Yes, they violated rights, rights we have HERE and NOW, otherwise, how would it have happened? We evolved, nature stays the same, the laws of physics have been consistent with then, we didn't. So what changed? There's your answer, that's where to look for evidences.
I value your well being, I believe we should protect you as much as we can from pain and suffering, both psychological and physical. Nature don't care about you. Ask a rock.
I think the term natural rights is a confusing point for you.
Natural law/rights were already discussed by Plato and Aristotle, they do not say nature protects you from violations, it just states rights is something that comes naturally to you. This has the disadvantage that you see, that you do not have a written reference point, but has the advantage that they are constant in time and universal.
What changed is judgement, in the past agressors were not brought to justice for some vioalations of natural rights, violations that are now brought to justice. The rights did not change, the justice did. More on this below.
It's not that I don't like or disapprove of the common English usage, but if I look at an encyclopedia or a dictionary the definition of right is the same across both language.
You should look up natural law instead. It is confusing, but rights have been abused in laws, dictionaries, etc ...that is why most here do not follow what is already written.
What we state here is think, logically and come with conclusions from that. Making a reference to a mistake in some book is not helping, we actually think it is very easy.
Personally I started the same, but I could not find a definition of rights that made sense going through dictionaries, I'm still reading basic works like Kant, Locke, etc ... to come to a view that shows the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches.
The simple fact of existing does not entitle me to live free of harm.
That is something we all can confirm here.
I have as much of an objective right to my life as the outside world as an objective right to end it.
I think what you are missing here is the consequence of your logic, if you accept anyone to do harm to you, you can do harm to anyone.
It is actually one of my issues with rights.
1) If you approach it from the positive side (like most here), you see people innocent and respect rights, that puts the advantage is with the attacker (the one that violates rights.)
2) If you approach it from the negative side (I'll never have my rights respected) you better violate the rights of others first. What kind of society does that give you?
When we speak in objective terms, nature grants us no privilege beside being the sole writer of our thoughts (I am ruling out the subconscious here). Everything outside your brain is SHARED.
I can accept that everything outside of the brain interacts,I can accept nature grants us no priviledge, we have to fight for our rights.
But how do you know when to pick a fight against unjust laws, by understanding natural rights.
That is why I asked Fiero about is "natural" right idea, it doesn't make any sense to speak that way. A right is an entitlement, nature entitles us only to our mind. It's a very short discussion, that doesn't help us.
I think it is short for you.
Yes nature only entitles us to us (I doubt I'm only a mind, actually in my vision I'm a pure physical process, I have trouble linking a concept like "mind" to the electron exchanges in my brain) and apparently something like logic. This logic is something universal that allows us to communicate, discuss, argument.
... I am not arguing that we have no rights, but that they are not granted to us by nature, but society. We are the SUBJECT of this experiment. Our rights are not "God given", they're human decided.
Laws are human decided (even Sharia) that is your point.
We keep saying that Robinson Crusoe on his island could think about rights, logically and would come to the same conclusions as anybody else (if the person can make sufficient abstraction from preconception). This without a society.
And does that mean you also think natural rights is a non-nonsensical concept?
Natural rights is a non-nonsensical concept, I confirm, it is based on logic.
Justice is something completely different and that you get justice is a priviledge that our forefathers have fought for and this is part why we do the discussions here to assure more justice for the future.
By the way, at the beginning, when you talk about the right to live, you are actually mistaking "the reality of existing" for "the right to exist", two completely different concept.
We had some discussions about objectivity in this domain. Can we prove we exist?
It seems somehow that we have the impression that we can do something (e.g. a gravity experiment) and have it written down and have the impression someone else does the same coming to the same conclusion. That proves there is something objective in our reality of existing.
Same thing with rights, you can write down the logic and someone else can verify the logic.
No if you have no right to exist anyone can kill you and you can not defend yourself, since you do not have any basis to defend yourself, it is only your reality of existing that stops.
They will tell you the only right they have is how they feel about it.
No slaves will not tell you they have no right to be free, they will say you are correct, but it does not help them and they are in position that they can not do anything about it.
Look at the Arab spring, one guy committed suicide since his life was not worth living without his rights being respected. The others agreed and risked their lives to defend their rights.
If they had not logically looked at rights they had accepted the dictatorship in place.
Nature did not gave them any right to enable liberation from that, not even the right to live.
You have, like most, a misconception of what a right is. A right is something you can defend that restricts the actions of not innocent others.
Even if you can not get it, because the fittest does not allow you to get your right respected, you can defend it with arguments.
"The right to live" is nothing more then you can defend to stop people from taking an action that will kill you immediately. It does not mean that if you go walk in the mountains and break a leg that someone needs to come and safe you.
Nature did give them a weapon for liberation, natural rights, argumentation based on logic. It actually worked.
I am not saying those atrocities were right, because I'd need natural rights to argue that and I don't believe in natural rights.
If you say you do not believe in natural rights, you actually state the one at power can decide about me. They just have to
Until WE decide, what WE value, and protect it, those things happen, because nature did give those people the "right" to do those atrocious things.
No, it gave them the ability.
Indeed those people had the possibility to do those atrocious things, not the right.
What we value comes back in our judgement, that is subjective. However the right, if correctly logically fromed, never changed, that is why it is natural. That is why our current justice condemnes rights violations in the past, even if the law allowed them, they were rights violations.
