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Comment by mondoshawan | Hacker News Reader

Rights are not bestowed upon us from our government -- they are natural and inalienable and a part of what makes us human.

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While I'm a rabid defender of rights, I don't agree they are not bestowed upon us, nor that they are unable to be taken away. Ask anyone in prison or a wartorn or repressive country if they still have all of their human rights. They don't. Rights CAN be taken away, and routinely are. The question is do we fight to retake and retain them.

I think it's just a terminology thing. Naturally our rights are inalienable, but we tend to rely on our governments to enforce this reality.

The terminology here is absolutely key, though. A government cannot imbue someone with "rights" -- only privileges.

For those who are interested, there is more information of the philosophy of natural/inalienable rights available on Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_and_legal_rights

You misunderstand -- I'm not saying they can't be taken away. What I'm saying is that they cannot be /given/, /granted/, or /bestowed/ because governments don't make or own rights.

Every human is innately free whether or not a governmental entity likes it or not. Whether or not those rights are oppressed or not is another story.

You're making rights out to be something they aren't. Humans, outside of government, humans "in the wild" have exactly the rights an animal has: they're free. Free to be food for something bigger, or to defend themselves if they can. But that's about it. Rights are a human-made concept, and can only be given from one person to others.

So if rights are bestowed upon someone by another person, who bestowed those rights to the grantee? And who bestowed them to that person, and so on?

Now? Ideally we give the right to hand out rights, via voting. Originally? Whoever could take control by force, dolled out rights as they saw fit.

Can you back that idea up with historical fact? Or is that a guess?

It's a guess. Can you back up the idea that rights are anything other than a human-made concept, at all? That they're somehow intrinsic to the universe?

I don't have to as I didn't assert that.

Fair enough, so what's your answer to your question "So if rights are bestowed upon someone by another person, who bestowed those rights to the grantee? And who bestowed them to that person, and so on?" i.e., what's your core assertion about this subject?

I'm a Christian, so my belief is that God created us with a set of rights: the right to survive (food, clothing and shelter), the right to exist peacefully in creation and the right to live securely.

As humans, we routinely violate those rights.

You did ask :-)

You only have rights as long as your government is willing to respect them. For this purpose, bestowing a right and not taking it away are exactly the same (and you acknowledge below that a government can "take away" rights).

Secondly, a "right" is a human concept, born of human logic. It is not natural, the Universe & Reality doesn't care one way or another what "rights" humans have.

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