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> My rights existed prior to the Bill of Rights and the government "Existed" in what sense!? Are they deducible by pure reason? Were they written on stone tabl

> My rights existed prior to the Bill of Rights and the government "Existed" in what sense!? Are they deducible by pure reason? Were they written on stone tablets? Seriously though, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence may refer to the idea of natural rights, but in my opinion this is due to the prevailing state of philosophy and political theory at the time, and doesn't bind Americans to forever understand their own rights in terms of "prior" natural rights that are "later" secured by the government.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
That's what the documents say - natural rights codified. If we no longer believe that, we need a new set of documents. And there are plenty of folks who believe that. If we were writing new founding documents, we'd have a pretty good idea of what 'should' be rights. Where does that come from?
- vertex-four 11y ago
  > Where does that come from? It comes heavily from what you've been taught is important, which, funnily enough, is culture-dependent. A good many people would, for example, argue that a person has a right to shelter and sustenance, and to demand that from others when they can't access it - but other people will argue that people have a right to refuse to give resources to others, even up to the point of refusing taxation. One might argue that one has a right to work without discrimination or harassment - others might argue in favour of freedom of association and free speech, "if you don't like it you don't have to work for them". To move even further away from currently implemented systems, one might argue that private property is not a right, which is actually entirely reasonable - property is solely a "right" to abridge others' rights, if we're going by the "what's a right is whatever you're allowed to do if nobody stopped you" definition. We could even argue that the ability to break a contract without retribution must be protected as a right, in some schools of thought. What rights "should" be protected - and in what circumstances - winds up being a matter of the opinion of the people who decide which rights to protect. There is no formal system of logic which starts off with no assumptions, and many of the ones which back politics start off with the goal - to protect people's rights, we must... protect people's rights. Even the idea that a founding document should primarily enumerate rights is because of what you've been taught - why not enumerate duties as well, or instead? Why not write a manifesto with a general goal and proposed method of getting there and call that your founding document? What even is the goal of a founding document? Why is abridging your ability to do whatever you want to any degree abhorrent - and why is abridging that ability in certain circumstances not so? Is it impossible to come up with a stable system which holds up a different ideal? I don't really expect all these questions to be answered, as the exact answers are nearly entirely pointless - the point is that these questions can all be asked and different answers can be reached, many of which make sense. For example, an argument that nobody has a duty to feed and shelter somebody on the edge of starvation, as that harms the person doing so, entirely ignores the harm that this protected right has on the person about to die of starvation - although of course to bring that up requires that the goal of your system of protected rights is to reduce harm, which may not be the case. However, the only way "we must protect all these listed rights at all costs, ignoring all other input" makes sense is if the goal of your system is solely to protect those rights. I don't personally feel that's a very useful thing to do, as it's tautological. A good many people will disagree.
  - EdHominem 11y ago
    Right, rights are a horrible way to express the limits we impose on governments. You can starve in a hellish jail despite all the god-given yada yada. If 'right' is to mean anything, it has to basically be seen as a natural-law restatement of "If you infringe these freedoms (restrict food, etc) then the victim will try to kill you and we'll be on his side." In that case, a right is anything you'll fight to provide to others. (That being the only long-term effective way to guarantee it for yourself as well.)
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > That's what the documents say - natural rights codified. What documents? The Constitution says nothing of the sort. > If we were writing new founding documents, we'd have a pretty good idea of what 'should' be rights. Where does that come from? To the extent that people would share common preferences as to what rights should be protected, its a matter of shared cultural norms shaped by our political/legal history; there'd also be considerable disagreement, too.
  - snowwrestler 11y ago
    You can't write a Constitution like the United States', without natural rights. The most basic question in any government is "who has the right to rule"? The very first line of the Constitution establishes that it is the people who hold that right in the U.S., which means they have some sort of natural rights. If they didn't, they couldn't form a government in the first place, for lack of sovereignty.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > You can't write a Constitution like the United States', without natural rights. Sure you can. > The most basic question in any government is "who has the right to rule"? I don't think that's true. I think that you are assuming a framework of natural rights to make this statement, which is a circular argument. > The very first line of the Constitution establishes that it is the people who hold that right in the U.S., which means they have some sort of natural rights. Alternatively, the first line of the Constitution acknowledges the empirical fact that government is simply that which people treat as legitimate authority, and therefore, independent of any notion of right, the people have an inherent power to govern and choose their government, as any government that the people do not choose to treat as such cannot government, and anything that the people choose to treat as a government can govern, whether or not one assumes any mystical notion of pre-legal "rights". Now, I suppose you could call this inherent, immutable power a "natural right" -- it is a real thing that really exists -- but, if so, its fundamentally different than all the other things that people hold out as "natural rights", which are not inherent, immutable powers, but instead are simply preferences for the conduct of relations between persons (including persons acting through or on behalf of "governments"), rendering the whole field a morass of equivocation.