... What I wanted is Fiero, or anyone else please, to explain to me what is this natural right [of property] he referenced originally.
Actually I'm one of the only ones rejecting natural rights of property.
For property to be a natural right, you need to prove that property is logical.
The logic mostly used is that if you work something, e.g. you plant crop, the combination (land + crop) becomes yours. I agree that this is logical in the sense that you did an effort and the result of that effort should be yours, you can defend that and property is indeed a concept that protects your effort.
Where I say it is not logical is that property takes away the freedom of everyone else to go on that land. Now where it can take away the freedom of not innocent people according to rights, it also takes away the freedom of innocent people, which is not in line with the definition of rights I hold at this moment.
So where you say "rights are an agreement of society" I agree with you on property "property is an agreement of society", but it is something you need to agree on since it does not follow the logic of rights.
I believe in the dogma of property, I did not find any system to protect your investment of effort without property.
The dangerous road to take, as history has taught us, is allowing law and force to determine rights. All the atrocities mentioned occurred because force enabled them and law legitimised them - societies determined rights.
The argument that we don't have real rights because they can be ignored is facile.
I do not believe it is that "facile", I'll try to illustrate below:
History has shown us that when societies determine what rights are according to force and makes laws about them we get human enslavement and mass murder. By the argument that force and law determines rights, no act of force, if legal, can be wrong or against rights. By that argument, slavery was right and the holocaust was right. By the argument that rights are innate, no act of force or law can be right if it is against innate rights. By that argument, slavery was wrong and the holocaust was wrong.
Rights help to determine what is wrong in all cases, some action against rights is wrong in all cases. Afterwards you come to:
... You have a right to defend your property; correct? But what exactly does this right encompass? Can you kill a human being, infringing on their right to live? Who decides? S...o...c.... see where this is going? ...
Rights do not equal justice.
Where I support the enthousiasm on Rights based on logic. There is no justice based on logic and somehow this is insufficiently clear in the statements in this thread. Justice is subjective and based on value systems, determined by society. That I confirm. I remain with logical objective rights though (that can only guide me to revolt against justice in an injust system)
Justice is a lot more complex, it needs rights as a basis, but this is not receprocical, rights do not need justice to exist.
I argued that rights are not absolutes, they are enforced and maintained by us, hence subjective to society. ... If rights are objective only our own thoughts hold to that definition. In the natural order of things you are victim to your environment and your well being is not a right, it's a privilege we've given each other.
That is correct: only our own thoughts hold the logical rights. You need to defend your rights, they are something we need to defend, they are not given.
But rights are absolutes, enforcement is justice, if rights were respected, there is no need for enforcement, no subjectivity of society. (I admit I'm avoiding a subject here)
Therefore I argue this proves "natural" (objective) rights is nonsensical. I firmly believe in the concept of fundamental rights, but I do believe I have those rights because I am lucky to live in Canada in the 21th century.
How do you come to fundamental rights? Where do they come from?
If you need to defend rights, how would you do it?
Fundamental rights are natural rights, given by nature in the sense that logic is universal (read Kant on this). Logic is the only way you can defend rights.
You are lucky on the justice system in Canada in the 21st century, but even that can be improved and that is our goal.
What use is a right if you don't benefit from it, seriously. A child sexual slave can have all the fundamental rights you want, he doesn't have those right until society comes in and give him those rights, until then he remains a slave with no rights.
Wrong, with the rights the child sexual slave can defend that it's rights are violated and try to break free. Without the rights the child has no arguments, if the others decide that is what is.
Trying to twist my words to make me look like I am supporting slavery and genocide in an attempt to discredit me is a sad argumentative.
I believe we use horrible examples to show people where we think their line of thinking goes wrong. I also find it agressive, but you should think how you will avoid the issues mentioned with your system. I missed that in your arguments.
Where does he say in his argument that it specifically supports slavery and genocide at any point in time? His argument is that society is the origin of human rights. Without society human rights do not exist. Think. It. Through.
We did think it through. This is the logic that comes out of society determins rights.
Premiss 1: Society determins rights.
Premiss 2: Society decides that it is a right to get a person in Africa and make them a slave.
Conclusion: So it is right to get someone in Africa and make them a slave.
We state that if you accept Premiss 1:
Logically if you expect an other to be a slave you must accept to be a slave yourself. So if the rich get the votes behind them and decide you should work without wages for them, you have to accept that.
So we state that Premiss 1 is illogical, that premiss would make that rights can change at will from society and would be against that rights can be defended, since sopciety can change it before you defend it.
Famine if you cannot comprehend that what is [morally] right and what are Rights are two completely and different concept, just stop already.
I do see a point in this.
But I do support the view that what is against rights is always against moral rights, otherwise moral rights would be illogical, since rights are based on logic.
However I do defend something like a "right to culture" and that would mean that you have moral rights that go further then logical rights.
Nevertheless, if someone states Rights and Moral are exactly the same, they have a system that is logical and coherent. Their culture is "I do not care if it is not against rights", that is a defendable culture. That people do not follow your culture is their right.
Your Rights as an individual living in the UK are NOT the same as the rights of women living in part of the middle east. Are you telling me they don't have less rights than we do?
They have the same rights, but justice is not done to them since society does not value the rights abuse. Famine was clear enough about the rest of the topic.
