Do Humans really have inalienable rights?

Rights exist independently of society. Take a man and remove him form society, and he has the right to do anything and everything he can possibly imagine.

What is a social invention is the ability to implement consequences for exercising these rights which exists.

In any society, a person has the right to do whatever I wish, regardless of what that is. What society has invented is not the rights, it is the consequences that can exist for exercising these rights. But so long as it remains possible to exercise those rights, they exist regardless of those consequences.

The only way to alienate a right is to remove the ability to exercise that right. It is not simply creating consequences for exercising those rights. Thus, if a person has the ability to exercise a right, it is inalienable. Society cannot remove the person from their ability to exercise a right.

What has been decided by convention is that certain rights exist that the social authority should never create consequences for. These rights are those that should be freely exercised, without the threat of consequences.

Society can, however, decide which rights they want to prevent it's people from freely exercising. An example of this is taking intoxicants. I have the right to do this, and no law exists that removes my ability to do this.

What society does is prevent me from exercising this without risking consequences. It cannot alienate me from this right, though. It could only do this by removing my ability to engage in that right, but since that is impossible to do while I exist, the right remains inalienable.

So rights are inherent, and they are the natural default state. What is a social construct is any consequences for their exercise. Rights exist independently of society, while consequences for engaging in a right exist only because of society.

A social construct cannot exist without society, and therefore, rights cannot possibly be a social construct.

Government is a social construct, that exists to place limitation on the free exercise of rights. What a bill of rights does is place limitations on the government's authority to limit the free exercise of certain rights.

It does not place a limitation on the rights -which exist independently of convention- it simply places a limitation on the potential consequences for exercising one's extant rights.

One does not need to believe in a deity to realize that logically, the existence of all rights is the default state of man.

Remove society, and there are no limitations to the rights one can freely engage in. Obviously, that means rights exist independently of society.

Go from this world to another. Would you feel right stealing the fruits of one's labor there? If you don't feel that it's right, then there is something to this idea of inalienable rights.

Also, inalienable rights are our rights with each other. We don't really have a choice if God wants to take something away from us. After all, isn't everything really the fruits of His labor?

No.

"Rights" do not exist. They are defined as limits on what others, including government, can legally do to a person. There are no natural boundaries, and anyone with sufficient power can do whatever they want with impunity.

Hitler didn't violate human "rights", nor did Mao, Stalin, Castro, Pol Pot, Che, or the other gods of socialism. They just killed people.

"Rights" is a handy emotion laden term, but in the end it's devoid of real meaning.

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What do I mean by that?

Well, the old concept of "rights" used at the founding of this country was that a right was something you already had and that government could not interfere with.

The new concept of "rights", as used by the babbling Leftists includes the following assumptions:

You can violate a person's most basic right if you're going to be inconvenienced, so a woman can deny her own child life, if it's going to make her feel bad letting the baby live...provided that the baby hasn't yet been born. She has the right to violate rights.

Rights are suddenly PROVIDED by the people to others, via the exploitative use of force. Somehow they've gotten a "right" to food, at your expense; a "right" to housing, at your expense; and the debate is raging about their alleged "right" to health care, at your expense; and your right to say "no" is abridged, alienated, and you're downright barbaric for even thinking about it.

Ikari said:

We are born with inalienable rights, it's true. It's something inherent to humans. You can list whatever source you want, God or Nature or whatever floats your boat. But no other animal is capable of the insight and intellect of the human race. None can do what we've done in the short period we've been on this planet. Because of our intellect and our empathy we are able to recognize rights as a natural existence, innate to ourselves.

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You go tell people in Iran about your "inalienable rights" and see how far that gets you.

Cephus said:

You go tell people in Iran about your "inalienable rights" and see how far that gets you.

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A despotic regime that arbitrarily violates the inalienable rights of man is nothing more than a despotic regime that arbitrarily violates the inalienable rights of man.

rivrrat said:

Rights are granted and removed at the whim of those in control. We are born with no such "rights", that is a social construct. We are born with and continue to gain personal interests and desires and may feel we have the "right" to do xyz, but we only have said "right" if it is allowed by those who have ultimate control over our actions, or if we can beat down those who would deny us what we believe to be our "right".

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My thoughts exactly. Natural law does not exist.

celticlord said:

You are presuming that all rights are inherently "inalienable" rights. That presumption is demonstrably false, for if all rights were inalienable, then no man would have any power to bind his fellow man--there could be no constraint, no law, and thus no society. While some rights must be inalienable, other rights must not be inalienable.

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Your argument is incomplete and forgets an important point. Man can create rights, and does. The power comes from either than man's ability to overpower others, that man's power to convince others to abide by his rights, and/or the followers agreement to abide by those rights. No rights exist without man's desire for them to exist.

