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Comment by happiness_idx | Hacker News Reader

"rights" are purely metaphysical super natural constructs they're only enforced via might.

Enjoy your corporate overlord fiefdoms

Funny how few people understand that “rights” are not fundamental. What good is a “right” that nobody observes you actually have?

Rights are granted by the legal observation of said right. If your right boils down to words without observability, it’s not a right.

They’re a convenient term for “freedom we care about a lot”. They’re good as a propaganda (neutral sense) tool.

Folks getting hung up on “well that’s a right and this other thing can’t be because technically…” are definitely missing the last 200ish years of thought in that area, though. As are the ones who think rights are actually better-protected than other freedoms (aside from the PR boost of the name! And maybe “popular” rights are better-enshrined in law, but that’s not inherent in their being a right—we could so-protect anything)

There’s no set list that’s definitely correct and they also don’t “exist” in any meaningful sense if they can’t be exercised (any more than Tinkerbell exists). It’s just a nice label. Which isn’t nothing! But they’re not “real” in the sense some people suppose they are, even philosophically.

I think a lot of this confusion stems from focus in US schools on the political philosophy state-of-the-art c. 1776 as an underpinning of a kind of US Civil Religion. Most of that stuff’s kinda crap. Go read the famously influential Second Treatise, it’s actually a pretty easy read and not that long. It’s plainly (to a modern reader) not strong.

This all seems like an awfully pretentious way to say "I disagree with the founding fathers of the US. They lived a long time ago so they are obviously wrong, ammirite?" No, you're not right. Human nature hasn't changed in thousands of years, much less hundreds. While we might have better technology than they did, we're still just a bunch of monkeys trying to get along.

Uh, no. The “natural rights” line of thought has just proven to be more-or-less a dead end, in political philosophy. It’s hard to make a strong argument for it, especially without resorting to the divine. “Rights” are a rhetorical tool—which isn’t nothing, but arguing that they have some reality beyond that is… well, if you can really nail such an argument, you can get some papers published and they’re guaranteed to be influential, put it that way.

Having been wrong about some things doesn’t make someone stupid. Plato got some stuff wrong. Doesn’t make him dumb.

Rights are just another layer of rules in a society. The most fundamental rules, I guess one would say. We can disagree about them but some people pretend to disagree for disingenuous reasons. For example, in almost every part of the world, one has at least some kind of right to self-defense. It's unnatural to not defend one's self. Even the stupidest and wimpiest animals will bite if attacked. Does the parallel with nature make it a natural law? I think one could make the argument. Besides there isn't too much downside in letting people defend themselves within reason.

I think we could get very analytical about some rights of course. The right to not incriminate yourself is a subtle one. But it relies on an argument about a number of biological and practical realities.

Not everything has a parallel so direct as pointing to what animals do. But as social structures are evolved rather than simply imagined, there may be naturalistic arguments to be had in favor of rights that facilitate everyone getting along.

Anyway, that's the overview of how I'd approach it all. It's probably been done by someone. If you happen to know, I'd appreciate the reference.

Part of why the “natural” angle is so hard to argue strongly is that you can use it to advance almost anything as a right, by selecting which parts to highlight. Is defense a right, or is safety—what self-defense seeks—a right? These are very different things, and it’s not clear that either’s more-correct nor that they’re wholly compatible. Does the animal defending itself prefer to defend itself, or would it rather not need to in the first place?

This is the kind of trouble one gets into with these analogies-from-nature, or with the kind of fictional humanity-in-the-state-of-nature stories that used to be in vogue for “proving” which things are or are not natural rights: they’re usually superfluous, because we’re just using motivated reasoning to reach the same conclusions we would have if asked to list what we think ought to be rights without that foundation. Instead of discussing which outcomes are likely and preferred by protecting some set of rights, we waste time deciding which set of from-nature analogies or tales are valid (if we go down this road and find that holding slaves is a right—what then? But we won’t, because the whole thing is just motivated reasoning anyway, so we’ll pick some different set of stories to ensure we don’t end up there—repeat for everything else)

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