Rights - god given? inalienable? self-evident? natural? WRONG

Again, if you believe a man has a right to self-defense then you are admitting that there is such a thing as natural rights. A man has the right to self-defense even if no other humans are around, only animals.

You can run away from this simple truth. You can try to deflect all you want. It won't change the fact that man has a "natural" instinct for self-preservation. Without this instinct mankind would have died out long, long ago. Stronger and faster animals would have made sure of that.

Once you admit to one natural right then it leads to there being others as well.

 

i think we all agree there are natural rights but natural rights are to do ANYTHING and EVERYTHING. If so, what's the point of even talking about natural rights if there is no specific list to which we can adhere to or believe in? If i have the natural right to do ANYTHING and EVERYTHING (self defense, kill, take a dump on someone's face, call someone offensive stuff, piss on your face, punch you, take your property, protect my property, right to life, pursue what i want etc...) then it's a concept that is meaningless as it means = everything.

This is the point i think we all try to make... You guys come back and try to explain to us 'no Mike12, there is a specific list of natural rights, it includes some stuff and excludes some stuff'. THIS, is what we disagree with. Why are there a specific list of natural rights? because Locke said so? because Jefferson said so? NO... it's all made up and just rules/laws/rights men came up with in order to try and peacefully co-exist.

 

On the contrary, rights from any other source would hardly be worth fighting a revolution over.

Of course not, since there's only one.

Won't work, since there are two ultimate sources, each eternally inimical to the other, of what any individual may choose to call a natural/unalienable right; and any society which becomes heedless of the difference will inevitably end in despotism.

Actually there is no need for any expansion, since the enunciation of the idea in the DoI is about as close to perfection as can be had with the written word.

 

I can agree to that, but find it incredibly irrelevant when talking about natural rights. I have a cat that is a great mouser. To him, mice don't have any rights whatsoever, unless it's the right to be toyed with before leaving the carcass on my wife's pillow.

If it's consensual, then no problem.

Tell that to people who have been imprisoned (people don't voluntarily go to prison) for tax evasion.

I also have a problem with your usage of taxes for anything and everything, be it for defense or health care. The way the country was set up was to protect natural rights. We have to give a little to get a lot when it comes to things like national defense.

In nature, we men (sans other men) have all of these things we can do. They are neither moral or immoral because it requires two moral agents to create both good and bad. It is only when we come across other men that we need to have some understanding of what the ground rules are for interaction so we don't end up killing each other. That is the idea behind natural rights. It is then "right" to abide by those ground rules and wrong to disregard them because it's bad to kill each other (I believe Hobbes would back me up on this).

So, could I whittle a chair out of a tree stump and know that it's there for whenever I want to sit down before another person (like you) came along? Yes, of course I could. There might be some birds that will take a dump on it, but they aren't moral agents, so that's just part of living with birds and bird poop. They can poop on my chair and I can have them for supper because neither of us have agreed to abide by ground rules so that I do NOT eat them and they do NOT poop on my chair. The "NOT" is what we mean when we refer to natural or negative rights.

So if you show up and want to sit down on the chair I whittled out of a stump, we're going to have a problem. We have to establish a ground rule about property rights. You can go over the hill and find another stump to whittle a chair out of, but this one is mine. So you agree, and we can live in peace.

The federal government was set up to protect those natural rights. Maybe king George decides he wants to take our chairs, so we're going to need some general or a commander in chief to tell us which trees to hide behind and where to aim when the British come to take our chairs.

Now we come up with a problem that you have introduced which is that maybe you and a friend of yours decide that you want something from me. So you guys tell me that we're going to have a vote to decide on who gets to sit in my chair. I refuse to vote because I don't want any part of what's coming next. You guys vote yes on proposition chair tax, and I'm stuck without a chair to sit down on. Both of you guys voted and said that you WILL take my chair, and that's just the way that is. That's a positive right, and those necessarily negate negative rights.

So a natural of negative right involves something that we are NOT supposed to do, and a positive right is something that we CAN do.

But what happened to our previous arrangement? Well, it's dead now. It's war because you took my property, thus none of us will respect the property rights of the other. A positive right negated a negative right. It's what will always happen.

Now your idea is that we can voluntarily agree to give up on negative rights by voting for positive rights such as the right to take my chair. Except you're adding something extra by saying that individuals do not have to voluntarily agree to this. The majority has to agree to this, and that's all we need.

This might be true for a state or municipality because of the tenth amendment, but it's supposed to be really difficult to amend the constitution because any amendment necessarily takes authority away from the states.

Do you understand the dichotomy between natural and positive rights here? If the federal government says "thou shalt X" then everybody in the entire union loses something in the process. So yes, the federal government can tax us, but only to achieve the responsibilities that are heaped on the federal government by the constitution which are to defend natural rights of the people within the various states.

Did you know that there wasn't a federal prison for about 200 years after the individual states ratified the constitution? The reason why we didn't have a federal prison for so long is because the federal government was only tasked with preserving natural rights. If some politician did something that was unconstitutional like telling everybody in a particular state that they can't have a gun, that politician would be subject to the laws of that state, and would be put in a state prison for theft. Or maybe somebody would be found guilty of treason, in which case he'd be hanged.

So here we are today with a whole ton of positive rights being foisted upon the entire country for two main reasons - the general welfare clause and the interstate commerce clause.

The general welfare clause is actually supposed to limit the federal government to only taxing people for the general welfare. And what is the general welfare? We can find that in the preamble of the constitution which specifically states "promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity".

The actual general welfare clause that is used to argue for positive rights is found in article 1, section 8 which is used as a limit on the grounds for taxation. Civil defense and paying debts is an enumerated power/responsibility, and general welfare clause is a limit on the power of those two enumerated powers and responsibility.

