talks about the right to smoke marijuana or pay for sex and another says it is immoral. Or when someone says their right to own a weapon is protecting their life and liberty and another says they don't need to. It is on going.
That is what happens in real terms of practice, but the basis for making decisions of "rights" is the important factor. A community deciding rights comes down to democracy, which in a sense is mob rules. That leaves the majority controlling the minority. America has a system that limits the majority from doing whatever they want to do. A community can create a law, but the court can strike it down if it falls under intruding on individual rights, but then even judges are biased.
Which is why I think it is important to regard life and liberty as natural rights bestowed from a "higher power" regardless if you are religious or not. I don't consider any human or group of humans to be a higher power over me. It is not their right nor their place to determine what makes me happy or define my freedom for me.
Again... we are speaking past each other. You are speaking of what ought, and I am speaking of what is. The pleasant fiction that rights devolve from some higher power is all well and good. It has also historically been a useful tool for authoritarian regimes to assert some sort of divine sanction. But it has never been true... not today in our more "enlightened" "Western Liberal Democracies," and never in the past in our most despotic monarchies, theocracies or dictatorships.
There is no historical basis for asserting that any such thing as a "natural right" exists.
Quote:
Originally Posted by lionking
Unfortunately it doesn't always play out that way, because people's self interest or ideals of deciding morals and bringing them upon to others happens. I support people using freedom to persuade others to agree or follow them, but not by legislating it. For instance I support a religious group knocking on my door to try and persuade me to their idea, but it must be of my own free will, I don't support that group or any other group legislating their belief on others.
In this way, you have neatly moved the discussion into the broader context of morality. And the discussion regarding rights was certainly merely a subset of that.
And just like rights, morality is defined by community consensus. And we exist in overlapping sets of morals that flex and compete based on our overlapping communities.
Morality is the conceptual framework we assemble to manage the conflicts between personal and community interests. As the zeitgeist evolves, the precedence of personal over community interests adjust. And the most pragmatic of these, we codify into law.
Quote:
Originally Posted by lionking
The law should come into play when someone's right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness has been intruded on.
Agreed, but only because that is our community consensus. This is simply a contingent fact. It does not have to be that way. it could have been otherwise. We are fortunate that this is what is.
But understand also that sometimes, it is the community that calls for that intrusion, even in our own. That is why I said the purpose of morals is to manage, negotiate and reconcile those conflicts. And that is why all legal systems understand, even if inexplicitly, that nothing is sacred, to include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
We ask citizens to risk (if not sacrifice) those things every day. At many times in history, they were not even options. As recently as 150 years ago in this very country life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were denied by law to an entire class of people... regardless of what the Declaration of Independence so eloquently pretended.
Quote:
Originally Posted by lionking
I will say in the case of health care the community looking out for one another when need be (using taxes to help someone in desperate need) when other options failed I can see and support. We can't be a nation that says it has morals and regards life in high regard and then turn around and let people's life be destroyed by a treatable situation. No matter who we are or how we live, a medical situation is going to come along sooner or later.
In those countries that have universal health care (and all of which manage better outcomes at half the cost of our own) they first generated the community consensus that health care was a right. They understood it to be a moral issue.
We have not reached that consensus... and have large segments of the community vigorously fighting against it.
What better example of the simple truth that rights do not descend from god or bubble magically out of the soil.
Again... we are speaking past each other. You are speaking of what ought, and I am speaking of what is. The pleasant fiction that rights devolve from some higher power is all well and good. It has also historically been a useful tool for authoritarian regimes to assert some sort of divine sanction. But it has never been true... not today in our more "enlightened" "Western Liberal Democracies," and never in the past in our most despotic monarchies, theocracies or dictatorships.
.
I hope we are not content just accepting what is, but strive for what ought to be. Morals , philosophy, the human mind and spirit is not fiction to me. But what "ought to be" is different in the minds of people. And that leads to tyranny depending, and sometimes that tyranny comes from community consensus. The term " three thousand people one mile away governing can be a tyranny as much as one king three thousand miles away" comes to mind and it is true.
I am skeptical of any who considers themself "modern and enlightened" and fails to recognize that that can lead them to being the very tyranny they think they are going away from.
One person, or a group of people can become full of themselves and misguided, and there needs to be a foundation in place that limits corruption and trampling of rights.
Natural rights are rights which are derived from nature. They are universal; that is, they apply to all people, and do not derive from the laws of any specific society. They exist necessarily, inhere in every individual, and can't be taken away. For example, it has been argued that humans have a natural right to life. They're sometimes called moral rights or inalienable rights.
There is sadly no such thing.And this is easy enough to demonstrate by the fact that across history, it has never been a difficult thing to take them away. In fact, across most of history they were never even considered.
So... if these are unalienable rights... how is it that most of human history managed to pass without anybody knowing about them?
It is important to remember what a radical and revolutionary set of ideas are contained within the Declaration of Independence. They were so groundbreaking that even the main author ignored them, and continued to deny his slaves the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness until the day he died.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kirdik
Legal rights, in contrast, are based on a society's customs, laws, statutes or actions by legislature. An example of a legal right is the right to vote of citizens. Citizenship, itself, is often considered as the basis for having legal rights, and has been defined as the "right to have rights". Legal rights are sometimes called civil rights or statutory rights and are culturally and politically relative since they depend on a specific societal context to have meaning.
Here you actually confabulate the two different actual "levels" of rights.
Legal rights are the formal codification in statue and law of the informal social rights that all communities define for themselves (as you wrote) based on custom. The fact that these social rights were general inexplicit and arose without debate or discussion accounts for the mistaken perception that some of them might have been divinely revealed.
So it was, for example, with the ancient Roman rights afforded the paterfamilia. He carried complete authority in the household, to include the right of life and death over his wife and children. It was simply unquestioned that these rights were divinely awarded for no reason other than nobody was alive who remembered anything ever being different.
The Romans believed these rights to be "natural." Today, we do not consider them rights at all.
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