Society cannot exist without the inalienable right to life.

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Society does not have to exist.

Every creature desires to live; that is the order of things. Society is the instinctive mechanism by which mankind proposes to best satiate his desire to live. All social animals, when deprived of the community, do not thrive; Man, being a social animal, needs society to live.

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A desire to live does not equate to the right to live.

Thus, society is an expression of the desire to live, and the laws of society are predicated on assuring life to the individual man. Indeed, you will not find in any society a corpus of law that is dismissive of the individual man's desire to live.

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This is not logical. Just because society is an expression of the desire to live, this does not equate to the right to live. Society is a social construct, created to foster a a better human condition. However, there is no right to either have this or be part of it beyond the right that those in power, or those in general grant.

Moreover, if the members of a society do not take pains to preserve the lives of that society's members, that society will not sustain. Life is always a precarious proposition; if we are dismissive of each other's desires for life, if we stand idle when the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune conspire to take away life, then, in time, we will all perish, and so will our society. As Benjamin Franklin observed most sardonically, "we must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately."

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You are talking about the desire for the society to survive, not the right.

Thus it is that any society, if it is to endure, must take pains to preserve the lives of its members. Thus it is that, in every society, a man must have an inalienable right to life, for to argue otherwise is invariably to argue the dissolution of society.

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No. A society chooses to endure by setting certain standards for this to occur. These standards are set by the society based on beliefs, morals, or perceptions. These are man-created, not inalienable in any way. All you are proving is that there is a desire to survive. This does not equate to a right.

celticlord said:

Except you are conflating your terms. First you describe an agreement "between individuals" and transpose that as a right granted by "the society".

The agreement "between individuals" is the society--and the first part of that agreement is to endeavor to preserve each others' lives. As society is inevitable, the agreement is inevitable, and the the right to life--being the substance of that agreement--must be inalienable to the individual.

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You err on the reason for a society to be created. We are social beings, and societies are created to fulfill the psychological desire for companionship and community. That is the first part of societal creation. No rights, no preservation. Then rights and agreements develop in order to sustain the society, but these rights are developed by those inside the society, based on their morals, beliefs, and perceptions. Human psychology comes first, How to sustain this is then man-created.

Goshin said:

Ah...I'd like to contest this.

If no one ever told me I had a right to life, yet I would still desire to live. Desiring to live, I would resent and resist any effort to deprive me of that life. In essence, I would be asserting that I had a right to live when I resisted someone trying to take that from me. This is instinctive in virtually every living creature, and therefore self-evident.

If no one ever told me I had a right to liberty, I would still want to do as I willed, not as others willed for me. I would resent capricious constraints on my liberty, and if possible I would resist them. It is the nature of Man to wish to do as he will, unless his independent spirit has been beaten down into cowering slavishness. That this is natural to human beings is self-evident, imo.

If no one ever told me I had a right to the pursuit of happiness, I would still pursue it, as unhappiness is an unpleasant state of being. Do I need to even go over this one?

Property, the other thing our Founders considered including in that short list, is possibly arguable. The Bantu, if I recall correctly, have little concept of personal property other than one's clothing and one's bow. Of course, they also have almost nothing else BUT those things, so it isn't much of a sacrifice for them. Still when I look at little children arguing "that's MY doll and you can't have it!" I tend to think possession is inborn.

All other rights derive from these.

Now...to pull up some Heinlein from the novel Starship Troopers, one could argue that a man has no natural rights whatsoever. If I am drowning the sea will not respect my right to life... my liberty can be imposed on in several ways...property too... pursuit of happiness is something that cannot be taken from me but it can be made very difficult. Nonetheless without these three or four things you cannot build a civilization for humans that is remotely just or reasonable, so to consider them "inalienable" is a good basis for building a civilization.

If you wish to believe them a made-up construct, go ahead...but please don't teach this belief to others. The more people who believe these fundamental rights are not inalienable, the more likely that someone will try to take them from us.

Some traditions are best left alone... when you pry at the very foundations of your civilization, you are doing so at peril to us all.

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You are not talking about rights. You are talking about desires. You desire to live and you will fight for that desire. You have the desire for liberty and you will fight for that desire. You only have these rights if they are granted to you by the society in which you live. There are plenty of ways that a society can take away your right to live or liberty. But a society can not take away your desire for these things.

Goshin said:

It is an instinct, sure. I also recognize it as a self-evident right, because any society that fails to recognize it as such is doomed to fail itself. You can't have a "society" that doesn't believe its individual members have a right to life that cannot be taken from them without just cause. It would quickly become the worst sort of anarchy.

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Then it's doomed to fail. That still doesn't make it a right. A society can choose to make choices that will doom it to fail.