logfromblammo 11y ago
They are not exactly deducible by pure reason, but an artificial life algorithm based on human psychology and randomly sampled polls might be able to figure out the optimal allocation of powers to delegate to the government and to be retained by the people to maximize a total public benefit metric. What we have now in the US is basically a guess from circa 1783, based on the prior centuries of British-American Common Law, plus a few hotfixes in the form of subsequent amendments. This iteration has only run for 2.33 centuries, and hasn't entirely collapsed yet, but a preliminary analysis seems to indicate that the interstate commerce clause, self-reinforcing redistricting procedures, and the currency clause should have undergone a bit more scrutiny the first time around. As for "natural rights", so long as "might makes right" is the dominant political paradigm on Earth, the natural rights are pretty much everything that people might threaten some form of rebellion over, if they were to be infringed. So there is no universal set. Different people would go to war over different principles. If you love Taco Tuesday, and enough people share that sentiment that you would collectively present a legitimate threat to your current government if you were to actively oppose it, then you have a natural right to eat tacos on Tuesdays. Any government infringes upon that right at its own peril. That natural right is "secured" by the government only in the sense that its officers don't want to be fired (or guillotined) over a handful of cilantro. It does not secure and defend natural rights on behalf of the people, but avoids attacking them--actually just avoids presenting the appearance of attacking them--because the people will defend them if they are threatened. So your rights did not exist before you were born. They didn't even exist as you were a baby. What you may have thought in retrospect was your right to live was actually your parents' right to not have their children killed. You didn't get any of your own natural rights until you acquired the ability to inflict some form of pain--or at least inconvenience--upon potential adversaries. Your right to yummy dessert after yucky vegetables was not defended by any government, but by the threat of the wailing, flailing temper-tantrum. You decide what your "natural" rights are. If the government can't find some way to slot them into its existing laws, then you will eventually have a problem with each other.
- newjersey 11y ago
  > You decide what your "natural" rights are. If the government can't find some way to slot them into its existing laws, then you will eventually have a problem with each other. Going back to the declaration of independence, the US had no more right to be independent than the Confederate States did. "After the Americans declared their independence, they had to win it by force." Similarly, the Confederate States had to do the same. I think most of us have a strangely complacent thought process when it comes to individual rights. We think that rights are eternal and they will just exist forever. However, it seems that if we don't defend the rights they will morph or even go away if they are inconvenient to someone in power.
c-slice 11y ago
This was the thesis of the Declaration of Independence upon which the theory for the Constitution was based. That natural rights are 1) exist and 2) are "God given" and are not granted by governments. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...."
- vacri 11y ago
  It speaks to the power of that part of US historical documentation that despite it declaring all men equal (women miss out again), the US then spent the next 80 years owning one type of human as property. If the core essence of the words were immediately ignored by the original authors, why should they be considered so ironclad today?
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    I don't bring this up to defend it, but it was pretty clear that Africans weren't actually considered people at the time. You can't use modern value judgements unless you want a dissonant argument.
    - vacri 11y ago
      > You can't use modern value judgements unless you want a dissonant argument This is my whole point! It's dissonant. There is no point in holding to the purist ideals of a document, if the authors themselves wrote it to ignore the invconvenient facts of life. Some people talk of the authors like they're some sort of demigods, and therefore any of their utterances are uncontestable. Highlighting dissonance like this is important it countering this trend.
      - c-slice 11y ago
        There's no point to holding to the purist ideals of the document because the authors didn't uphold it fully? That's illogical.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> Seriously though, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence may refer to the idea of natural rights The second does, the first does not.
EdHominem 11y ago
They existed because had the government not acknowledged our freedoms we wouldn't have accepted the government. It's not like people were sitting around in fear and a government walked by and said "Hey, how about some rights in trade for tax?". They proposed and created a government that helped to protect the rights they had already decided to die protecting.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