These days, it's just used as an enumerated power so that the federal government can claim anything it wants to as a form of "general welfare", and the vagueness of that mistranslation has been used very effectively over the centuries to the point that I really have given up on the government.

If we were to really take the general welfare clause seriously, we'd look at the efficacy of all these social welfare programs that have been instituted by the federal government over the years and ask the supreme court to rule on just how successful these programs have been as far as promoting the general welfare, and they would be (in a just world) ruled unconstitutional. In fact, I would go so far as to say that we might have more than a few politicians keelhauled as a result of their failure to promote the general welfare.

now my fingers are tired

 

nonsense. You only have rights agreed upon by society, or rights you can defend.


And I'll keep pointing out there is no such thing as natural rights. It's simply a philosophical man made concept.

 

Unresponsive, and what is there is full of non sequitur, especially ala para "people don't fight unless God is somehow involved," absurd and not comporting with historical fact in the least. Oh, and the Declaration of Independence is not law in this or any other country and never has been, nor is it "political philosophy" or even a platform. It is basically a Sam Adams, Thomas Paine type tract gussied up by Jefferson to rally the cause, basically an advertisement. Spend some more time reading the actual laws of this country and your understanding of them should grow.

 

Which is an exact case of might = right.

Meaning it's contractual, not natural. Now 2 people or more may say it's a natural right and agree to it. But not the entire animal kingdom will agree to it. Meaning it's not natural, but consensual/contractual. Man made.

 

Then you disagree with your right to self defense.

It's amazing how lefties are so willing to hang themselves on their own rope of arrogance.

 

I guess you would prefer if we went by the term 'negative rights'? Makes no difference to me.

 

No such thing as negative rights. Makes no difference to me.
All you've really given in this thread is talk about it should be consensual, which is contractual, which is people agreeing. Making it man made.

As for your tree chair story. Who ever is sitting in it at the time has the right to sit in it, if it's in the woods.
How do you prove you whittled it?

 

I guess my shotgun is proof that I whittled it.

You're not really very good at this, are you? You don't appreciate natural rights, so we don't have natural rights. We do not have an agreement to protect that which you spit upon.

so yeah, my shotgun proves my ownership.

You want it, you got it.

 

Ahh, my might = right. I agree.

You don't know what natural rights are. You are terrible at this. You claim folks need a consensus. Or you can use a shotgun. Real natural. Sounds like it's either contractual, man made, or might = right.

Thanks, you and I now agree the the base natural right is might = right.
It's what I, Mike12, and others been saying this whole thread.

Of course, I'm sitting in the whittled chair, and I shoot everyone I see coming near me sitting in that nicely whittled chair. So I guess it's mine.

 

And that, my conservative friends who value the constitution, is why we're headed towards a civil war. The left refuse to live peacefully with us. They look on our labor as theirs, and refuse to acknowledge the fruits of our own labor as our own property.

They will take what we produce by force, which reduces us to slavery.

You know what we have to do.

 

Except you don't value the constitution. You want to twist it into your very own document with made up interpretations. That is why you are headed to civil war. Conservatives have no clue how to interpret words written 200 yrs ago so society can live together.

 

I have no use for a parasite like you, so... yes, might will indeed equate with right.

 

Of course you don't, you defeat your own arguments. And resort to personal attacks when you have been defeated. It happens all the time.
You do a lot of personal attacks.
Maybe you should go to a site where everyone agrees in lock step. You clearly can't handle when you prove your own views wrong.
Some day you might become an adult. Most do.

Every single time you bring up natural rights, you say it must be consensual. And of course a right must be consensual.

Or the rights, as you so eloquently have told us, is you'll use a gun to get your rights you think you have. So now you agree, might = right, and the bottom line is, that is the only natural right anyone or animal has.

But if you want to live among society, then society determines what are rights and what are not rights. You just don't happen to like societies definitions.
The problem is yours.

 

after you wrote...

That's your idea of a right, so we war. Society will be composed of the winners.

 

I may be willing to engage in a discussion about the logical and biological underpinnings of a universal and natural system of rights, or at least guidelines to rights, but I would rather ask you to back your position up:

I am correct in assuming that you believe slave/master relationships to be a legitimate rights system under certain circumstances? If you believe that no circumstances justify the right to own another person, or revokes a person's right to not be owned by another, then why are you not backing a universal and natural right?

 

There is a difference between legal rights and moral rights. Do not confuse them. If society agrees upon my right to ownership over you, it doesn't negate the moral rights you have that makes such an agreement unjust.

This is a non sequitur. Why must they not exist if they are an invention of man?

 

What does this question matter?

 

It's not my idea of a right, that is the only natural right.
All other rights, many of which I and maybe even you agree, are man made contractual rights. With the gov't granting, enforcing, or giving.

And you have agreed, and have said, your shotgun gives you your right.

Why do you have such difficulty, when you are in agreement?

Not in our form of gov't. And I think that pisses you off. Your might isn't the right for everything.

 

Do you know what nature entails?
If man invented it, it's not in nature.

 

Who's chair is it? The one who whittled it, or the one sitting in it?

He is claiming it's his chair because he whittled it. I claim it's my chair because I'm sitting in it and/or I whittled it. Or neither of us whittled it.

 

So what is the moral foundation for a moral government?

The guy with the biggest gun?

 

Isn't that how this country was founded?
Then we established laws and a set of guideline for rights. You know, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And then the people, 'We the People', keep electing officials to represent us and give our society the rights we want.
How else do we get them?

It was moral for our country to own slaves at one time, then it wasn't.
It was moral to make women 2nd class citizens one time, then it wasn't.
It was moral to take the property from the natives living on it at one time, then it, oh wait, they still don't have their land. We gave them some parcels.

It was moral for some to drown women one time to see if they were a witch, then it wasn't.