That doesn't mean every instinct is a right, though. I have the instinct to want to kill people who make me angry... I suppress it for a variety of reasons, not least of which is a belief in the right to life. :mrgreen:

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No instinct is a right. It can be translated to a desire.

Goshin said:

I would correct that by saying "what constitutes just cause is not universal but rather specific to a given society...but the right to life itself, absent whatever is considered just cause by that society, is universal."


That is, the right to life is universal...what constitutes just-cause for violating that right is specific to a given society.

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Even if it is universal to all societies, even if all societies have just cause to have this right, it is still NOT inalienable if the society has just cause. You just defeated your own argument.

The silenced majority said:

A despotic regime that arbitrarily violates the inalienable rights of man is nothing more than a despotic regime that arbitrarily violates the inalienable rights of man.

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Which means they're not terribly inalienable, are they? Rights only exist so long as everyone involved agree they exist.

Theres one question that i need answered that draws the line between me agreeing and disagreeing that we have inalienable rights;

Are all Humans, or at least, should all Humans, be entitled to the right of Freedom, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, or do we think we should be entitled to those rights?

kaya'08 said:

Are all Humans, or at least, should all Humans, be entitled to the right of Freedom, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, or do we think we should be entitled to those rights?

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They are not only entitled to that pursuit, they have it naturally. Only intervention by society itself can prevent that pursuit.

Tucker Case said:

They are not only entitled to that pursuit, they have it naturally. Only intervention by society itself can prevent that pursuit.

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So, its a natural instinct, but not actually inalienable right.
I think thats where people need to learn to differentiate.

kaya'08 said:

So, its a natural instinct, but not actually inalienable right.
I think thats where people need to learn to differentiate.

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It's an inalienable right, but that doesn't mean it won't have obstacles. Society is the obstacle.

kaya'08 said:

Theres one question that i need answered that draws the line between me agreeing and disagreeing that we have inalienable rights;

Are all Humans, or at least, should all Humans, be entitled to the right of Freedom, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, or do we think we should be entitled to those rights?

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Sure, I think they should, but I happen to live in a culture where that's true. If I lived in a different culture where these rights didn't exist, I'd likely have a different view.

Can anyone morally defend theft and murder? If not, then life and property are among our inalienable rights.

phattonez said:

Can anyone morally defend theft and murder? If not, then life and property are among our inalienable rights.

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Because you say so, of course. I can certainly make a case for specific instances of stealing to feed your family and killing in self defense. So much for "life and property".

phattonez said:

Can anyone morally defend theft and murder? If not, then life and property are among our inalienable rights.

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Easily. We commit theft and murder almost constantly during war and defend both vehemently.

Not to mention the all too easy defense of self defense, defense of family, friend, or others, and stealing to live.

Just as easily we kill and commit acts of war in defense of our inalienable rights.

rivrrat said:

very well thought out and explained argument, but i disagree. The "basis" that you demand for governmental imposed rules, laws, and/or rights is the society itself. As we all well know, different societies have different ideas of "rights". They have different laws, different rules, different freedoms. If "rights" were indeed inalienable to mankind, there would not be such diversity in what those supposed inalienable rights are.

You ask at the beginning:

a person has not even the right to live and walk upon the earth if there are no inalienable rights.

this is indeed true. In the grand scheme of things, i have absolutely no right to walk upon this earth. I earn that right by destroying those who would deny it to me, or by being born in a society that has determined that i have that right and as such protects it for me at my behest.

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destroy mothers!!!!!

This is a very interesting debate.

I voted "yes" before reading the thread, and now I am not so sure it was the correct choice.

Both sides of the arguement have made points which make sense, at least partially.

Personally, I don't know if one, neither, or both are correct (Not really sure how both could be correct, but it is likely possible.).

That said, I still lean towards the "there are inalienable rights" side of the issue.

This is, perhaps, in part because I want there to be such, so that humans naturally gravitate towards that state unless not sane.


It appears to me that the basic question here is something along the lines of: "Which came first, humans or rights...Or did they arrive at the same time?"

Can't really answer that question.

kaya'08 said:

The term "inalienable" rights only came about on the founding of the constitution. How about before then? Was our rights inalienable? Why are humans subject to "inalienable rights", yet other animals are not, and who says we should have such rights, what makes us deserving of such rights, is the term inalienable rights simply a factor of social construct aimed at providing the Human a false term of importance, or a system of civilization?

Are we really born with Inalienable rights? Or is it merely a figment of the social structure we have developed as humans?

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Rights do not exist in the State of Nature... Rights are a man made concept...

Cephus said:

Because you say so, of course. I can certainly make a case for specific instances of stealing to feed your family and killing in self defense. So much for "life and property".

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Note that these are in the presence of mitigating factors. If I'm simply more powerful than someone and want his house, am I justified in taking it?