Quote:
Originally Posted by Hayekian
If I point to you I will be pointing to a human being. I could put you in chains and drive you into my salt mine and you would have no rights whatsoever whatever you say or believe. It happens/happened all the time.
My view is that a system that allows this is not a good one for the reasons I've already stated - it does not allow all humans an opportunity to flourish, and while today I'm the slave-owner tomorrow I or my children may be the slaves.
Rights are a useful concept that allow men to live together peacefully and to their mutual benefit. However many words you pack around the name of the concept it is still not a thing with independent existance in the universe; when separated from the context of the concrete reality of humans living in society it has no meaning. The closest you can come to what you want to make of it is this: The reason this concept is valuable is because it arises out of the very nature of man, as seen in this definition of rights: "Conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival."
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It seems to me this is just an argument about the definition of a human right, and not if they can exist or not with or without God. Is a human right something somebody has regardless of their ability to practice it? Or is a human right no longer a human right when it is "taken away"? It's a simple disagreement on scematics. Simply by definition, I believe human rights belong to all humans, even if their ability to practice it has been taken away.
That being said, it's a completely different argument if human rights exist at all. I'm still debating this in my own mind, but currently my position is that they can't, even with god. If a right doens't exist unless god says it exists, I don't think that's a "human right" at all. It's a "god given right" that exists independant of the nature of humans.
Thus I see Publius Infinitum's argument that human rights can't exist without God, and raise him the fact that they can't exist even with God.
So if god can't give a human right, what about nature? No offence to Kant, but I don't see how human rights can be derived from human nature. Unless someone can give some fantastic argument as for why being "sentient" somehow establishes rights, we are nothing more than animals who have no rights in nature. Just survival of the fittest.
All I believe in is civil rights created where we establish a social contract "under the veil of ignorance". This is done with a mutual understanding that we will all flourish togeather better than under nature's laws. The problem with this is we do not always function "under the veil of ignorance". Your slave owner ignores the fact that one of the slaves "could have been him" and instead benefits from the fact that it's not him.