a right to life, can be construed in one of two ways
a negative right, ; no 3rd party can coerce the physical body property of the ‘living person’ under consideration.
juan and brain must reject this version if they are consistent that right to life is something other than property right in bodies. because property right in bodies is sufficient to protect a body from coercion ;and a right to life that is not a property right adds nothing and so can be discarded as superfluous, or they must state what a right to life means if its more than a body property right, i.e. it must do something that a body property right cant do, but when we are negatively formulating the right, this cant be.
a positive right; 3rd parties must oblige the positive life right holder in his demands to resources and services that sustain his life. BrainP explicity derided this conception as did I.
yes, presumably you asked why i am amazed people believe in positive right to life concepts.
(plus, I am equally amazed if they believe only in negative right to life, but then somehow arbitrarily proclaim that there is something special about ‘life’ that cant be said in reference to private property’)
As did I in the thread in which you argued for the right of property owners to kill children in cold blood when they wander in their lawns. What’s was your point anyway ? Were you suggesting I’m advocating positive rights ?
Some people are perfectly content to eschew the risk and expense of ownership in favor of renting and will gladly acquiesce in the terms that are written for them. The success of the State and the fact that employees greatly outnumber employers demonstrates that most people are so inclined. This is why the State cannot be externally ovethrown. Rather, it must be shown to be a weaker competitor in the provision of services for which people will pay. This is already happening in Rio de Janiero, where poor people pool their resources and pay mercs to patrol keep order in their neighborhoods.
my point is that if you arent advocating positive rights, and you are advocating it as a negative right, you are then guilty of tlaking nonsense when you say that human rights are not merely property rights.
Because a “right to life” doesn’t mean you can compel others to pay for your cancer treatment, or even your tetanus shot. Or even the removal of a splinter, if that’s all it would take.
we could discuss this, but whats the point? , most people here including you are at least misesian enough to hold that phytsical property rights, and noless peoples bodies property should be respected. if you are trying a rhetorical trick, or just lets make nir work hard on a thread where he has said lots of stuff that challenged us then i wont play. give me a good reason that i should , on this thread, explain why property rights should be respected (bearing in mind that you agree)
what caused him to do it is irrelevant given the context that we all agree on it, (despite having different reasons for agreeing it); therefore , why should we bring it up.
i.e. juan is challenging me to flesh out non-controversial issues. i.e. its a pointless branching of the thread.
Well, it seems to me that in order to justify physical property rights you would have to appeal to something else, probably above property rights in a philosophical sense. You can’t justify body ownership in terms of general ownership. That’s just circular.
You say that killing people is not OK because it’s a violation of body ownership, no different in essence than, say, stealing a dime. So I wonder why physical property is to be respected…
well, i’ll let some others take over and get back to you in the morning after i’ve slept. its 2am here. im not sure if i’ve misread you on other threads, are you a catholic?, if so, would appealing to anything that is not G-d lack explanatory appeal to you? (i will read your answer in the morning, adieu)
I was responding to your first query in response to another’s post as to why the “right to life” is actually something of a metaphor. That is, it is a negative right only that follows from self-ownership. Since we own ourselves, since we own the fruits of the labor of ourselves, then we can’t be compelled to guarantee an equal opportunity for life for every person. This means inequality of outcomes: a dysfunctional and/or low IQ individual who can’t hold a job or can’t generate enough output to afford a kidney transplant is going to die, and a well-adjusted and/or high IQ individual who runs a successful business or who has enough sympathetic family members to bear the cost of a kidney transplant is going to live. The exercise of the right to life, it would therefore appear, is based on others’ relative values of the worth of that particular life.
Thus, we can talk about the principle of the right to life all we want, but all the market is concerned with is the exercise of that right, and that is where we get to the subject of costs and who’s going to pay them.
I think this really bugs some people here. I’m beginning to understand the dichotomy on this website better.