That's what the documents say - natural rights codified. If we no longer believe that, we need a new set of documents. And there are plenty of folks who believe that. If we were writing new founding documents, we'd have a pretty good idea of what 'should' be rights. Where does that come from?

vertex-four 11y ago
> Where does that come from? It comes heavily from what you've been taught is important, which, funnily enough, is culture-dependent. A good many people would, for example, argue that a person has a right to shelter and sustenance, and to demand that from others when they can't access it - but other people will argue that people have a right to refuse to give resources to others, even up to the point of refusing taxation. One might argue that one has a right to work without discrimination or harassment - others might argue in favour of freedom of association and free speech, "if you don't like it you don't have to work for them". To move even further away from currently implemented systems, one might argue that private property is not a right, which is actually entirely reasonable - property is solely a "right" to abridge others' rights, if we're going by the "what's a right is whatever you're allowed to do if nobody stopped you" definition. We could even argue that the ability to break a contract without retribution must be protected as a right, in some schools of thought. What rights "should" be protected - and in what circumstances - winds up being a matter of the opinion of the people who decide which rights to protect. There is no formal system of logic which starts off with no assumptions, and many of the ones which back politics start off with the goal - to protect people's rights, we must... protect people's rights. Even the idea that a founding document should primarily enumerate rights is because of what you've been taught - why not enumerate duties as well, or instead? Why not write a manifesto with a general goal and proposed method of getting there and call that your founding document? What even is the goal of a founding document? Why is abridging your ability to do whatever you want to any degree abhorrent - and why is abridging that ability in certain circumstances not so? Is it impossible to come up with a stable system which holds up a different ideal? I don't really expect all these questions to be answered, as the exact answers are nearly entirely pointless - the point is that these questions can all be asked and different answers can be reached, many of which make sense. For example, an argument that nobody has a duty to feed and shelter somebody on the edge of starvation, as that harms the person doing so, entirely ignores the harm that this protected right has on the person about to die of starvation - although of course to bring that up requires that the goal of your system of protected rights is to reduce harm, which may not be the case. However, the only way "we must protect all these listed rights at all costs, ignoring all other input" makes sense is if the goal of your system is solely to protect those rights. I don't personally feel that's a very useful thing to do, as it's tautological. A good many people will disagree.
- EdHominem 11y ago
  Right, rights are a horrible way to express the limits we impose on governments. You can starve in a hellish jail despite all the god-given yada yada. If 'right' is to mean anything, it has to basically be seen as a natural-law restatement of "If you infringe these freedoms (restrict food, etc) then the victim will try to kill you and we'll be on his side." In that case, a right is anything you'll fight to provide to others. (That being the only long-term effective way to guarantee it for yourself as well.)
dragonwriter 11y ago
> That's what the documents say - natural rights codified. What documents? The Constitution says nothing of the sort. > If we were writing new founding documents, we'd have a pretty good idea of what 'should' be rights. Where does that come from? To the extent that people would share common preferences as to what rights should be protected, its a matter of shared cultural norms shaped by our political/legal history; there'd also be considerable disagreement, too.
- snowwrestler 11y ago
  You can't write a Constitution like the United States', without natural rights. The most basic question in any government is "who has the right to rule"? The very first line of the Constitution establishes that it is the people who hold that right in the U.S., which means they have some sort of natural rights. If they didn't, they couldn't form a government in the first place, for lack of sovereignty.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > You can't write a Constitution like the United States', without natural rights. Sure you can. > The most basic question in any government is "who has the right to rule"? I don't think that's true. I think that you are assuming a framework of natural rights to make this statement, which is a circular argument. > The very first line of the Constitution establishes that it is the people who hold that right in the U.S., which means they have some sort of natural rights. Alternatively, the first line of the Constitution acknowledges the empirical fact that government is simply that which people treat as legitimate authority, and therefore, independent of any notion of right, the people have an inherent power to govern and choose their government, as any government that the people do not choose to treat as such cannot government, and anything that the people choose to treat as a government can govern, whether or not one assumes any mystical notion of pre-legal "rights". Now, I suppose you could call this inherent, immutable power a "natural right" -- it is a real thing that really exists -- but, if so, its fundamentally different than all the other things that people hold out as "natural rights", which are not inherent, immutable powers, but instead are simply preferences for the conduct of relations between persons (including persons acting through or on behalf of "governments"), rendering the whole field a morass of equivocation.

