Кира Уитрова ([info]kira_speaks) wrote in [info]aynrandforum,
@ 2008-02-17 04:45:00
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What are the Rights of Man?
  What are the rights of man? I'll name a few, but there may be more... 

---Keep in mind, I'm talking about the inalienable kind of rights. 'Right' is defined as the power or privilege to which one is justly entitled [by virtue of being human]. Further discussion of what constitutes as a 'right' and not simply a desire may be necessary, since I do not believe the concept is still being taught in the public school system. It's a complicated idea because it's so simple. So.---

1: The right to life.
2: The right to liberty. (Liberty consists in the freedom to do all which which does not harm others.)
3: The right to own property.
4: The right to pursue happiness.
5: The right to resist oppression.

I'm curious what additional rights, if any, there are, and if there is any dispute that the ones I have named are in fact rights.

Just for kicks, here's a quote for President's Day.
"The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipping mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters; as a political group, they were a phenomenon unprecidented in history; they were thinkers who were also men of action." -AR

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[info]madbard
2008-02-17 04:59 pm UTC (link)
Let us not forget the right to rock.

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[info]glenniebun
2008-02-17 11:16 pm UTC (link)
Is that a corollary of the right to party? That one was hard-won, I assure you.

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[info]mi_stabbi
2008-02-17 06:22 pm UTC (link)
Well, it depends which philosophy or culture you're stating these 'Rights' from - for example, those you've listed, come from western secular humanist traditions and cultures.

Other cultures, philosophies, countires, or systems of government, would have different ideas about what 'inalienable' rights are.

For example, it most Arabic countries, most of those rights you've listed are nonsense, not to mention dangerous, and those that aren't, are applicable only to Men. Many cultures still do not regard woman as human.

Further, in China, most of these rights you've listed are anathema to 'public order and decency'. For example, the right to resist oppression depends a great deal on the entirely subjective view of the individual, and in most cases 'oppression' would come from the government, or government favored entities.

To cut this short, and to clarify - what cultural, social, religious, philosophical system of thought are you deriving these rights from? Once that's known, they're easy to list.

Remember, rights only exist where there is force to defend them.

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[info]rinku
2008-02-17 09:11 pm UTC (link)
The idea of natural rights is that they are a) not cultural, b) still exist even if they aren't defended. AR (this is an Ayn Rand community, remember) said that rights are biological, part of our species, just as real and stable as fins on a fish or echolocation in bats or the different roles of the different ants among ants. So if that is true, different cultures might differ in how they understand rights, but not in what they are.

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[info]mi_stabbi
2008-02-17 10:09 pm UTC (link)
Unfortunatly, many cultures differ quite fundamentally on not just how they understand rights, but indeed what they are. For example, cultures that endorse and embrace slavery, of which there are still many, hold none of the so-called natural rights so espoused.

As you state below, the 'right not to have force used upon you' - what is the origin of that right? I suspect it to be cultural or religious in nature, as, through history, that right has only been held by a very few cultures and religious at a very few points in time. Indeed, the greater majority of humanity has held that the right to use force on others, for example conquest, discipline, eradication of competing social structure and ethnic groups, child-raising, etc.

Ayn Rand may have said that rights are biological, and I do hope I can be proven wrong, but from my experience and understanding of both history and current affairs, there apperears to be no evidence of such.

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[info]rinku
2008-02-17 11:06 pm UTC (link)
The origin of that right is the structure of homo sapiens as a species, in particular its social organizations, which is essentially biological in nature, not cultural or religious. In particular, imagine a human civilization or tribe in which there was rampant initiation of force. I don't mean between them, but within them. That civilization or tribe could not long survive, and would soon go extinct.

Rights evolved to keep that from happening; people have a natural aversion to murder and a natural sense of fairness which comes into play very early and is similar across all cultures.

But to be clear, a right is not 'what one ought to respect', it's not a 'should', it's an 'is' -- people can make their own choices about whether to respect them or not, and it's sometimes moral not to respect the rights of another person, but even when they don't, people have a natural feeling that it's unfair to murder or steal or rape.

Also it may sound strange to say that something as abstract or ephemeral as rights is biological or evolved, but it's really no different from other instincts we have, such as the maternal instinct, or any other instinct we have.

