re: #322 Charles

re: #322 Charles

If you really believe your rights are granted by “nature,” try spending a few weeks in an Amazonian rain forest, then come back and let me know how well your rights were respected by nature.

Human beings grant “human rights.” Human beings enforce “human rights.” The concept is a human concept, and it has no analog whatsoever in nature.

If you wish to believe your rights are granted to you by God, that’s your choice — but it’s a belief, not a fact.

You miss the point.

There are positively enumerated rights, and rights that people have by virtue of existence. The latter are called “Natural Rights.” It is a concept that dates back to a slightly different semantics. It is not meant to assume that critters in the forest, or Autralopithecus aferensis had some legal system. It is a synonym for “inalienable.” You have, for example, the right to a personality—no one can take that away, it is a “natural right.” The default human condition—sans other humans imposing something else—is liberty.

This is not the least bit controversial an idea, though some have argued that only the strong can exercise most natural (also called inalienable) rights.

I am an atheist, so I don’t imagine my natural rights are granted by anyone—positively enumerated rights are a different matter. Saying they are granted “by nature” is something that, say, Jefferson might have written. I would personally say I have them by virtue of existence.