It's the unalienable bit I don't get un·alien·able \ˌən-ˈāl-yə-nə-bəl, -ˈā-lē-ə-\ adjective :impossible to take away or give up Full Definition :inalienable First use :circa 1611 Miriam-Webster none of which are true Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
It is useful to start by trying to define what a "right" is. In an abstract sense, rights involve what is claimable by a person on ethical grounds. In a more concrete, legal sense, a right is a power, privilege or claim possessed by a person by virtue of law, which means that it can, in principle, be enforced in a court of law. Clearly, not every moral (ethical) right is also a legal right, and legal rights can vary depending on time and place. Legal rights usually impose specific legal duties on other people. For example, your right to freedom of enjoyment of the house you own imposes a duty on others not to interfere with your free enjoyment (e.g. by trespassing or breaking into the house). Rights can be further classified in various ways: Natural rights are believed to come from the nature of individual human beings; examples include such things as the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Civil rights are those granted to citizens of a town, city, country etc. by law; examples include property rights, marriage rights, freedom to make contracts, rights to trial by jury, and others. Political rights are those rights granted to citizens to participate in government or administration of a town, city, country etc.; examples include the right to vote, the right to run for public office, citizenship rights, etc. Given this context, religious people would probably hold that "God-given" rights mostly concern the natural rights mentioned above. The general feeling is that these rights exist regardless of whether a political leader or government permits people to exercise them or enforce them. Therefore, God believers being what they are, the natural rights are assumed to be dictates from God. Since natural rights are based on notions of morality, at the bottom level the question of whether natural rights are "God given" comes down to a question of where morality comes from. It is a common mistake that religious people make to assume that morality must come from God, hence the mistaken notion of "God given rights". In practice, a lot of the time this is fairly harmless, because a lot of the time we can agree on what the "natural" rights of human beings are, regardless of whether we are religious or secular. Some people confuse natural rights with political and civil rights. For example, the second-amendment right to bear arms in the US Constitution is a civil/political right, not a natural right - as is clearly evidenced by many other nations recognising no such "right". Most countries, similarly, do not recognise a general right to defend one's property with deadly force, which means it is not a natural or "God-given" right.
It's a god given right which the some in Government is trying to take away Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
But is that not a man-made civil right? AFAIK, such right does not exist in nature for any living thing. The whole idea of evolution is "survival" (avoiding death). It's hard work for most just to stay alive. There are no rights to life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness, except by "common agreement". And even that agreement is all to often broken, especially by humans. As to the meaning of rights being recognized by religious people, the more religious they are, the more the right to live is a negotiable commodity. To many religions your belief in God itself determines your right to life.
Which is SELF determination, not non existent god given Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
If an organism has the ability to defend its own life, liberty, and property (territory), it has the natural right to do so, simply by its inherent ability. No one would expect an organism that is capable of defending or feeding itself to refrain from doing so. Hence it is a natural right. We don't condemn any animal as immoral for killing its prey or predator, because that is within its natural right to seek its own survival. In nature, no one provides such prey nor defense, but that only means it's not a positive right that must be provided by others. It's a negative right that permits inaction, neither must nor mustn't. It's the inherent right of a predator to hunt or not, and of prey to flee/defend or not. Albeit, instinct alone doesn't really provide a choice. It's the same with humans. If you have the capacity to defend your own life, liberty, and property, you have the right to do so. But there is no guaranteed, positive right that you will succeed. And while man-made laws seek to protect such rights, even they do not guarantee it. They merely offer other recourse than simply killing all perceived threats. These natural rights only become moral when we accept and respect that others have them, and that ours do not justify violating theirs. As humans, we are uniquely capable of understanding the rights and value of life, liberty, and property of our fellow man. Where in animals might equals right, humans have the rational capacity to recognize that escalating violence and war would inevitably lead to mutually assured destruction. Hence we cooperate to create laws, government, and civilization. It's actually the secular who believe life is negotiable, as they advocate negotiating between the mere convenience, lifestyle, career, etc. of a women and the life of a baby. Only religions like Islam relate right to life to belief. For most religions, right to life is universal, whether you believe or not.
So you just contradicted yourself. Right to life is NOT a universal belief. It's not Universal at all. It's a Human invention. At best the right to life is a temporary permission. A turtle may live 100 years, a mayfly may live 24 hrs. The right to life is a morally based human invented and granted law. But it is possible to forfeit your right to life, by law. The electric chair, the gas chamber, the list of instruments to deprive you of your right to life is long and bloody. A right is not a right if it can be taken from you. But none of that has anything to do with a natural right to life. You have a natural opportunity to life, not a right. Natural selection is the probabilistic judge of who shall live and who shall die. It mathematically (probabilistically) decides your right to life. Not all living things live to procreate at all. What happened to their right to life? Point is, Nature has nothing to do with human rights, all of them are human invented.
