How dare I believe in God? I choose to. Deal with it and move on. I’ll be happy to discuss it in a different thread. You atheists adhere to unproven beliefs of your own by way of an argument from ignorance. You claim that since nobody has proved God exists, it’s determined that God must not exist. Get it? I agree with Thomas Jefferson and Ron Paul that our liberties come from our Creator, not government. If you don’t like the use of the term “God” or “Creator” then consider our rights coming by way of birth. I believe what I believe. Be a little more tolerant if you believe differently.
I’ve searched the forum and I’m having trouble finding a thread that bashes Ron Paul for believing the same exact thing. Anybody want to completely discredit him and his message of liberty for believing our liberties come from our Creator? By all means, please go ahead; otherwise, being the creator of this thread, I recommend that we get back to the discussion of rights and liberty regarding non-human animal life and not the metaphysics of divinity, as many of you on here are incessantly distracted by. How dare I think differently than the community! Again, deal with it and move on.
The biggest problem with non-libertarian ethics is that they are rife with contradictions and errors. They cannot even get off the ground without property rights, and are forced to assume them but shroud them under different adjectives, like things belonging to “the people” or “man” in the abstract etc. They also try to justify behaviours that if taken to the interpersonal level would be sociopathic, but it is not surprising, as many of them are envy-driven sociopaths.
I therefore prefer approaches that attempt to demonstrate contradictions inhering in their propositions and putting them on the defensive. Hoppe and de Jasay take this route. Natural rights are all well and good and if you want to put the effort into it, they can plausibly be defended via a revised version of Aristotelian ethics, but I fail to see why the libertarian should be the one to do all the work. We are simply asking to be left alone.
I personally reject the premise that any supernatural being exists, let alone the god of the Bible.
I’m not sure what you mean by this.
I’ll go ahead and infer that you define “right to (something)” as “a fact that people should not take the (something in question)”. However, I consider this definition to be nonsensical based on my own definitions of “fact” (“an observation of something outside of the mind”) and “should” (“is expected”). So my question to you is how you think expectations can exist outside of the mind.
Autolukos, I kindly informed you in a personal message that I did not mean to hurt your ego/self perception/feelings (whatever term I used) in my prior posts and asked you to not insist on making contact with me on here. I understand your viewpoints may be different from mine, but I must publicly ask again as kindly as possible, please refrain from making contact with me because interacting with you is interfering with my enjoyment on Mises.org. If you insist on emailing me and attempting to antagonize me and continue this pointless, tedious and annoying ego-filled banter, I will let the admins know that you are trolling me, which frankly is juvenile and I do not appreciate, and at this point, I do not see any other alternative other than to report you.
From here onward, due to your belligerent discourse, I will not respond to you. I believe that at this point, operant conditioning is the best method by which to condition your response, so in ignoring you, I simply, peacefully hope you will refrain from contacting me period. Unfortunately, I realize comments like this seem to be fuel to your fire, so while you may persist for a little while, I want to publicly let you know one last time to please stop contacting me since a private email apparently does not work. It is a simple request that I have politely asked; please respect it.
Rights are those things that are guaranteed to a rational being by nature in the absence of all possible violations of other rational beings. This is a category of things that exists objectively. This category of things has existed since time began. While my mind perceives this category, it is not required for its existence. Nor is my mind required to create the things which populate the category. My mind simply discovers the rights that already exist. Their only utility is to confer knowledge of what things I am guaranteed in the absence of a violation of my rights by other men. I can now refrain from violating the rights of others and attempt to prevent the violation of my rights.
Obviously my definition of the word “rights” might vary from yours. But nature is the only system that can make any true guarantees. Discussing the “rights” conferred by man seems like a futile exercise to me. Such rights could never be depended on for consistency or for observation.
Really what I am doing is ruling out things that are not guaranteed by nature, and then I say that whatever is left shall be defined as a right. This rules out all possible harm between men. That might be another definition of the word “rights”: the system of rules that (if observed) prevents all harm between rational beings.
