Being alive in this moment is not my right. The "right to live" means that my life is being protected under law and enforced by society, it is essentially a privilege.
Something we keep repeating: even if someone kills you and society does not care, you still had the right to live. Logically if you exist and you do not have the right to live, you could not defend yourself against someone attacking you. What would be the definition of right in that case? Out of the definition of right you must have a right to live, if you had not, the other one could kill you (not against your rights in this case) and you could not defend yourself anymore since you were legally killed.
Same goes for property. Simple tit for tat.
Do not agree, although find it compelling.
Tit for tat is a logic we use a lot and it works in the sense "I can do to you" what "You can do to me". For property it would have to work like this: "I can call the land mine" if "you can call the land yours" but in that case "we can only call the land ours". This only becomes an issue if there is not sufficient "equivalent" land available though, people should be more mobile (I can call equivalent land mine, is sufficient), there is no right to be able to survive where you happen to fall on the ground.
Where I agree it works is "if you can buy property", "I can buy property", so if a society has property agreements, they are valid for all. This mainly means that you can not disown one person to give it to another, but you would have to disown everyone (with similar compensation) to redistribute more fairly, this will be very unpractical and we are far from a situation that would justify this IMHO.
Exactly my point, the excuses do not matter in rights (not for Humans, not for animals).
You are not held responsible for your motivations, you are responsible for your acts. Rights are not about how to judge, they merely indicate where a judgement is needed. Most judgements are made by people about their own acts. If you understand rights correctly, you might judge your acts correctly and thus act correctly. If animals do not judge rights correctly that makes them more probable right violators (cfr Danoff before), but it does not make that they have no rights.
If we accept that then I can still kill any animal I desire or treat them anyway I wish as they have shown a disregard for rights in all things. This is no different than punishing humans with imprisonment or death for showing disregard for the rights of others.
There are different views on this, but basically:
1) You need to see rights on an individual level (if not you put down the basis for racism), if one dog attacks you, you can defend yourself against that dog, not punish all dogs.
2) In my view there is a subjective judgement, you can not avoid it practically, I agree. Is the punishment in line with the rights violation the animal did? => this is always an opinion, not really worth discussing in general.
3) You can kill and treat anything the way you want, however if it is against their rights, you will be judged on it (or if you are lucky you get away with it). If you do nothing against their rights nobody should judge you!
You call it dodging your point, we say your point is irrelevant.
It was relevant to the discussion at the time. Since it was suggested that animals killing was excusable as it was for survival I was asking if the same excuse works for humans.
Sorry if that was not clear, yes, you can defend the rights violation on the same basis. So a wild animal killing a man for food is no different to me then a man killing the animal for food, seen from a pure rights viewpoint. I bet that even I will judge one different then the other due to value systems involved in judging.
The main point is that you do a rights violation, that might be justified, but basically in my view of moral, you are doing something immoral since the other choice is even more immoral according to your judgement. The only thing that rights can bring is show you it is immoral. That many judge it acceptable in the circumstances, does not make it moral, it remains a rights infringement.
You turned it away from those without the spring committing murder to them trespassing, vandalizing, and stealing and then have the owner of the spring commit homicide in an attempt to protect her property. Then you went on a tangential philosophical discussion of property rights vs right to life. That was irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
It was an unneeded distraction to answer your question, I agree on that.
The standard you hold humans to is subjective, it is about judgement, not about objective rights. That you value animals less then humans is irrelevant it changes nothing to the natural rights. That many do not respect animal rights, not even the other animals, is irrelevant to the existence of their rights.
Now, explain it with logic.
You start with a definition of a right, my current take: A right is something you can defend that takes the freedom of action away from someone that infringes your rights.
From that you can defend a set of rights: See the one above on "right to live"; although I do not like that rights formulation. Purely on the definition, without bringing in subjective parts.
The only thing you get out of this is you have the right that,....
and this is the logical part, the one that gives natural rights.
So basically this is a moral guide, I do not infringe the right of others, so I'm not doing anything wrong. All morals should include this otherwise they would be against rights and since the rights are purely logical, it would be against logic.
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Now life is not that simple: People/animals infringe rights. It does come out of rights that you can restrict the action of the other when they do not respect your rights, however it does not say how. A right states nothing about a punishment. So how to you get your right respected, how do you defend it?
We judge that we can take an action that we would normally see as immoral, because it is the only way we see that our rights can be defended (e.g. I kill in self defense).
Now this judgement is subjective linked to the standard you see. As people stated in North Korea some people find it OK to be killed by the government if that helps the community, that is their value judgement, I'm OK with that, it is their choice. They still have their rights though, even if they did not want to defend them. In the same way your value judgement on animals has no relevance to the rights animals have (in my view if it would you could use the same argumentation to bring slavery back into place).
So natural rights for me are purely based on Logic. A standard of behaviour is irrelevant to the right itself.
To practically defend those rights you end up in subjective value judgements (even if the judgement would only be exactly what right has been violated). There you will judge if the behaviour deserves punishment or not.
Laws is the most common way we are confronted with rights in an official way, they pervert us by mixing rights, wishes and standard judgements, once we can just focus on the right, we can see if we can find a solution that respects the rights of everyone, if so we do not do anything wrong, if not we can only rely on our judgement (which lead to slavery, genocides, racism, ...etc in the past).
Practice makes perfect man. The more often we recite it the less we have to think the next time we do.
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I think you miss one thing: even if it asks more effort to repeat, the more people understand rights the better rights will be defended.