Right to life is naturally universal, whether others respect it or not. The right to liberty necessarily entails the possibility that others may attempt to violate your rights. And violating the right to life of another does forfeit your own life and/or liberty. In nature, that would mean if you tried to kill someone and failed, they would kill you. In civilized society, we simply have police, courts, and penal systems to take care of the latter. These niceties do not change the underlying natural rights. No, negative rights are not guarantees. Only positive rights, like healthcare, can be guaranteed. There is no such thing as a positive natural right. Natural rights are not given to you, you take them using your own inherent abilities. No ability is absolute, but saying nothing exists that is not absolute means that nothing exists. It's a nonsense claim.
That's is not true. Your are cherry-picking. We are living, wrote Gould, in the Age of Bacteria. Specifically human, not universal. What is a negative right? You do not have the right to live forever? Human granted rights, ok. Do animals in the wild have healthcare? No you don't. Natural rights are bestowed on you through natural selection. If you survive you have the natural right (if you have the ability) to procreate. Who is saying that? God is absolute? IMO, that's a nonsense argument for "inalienable rights". Natural rights and legal rights (Inalienable rights?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_rights Are you proposing that "inalienable rights" are, or are not subject to God's sovereign Will?
Rewording to If you survive you have the opportunity to procreate if conditions permit. Certainly not a right Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
They may have a caring tribe member To paraphrase Miranda " You have the right to the rights of your choice or your god given rights. If you do not have any choice of rights or a god, you will be given a god, appointed and paid for by the court, to ensure that you have rights of some standing" Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Not exactly. As I previously explained, the concept of a right is rooted in ideas of morality and/or law. Mere ability to do something does not automatically create a right. A right is a moral judgment, first and foremost. The capability, in an of itself, cannot create a right. A right must be recognised by people as a moral good. Rights are something that people recognise. Without recognition, there are no rights. This does not, by the way, mean that rights do not exist unless everyone acknowledges them. But one feature of rights is that they create moral or legal duties. We don't condemn it because we appreciate that the concept of a right is most likely not grasped by animals. Moreover, even if an animal were to have a capacity to make moral judgments, it would be difficult to decide whether predator or prey was more deserving of the chance to survive. It's difficult for us to decide that, in the case where only one can survive. If there's no choice, it really isn't a matter of exercising a right, or preventing another from exercising it. It's not a matter of capacity. In a civil society, most human beings tend to agree that a dog-eat-dog moral code (or might makes right) is barbaric. I think you have it backwards. We make moral judgments first, then rights follow, not the other way around. We first decide that it's a Good to live and let live, then we hold this to be a Right that imposes obligations on people. In other words, we decide first what we value (e.g. the absence of mutually assured destruction), then we decide what rules need to be put in place to ensure that those values are respected (and to punish those who refuse to respect them). You are talking about a clash of interests (or rights) between two individuals there: the rights of a mother and the rights of a baby (or, more often in that context, something that might one day become a baby). Where the rights of two individuals come into potential conflict, we must decide what is fair. This has nothing to do with being secular or religious, per se. Religion just muddies the moral waters with irrelevant superstitious baggage. Do you eat meat? Is the right to life of the cow on your plate part of the universality you're talking about, or is it only certain specific kinds of privileged life that is entitled to this "universal" right (which would make it somewhat less than universal, methinks)? Naturally universal? Do you mean for human beings only, or for all forms of life? If only human beings, then how is that universal; that would be a bad word to use, wouldn't it?
Wow, a bare assertion with nothing to support it followed immediately by a complete non sequitur ("Your are" to boot). Who said anything at all about dominance? How do you think dominance somehow means an organism has no natural right to defend itself? Again, a right is not a guarantee unless it's a positive right. Natural rights are negative rights. Duh. Civilized societies are a human creation. I guess it was completely lost on you where I contrasted "in nature" with "in civilized society". Hint: only natural rights are universal. Negative rights are those you can exercise without requiring anyone else to do anything. You can, for example, defend your own life, without requiring anyone else to save you. Guarantees require someone else to do something. Even positive rights cannot guarantee you die of old age, much less anything as ridiculous as "live forever". If you simply read what you quoted, and comprehend simple English, you'll see that healthcare is a positive right and there is no such thing in nature. Natural rights are strictly negative rights. Who said procreation was a natural right? If you have life, you have the natural right to seek your own survival, whether you succeed or not. Again, there are no guarantees in negative, natural rights. You're the one repeatedly making nonsense straw men about living forever. Don't like it? Quit making dumb arguments. There's no need at all to bring God into a discussion on natural rights. Only moral rights and obligations require a God or other source. Natural rights are inherent in the organism itself, thus inalienable. You cannot legislate away the survival instinct. Because natural rights are not a moral judgement. If hunting prey is part of an organism's survival instinct, it has an inherent right to do so.