It believe my method of discovering these rights fulfills that definition of rights. It is possible that other systems of rules exist that can (if observed) prevent all harm between rational beings, but I find that unlikely.
Rights aren’t defined by utility. A right without practical utility is still a right. The tendency of other people to recognize a right is also irrelevant. If a “right” is given by society, it is not a right at all. It is a privilege since it is revocable. If rights are given by God, yet a secularist society ignores those rights, that does not invalidate those rights. It simply violates them.
The OP is about whether or not animals are rational beings. If they are, they have rights. If not, they don’t. I can’t say for sure if a dog can reason. Surely a dog might one-day evolve to the point of rationality. Will it be easy to say exactly when this occurs, or even in which dog it happens first? I doubt it.
@dude: You are conflating rights and power. While you have an inalienable “right” to do anything with your body which you can will it to do, this isn’t what people have in mind when they ask “what are my rights”? Your rights are precisely those things you are right to do, that is, those things which you can justify. The word “rights” has a common origin with the word “right-of-way” and bears a conceptual similarity - the person who was in the right in the case of a collision (conflict) is the person who had the right-of-way (the person who was right).
This is why rights (law, more generally) and morality are inextricable.
Judge Napolitano, in a way very similar to Ron Paul and Thomas Jefferson, sums up rights very nicely here. What is a right, according to Judge Napolitano?
What is a right? A right is a gift from God that extends from our humanity. Thinkers from St. Thomas Aquinas, to Thomas Jefferson, to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to Pope John Paul II have all argued that our rights are a natural part of our humanity. We own our bodies, thus we own the gifts that emanate from our bodies. So, our right to life, our right to develop our personalities, our right to think as we wish, to say what we think, to publish what we say, our right to worship or not worship, our right to travel, to defend ourselves, to use our own property as we see fit, our right to due process — fairness — from the government, and our right to be left alone, are all rights that stem from our humanity. These are natural rights that we are born with. The government doesn’t give them to us and the government doesn’t pay for them and the government can’t take them away, unless a jury finds that we have violated someone else’s rights.
I looked on the online etymology dictionary, and I found the verb and adjective form but that’s all. If someone could find the actual etymology of the term right as a noun, I’d be much appreciative.
This is a poetic way to state our rights but I do not think it is a rigorous statement of rights. What rights do I have in my dealings with a Muslim? After all, he does not even acknowledge the existence of the Christian God. What rights do I have in my dealings with an atheist who does not recognize the existence of any God? Rights as a matter of human affairs can be explained in wholly human language (without resort to theology). In other words, stating that rights come from God implies that cross-religious or atheistic dealings are “might makes right”, which is clearly false. Human law does not logically depend on theology in any way.
Please point out just where you asked me in a private message to not make contact with you in the forum. Nevertheless, you didn’t actually hurt my feelings, as I’ve already made abundantly clear.
Your enjoyment on Mises.org is entirely up to you. But as I said before, I will make contact with you as I see fit. That includes making contact with you both publicly and privately. Do you understand?
What effect do you expect this to have on me, exactly?
I don’t believe you in the slightest. I think you will respond to me - at least eventually.
I’ll be the first to tell you that such “operant conditioning” won’t work.
Now you’re really just repeating yourself.
Make me.
Now why don’t you actually respond to my earlier post. I actually wasn’t being belligerent there.
Clayton, your question begs another. What rights do you have in your dealing with a socialist, a nihilist, or with any person who rejects your notion of rights?
The obvious answer is that your rights are not dependent on who you are dealing with. I don’t see any implication of might makes right in the religious origin of rights. A religion can easily reject all violence, even in self defense.
I disagree with part of the above quote. Life is not a right. Nature cannot violate a right (by definition). So a natural death disproves the right to life. Only rational beings can violate a right.
I suppose being born is really what facilitates the rights. So atheists can still believe in natural rights, basically by way of birth, whereas theists are probably more geared toward the cosmological origin. I see one being a matter of cosmology and metaphysics, the other ethics.