As for contract guarantees, your ability to enforce the stipulations of the contract yourself or obtain the services of a third party to enforce the contract are all the guarantees that are needed.
Right, the credit score argument.
That’s right. Those are serious guarantees.
I do not understand. Please explain.
Which part?
All of it.
Forget contracts, I like this one.
Other people ready to protect them.
Basically, the way I think of it is for someone to have the right to something they have to have the power to protect that right. Otherwise, for all practical intents and purposes, it’s useless. For humans to have rights, they must come from some kind of powerful entity. Either man as a collective (in which case we made them up and try to enforce them) or God made them and he/she/it enforces them. If neither exists to enforce the rights of man then those rights cease to exist.
I can already imagine how immediately people will ask “so might makes right?” No, mIght makes possible. Without might, those rights can’t possibly exist. Who decides what’s right or wrong? I don’t know. Maybe God. Maybe man.
Seconded.
“I know it’s not from God because not everyone believes in a god.”
“…who determines our rights?”
i dont know what you particular view on god is. if you believe in a god i expect you yourself believe that rights extend somehow from your god.
if there is a god even those who dont believe in a god would likely still get their rights from their creator that they have failed to acknowledge.
so i dont think you know for sure if your rights doon tcome from god.
try searching for god and see if you can find some rights.
no one gives you your rights that’s why they’re “inalienable.” Your rights exist as the universe exists and they aren’t enforced by god or government. Only by you.
Rights obviously do come from somebody, namely, the obligator of the contract. Once the transaction has been agreed upon by the two parties, one party is now entitled to something he wasn’t prior, he becomes the right-holder, the other party is now under an obligation he wasn’t prior.
Rights don’t exist if there are no people. I don’t see how they exist or how you can speak about people having rights in a chaotic society either.
The concept of rights is utterly pointless under such conditions, also where exactly do they come from and how do you define what they are?
I think the position that rights exist only when there is ethics is much more reasonable. It can answer how the rights come into existence and they don’t become meaningless ideas that have no relevance in practice. Ethics implies that there is at least some small degree of enforcement as well, and without enforcement rights are meaningless.
We can of course speak about which rights there should be in either society but not which rights are.
Rights emerge from law. Law emerges from successful dispute resolution via non-violent means. Rights are not determined by anyone. They do not come from a supernatural being and they most especially do not come from government… in fact, government is the rights violator par excellence. Rights (and law) are a lot like language… no one designed it - no one can even change it - yet everybody knows what it is. But just as language can be censored by systematic violence, so can rights be trampled by the systematized rights violator, the State.
Clayton -
Note that you have many rights which you do not or cannot enforce. This is evidence that rights also do not emerge from the individual.
Clayton -
Two problems with that.
1.) Are you saying that there are other actors outside of individuals which ‘give’ you rights?
2.) If unenforced, your rights nullify then why/how could we ever protest against the state?
From your might. And others’.
Its very popular to say that might makes right. if you have rights its cause of the might being exercised or excersible.
I think it should at least be considered that rights for you and others are caused by self-restraint of ones might in the latter case, and the self-restraint of others might on the former.
in that way ‘not-might makes right’
Sovereignties determine rights. Everyone has a free will and everyone can possess a set a morals and personal rules, so anyone can determine rights. However, it is common for people to give up their sovereignty to someone/thing else, whether it be an institution like a state, or a hypothetical being like God, for many different reasons. The phrase “Don’t Tread On Me” reflects the culture of Revolutionary America asserting their right to determine their own rights, for example.