You may be conflating other rights with natural rights. Natural law (Latin: ius naturale, lex naturalis) is law as seen as being independent of, and pre-existent to, the positive law of any given political order, society or nation-state. Such genesis is seen as determined by nature (whether that reflects creation, evolution, or random chance), and a notional law of nature treated as objective fact that is universally applicable; that is, it exists and is recognizable, without any dependence on human understanding, or on the positive law of any given state, political order, or legislature — and even of society at large. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law Natural rights are those that are not dependent on the laws or customs of any particular culture or government, and so are universal, fundamental and inalienable (they cannot be repealed by human laws, though one can forfeit their enjoyment through one's actions, such as by violating someone else's rights). Natural law is the law of natural rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_rightsWhile natural rights have, historically, been used to justify morality, they do not derive from it. Divine, legal, and positive rights derive from moral judgements or sources of morality. Otherwise, what differentiates natural rights from the others? It's not just capacity. It's that the behavior is inherently necessary, as determined by nature. No person has to recognize it for there to be a right of an organism to seek its own survival. That is "recognizable, without any dependence on human understanding". Only positive rights require recognition, because only positive rights obligate others to a duty. Negative rights only oblige inaction. Again, you seem unaware of the concept of natural rights. As a natural right, neither predator nor prey is "more deserving". Natural rights are universal because they do not make such judgements. They simply acknowledge that any organism has the right to seek its own survival, simple by its nature. And that nature of, say, a predator does not incur any further judgement in natural law. You don't need to make a choice in order to exercise your natural rights. Being negative rights, you're not even obligated to exercise them at all. As I said above, I agree, it's not just a matter of capacity. And as soon as you start talking "civil society", you're no longer talking strictly about natural rights. Might equals right is actually violating the natural rights of others. Natural rights only obligate inaction, but as they are not positive or legally protected rights, they are in no way guaranteed. The natural right to liberty necessarily entails the possibility of one violating the rights of another. And that's even true for all but maybe the most extremely authoritarian of societies. No, you're just glossing over the only difference between natural and other rights. Again, see the above definitions of natural law and natural rights. Note that they not only completely fail to mention morality at all, but also explicitly say they are "determined by nature", "universal", and exist "without any dependence on human understanding". No, we simply recognize some natural rights, and choose to build upon those our legal and social agreements derived from further moral judgement. As I've mentioned earlier, natural law already provides for punishment, as a failed attempt to violate the natural rights of another often results in the immediate loss of the life of the perpetrator. Weighing the rights of the woman for "convenience, lifestyle, career, etc." against the life of a baby only affirms that you believe life is negotiable. That you can negotiate what's fair between life and other interests. Natural rights are typically expresses in their natural order of priority. Life, liberty, and property (which became Jefferson's 'pursuit of happiness' via Locke). There's nothing religious about how science defines life. But leftists like to "negotiate" (equivocate) what that term means too. As I've already said, the survival of a carnivore/omnivore naturally includes meat, just as that of prey naturally includes fleeing/defending against/killing its predator. Me eating beef is a natural right of being an omnivore and beef being a readily available source of protein. Again, natural rights are determined by nature, and that includes the hierarchy of the food chain. No sensible person would claim a bird has no right to eat insects. So why are you seeming to make the equally insensate implication that humans might have no right to eat lower convertor organisms? Again, natural rights are universal, but they are not guaranteed, like positive rights. All lifeforms, whence "determined by nature".
What happened to the Declaration of Independence, that holds as “self-evident” that human beings were “created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights… among [those] are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” https://www.state.gov/unalienable-rights-and-the-securing-of-freedom/ AFAIK, there is no single living thing other than human life which is held sacred, and even that is a "negotiable" declaration of a "desired" morality in humans, being that humans are the only organism that has the power to destroy the earth and every living thing thereon and seems to be actively pursuing that very objective. As Carlin observed; "if everything that has ever lived is dead and every living is goin to die, where does the "sacred" part come in" ?
The two are not mutually exclusive. Seeing as humans are the only species we know of that can understand the notion of "sacred", that should be surprising. "Sacred" is a term of morality, not natural laws or rights. Well, some people don't understand the difference between comedy and wisdom.
And what about the prey. Does it have a right to "life"? How about "hunting for sport". Is that part of a necessary "survival instinct?
Well then , get your story straight. Your moving the goalposts. Humans are the only species that understand morality? What happened to God? He doesn't understand morality? Judging by religious behaviors in accordance to God's will, I would tend to agree with the concept that God doesn't understand morality at all, or simply doesn't give a damn. It's the wisdom contained in the comedy that is the "important" message. I don't see you making a cogent counter argument....Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