In the case of slavery and war, there's one interesting thing about how we evolved rights: if you see another people not as people, but as animals or subhumans, you can get around the instinct of feeling any respect for their rights. That's why Japanese were trained to see Chinese as pigs, not as humans, during WWII -- and why ancient Romans or ancient Chinese saw anyone not of their kind as a subhuman barbarian. The instinct of rights is less forceful when someone doesn't look like you or speak the same language unfortunately.

Of course this isn't exactly AR's argument for rights, she ended it at 'rights exist because without them human society would be impossible', and she would probably take issue with the idea that rights have an instinct associated with them, because she was wary of claims that humans had instincts at all, so don't take this as me speaking for the philosophy.

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[info]rinku
2008-02-17 09:14 pm UTC (link)
I think there is only one right: the right not to have force used upon you. Secondarily, as a consequence, there's the right to use retaliatory force back if it's used upon you. All other rights (including the ones you name) derive from that; the bill of rights for example (free speech, protection against unwarranted search and seizure and so on) are some different ways in which force cannot be used on people by the government, but they are all essentially protections from the initiation of force.

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[info]thyme_hawthorne
2008-02-18 09:55 pm UTC (link)
Rights exist only in the selective mind. There are no inalienable rights, for your definition of a right is a modern concept. They are conceived from a mutual agreement from a group of people, and does not apply universally. It's something people have come to take for granted and not for the luxury it is.

For every right that you have listed, there is a culture that says otherwise, and so it would be naive to think that everyone would take those things to be natural rights. In fact, it would be hard to prove that anyone in the world actually has those rights to begin with.

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[info]tppyouthcrew
2008-02-20 07:06 pm UTC (link)
There is no group mind. These rights are based on the rational needs of Human beings, not of some collective whim. IF a culture denies any of these rights, it denies the right to exist, which means death, first spiritually, then physically.

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[info]thyme_hawthorne
2008-02-22 03:31 am UTC (link)
I'm pretty sure the right to free speech is not a rational need and the right to own property even less so. Rather than argue with you about the metaphysics of a "spiritual death", there are numerous cases of people living in oppression for centuries and while the individuals suffered, they existed pretty well. Consider the serfs in feudal Russia or the women in Eskimo societies or in the Middle East.

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[info]tppyouthcrew
2008-02-25 10:14 pm UTC (link)
The right to property is necessary to survival, because without property, it's range of the moment living, or collectivism, which is even worse. The right of free speech is one of the most essential freedoms, without it we are living in totalitarianism, theocracy, or any other bloodbath in history I could name. Remember that Hitler included it as one of the primary things to take away in order to rule. Yet you claim it's not a rational need? As in, it's not rational to keep individual thoughts? That is totalitarianism. Also you claim that people living in opression "existed pretty well." You think that serfs in feudal russia are a positive example of your point? If you think that that is a proper way of "existing" then you're welcome to live that way. The proper way for humans to live, and the only way that allows for success, is to recognize that these rights are inalienable.

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[info]thyme_hawthorne
2008-02-29 08:00 am UTC (link)
Again, you're thinking in a very westernized way. Before nations existed, there was no concept of property. Hunter-gatherers did not stay in one place long enough to own land; therefore, it is not essential to survival.

When I said "existed pretty well", I meant that they did not shrivel up and die simply because they didn't have free speech , like you claimed people did. The point is that all cultures have denied what you call essential rights to their people and it hasn't killed off that culture yet. And it is only by group consent to uphold these rights that you wont have one person rising up and oppressing the rest of them.

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[info]kira_speaks
2008-02-22 05:03 am UTC (link)
Thank you, my friend. What do we do? How do we, the individuals who see the beginings of the end, alter the course and prevent the disaster?

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[info]primary_sources
2008-02-20 03:13 am UTC (link)
the main right is the right to life. property, pursuit of happiness, etc are all just corollaries to this right

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[info]tppyouthcrew
2008-02-25 10:23 pm UTC (link)
These rights are inalienable. All rights that Human beings possess stem from your #1. Our right to our own life determines all others. Without liberty we are unable to act for our interests(with a gun to our head, as AR would say). Without the right to Property we would be unable to keep and establish our survival. Do I need to explain why we need happiness? This is similar to the way Philosophy itself works, i.e. our metaphysics leads to our method of gaining knowledge(i.e. epistemology), which leads to our verdicts regarding that knowledge(ethics), which determines how we act(politics) and what we enjoy(aesthetics).

Bravo

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