Sir Xsarus wrote:
Quote:
Yes. But at the risk of repeating myself, the right to those things is not granted by giving those things to people. The right to something means that there exists no artificially maintained rule or power that prevents you from obtaining them if you could otherwise in the absence of that rule or power. Handing the thing to someone doesn't tell us anything about whether that person has a right to it.
This is how you define rights. It's not how other people define rights, nor is it any more or less correct. If you want to be specific you can use the term Natural Rights, as I think that's fairly specific to your specific perspective. To take the general idea of rights and insist someone else is wrong is laughable, and short circuits any useful discussion whatsoever.
Sure. We can speak of Natural Rights versus Enumerated Rights. But it's interesting that one of the great concerns over the issue of the Bill of Rights was that people might mistakenly think that this was the complete list of "rights" that the people had, and that it was the government giving them to the people. It's why, if you read said Bill of Rights, you'll note that it repeatedly says things like "the right to X shall not be infringed", or prohibiting the government from passing laws that inhibit or abridge various free activities. There are no "rights' which claim to be given to the people by the government. They're always written in the form of restricting the government from infringing various rights, not the other way around. And, just in case anyone might be confused, they wrote the 9th amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. You know. Just in case. This is not a case of two equally valid opinions on something. In our system of government, my interpretation is correct, and Smash's is wrong. Period. Rights are not granted to us by the government. Ever. This is just not something that is a matter of debate. It's axiomatic. Like "red cars are red".
Almalieque wrote:
I completely agree with your understanding of what "rights" are, but the question then becomes "What is the government's role to ensure that those rights are maximized (for a lack of better words)"?. What's the point of having a government if it's not going to assist to ensure that people aren't killing, stealing and violating every other concept of your life?
I would use the term "protected" rather than "maximized". I also agree completely with the need to make sure that the government is protecting our rights to the greatest degree possible. However, I would hope you'd agree that it's impossible to do that if we don't first have a common understanding of what rights are, and at the very least the understanding that the government doesn't "grant" them, but only protects them. Failing to grasp that leads to other misunderstandings like thinking that by giving people "things", we're giving them "rights", which somehow equates to use being more free. Which would seem to be an appropriate issue to raise given this is precisely what was proposed earlier in this thread.
Giving someone things does not give them rights. Ever. Period. It may or may not be a good thing to do for other reasons, but lets assess that on the value of the things themselves and on those other reason, and not out of the false belief that we're protecting people's rights by doing so.