logfromblammo 11y ago

They are not exactly deducible by pure reason, but an artificial life algorithm based on human psychology and randomly sampled polls might be able to figure out the optimal allocation of powers to delegate to the government and to be retained by the people to maximize a total public benefit metric. What we have now in the US is basically a guess from circa 1783, based on the prior centuries of British-American Common Law, plus a few hotfixes in the form of subsequent amendments. This iteration has only run for 2.33 centuries, and hasn't entirely collapsed yet, but a preliminary analysis seems to indicate that the interstate commerce clause, self-reinforcing redistricting procedures, and the currency clause should have undergone a bit more scrutiny the first time around. As for "natural rights", so long as "might makes right" is the dominant political paradigm on Earth, the natural rights are pretty much everything that people might threaten some form of rebellion over, if they were to be infringed. So there is no universal set. Different people would go to war over different principles. If you love Taco Tuesday, and enough people share that sentiment that you would collectively present a legitimate threat to your current government if you were to actively oppose it, then you have a natural right to eat tacos on Tuesdays. Any government infringes upon that right at its own peril. That natural right is "secured" by the government only in the sense that its officers don't want to be fired (or guillotined) over a handful of cilantro. It does not secure and defend natural rights on behalf of the people, but avoids attacking them--actually just avoids presenting the appearance of attacking them--because the people will defend them if they are threatened. So your rights did not exist before you were born. They didn't even exist as you were a baby. What you may have thought in retrospect was your right to live was actually your parents' right to not have their children killed. You didn't get any of your own natural rights until you acquired the ability to inflict some form of pain--or at least inconvenience--upon potential adversaries. Your right to yummy dessert after yucky vegetables was not defended by any government, but by the threat of the wailing, flailing temper-tantrum. You decide what your "natural" rights are. If the government can't find some way to slot them into its existing laws, then you will eventually have a problem with each other.

newjersey 11y ago
> You decide what your "natural" rights are. If the government can't find some way to slot them into its existing laws, then you will eventually have a problem with each other. Going back to the declaration of independence, the US had no more right to be independent than the Confederate States did. "After the Americans declared their independence, they had to win it by force." Similarly, the Confederate States had to do the same. I think most of us have a strangely complacent thought process when it comes to individual rights. We think that rights are eternal and they will just exist forever. However, it seems that if we don't defend the rights they will morph or even go away if they are inconvenient to someone in power.

c-slice 11y ago

This was the thesis of the Declaration of Independence upon which the theory for the Constitution was based. That natural rights are 1) exist and 2) are "God given" and are not granted by governments. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...."

vacri 11y ago
It speaks to the power of that part of US historical documentation that despite it declaring all men equal (women miss out again), the US then spent the next 80 years owning one type of human as property. If the core essence of the words were immediately ignored by the original authors, why should they be considered so ironclad today?
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  I don't bring this up to defend it, but it was pretty clear that Africans weren't actually considered people at the time. You can't use modern value judgements unless you want a dissonant argument.
  - vacri 11y ago
    > You can't use modern value judgements unless you want a dissonant argument This is my whole point! It's dissonant. There is no point in holding to the purist ideals of a document, if the authors themselves wrote it to ignore the invconvenient facts of life. Some people talk of the authors like they're some sort of demigods, and therefore any of their utterances are uncontestable. Highlighting dissonance like this is important it countering this trend.
    - c-slice 11y ago
      There's no point to holding to the purist ideals of the document because the authors didn't uphold it fully? That's illogical.

dragonwriter 11y ago

> Seriously though, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence may refer to the idea of natural rights The second does, the first does not.

EdHominem 11y ago

They existed because had the government not acknowledged our freedoms we wouldn't have accepted the government. It's not like people were sitting around in fear and a government walked by and said "Hey, how about some rights in trade for tax?". They proposed and created a government that helped to protect the rights they had already decided to die protecting.