One of those things I think everyone should know. . .

[xiphias]

. . . but, apparently, some people in our government don't.

And I've heard other people talk like they weren't aware of this, either.

The Constitution doesn't grant any rights. Governments don't grant any rights.

You HAVE rights. You have rights that, if you believe in God, God gave you. And God gave all human beings. If you don't believe in God, that's okay -- you have rights simply by virtue of your being human.

They're inherent. They're inalienable.

They're not granted -- you have them.

If a right isn't mentioned in the Constitution, you still have it. If the Constitution doesn't mention specifically that a right also applies to people who aren't United States citizens, they still have that right, too. ALL human beings have rights. Governments don't grant them, constitutions don't grant them.

A government can't take away rights.

A government can fail to do its duty as a government, and fail to enforce and protect rights. But the rights are still there. It's just that the government isn't doing its job.

All prisoners in Guantanamo Bay have the right of habeas corpus. That means, "the right to be told why they are there." It's among the most basic and fundamental rights there are in a civilized culture. The United States government is not acting on this. That doesn't mean that those prisoners don't have that right -- it merely means that the United States government is failing to respect that right.

(Our Constitution says that, in extreme circumstances, you may arrest people and hold them for a while until things calm down enough to tell them exactly why you arrested them. There is no conceivable way in which that can be stretched to mean holding people for six years without even letting them know WHY they were arrested. At some point, they need to at least be told what the CHARGE is. The suspension of habeas corpus means that there are circumstances where a government can do a "sweep" and just arrest everyone in an area, and then, once things calm down a little, go through and see who they picked up, and charge the ones who ought to be charged and release the ones who ought to be released. It doesn't mean that you can do whatever the hell is going on in Guantanamo Bay.)

The government doesn't give us a right to free speech. We HAVE a right to free speech. The purpose of a government is to protect that right, along with other rights.

The government doesn't give us our rights -- we set up our government in order to protect our rights.

Any time when a government does anything which denies rights to anyone, it's failing in its duty as a government.

You will see people try to muddy this issue.

Don't let them.

Comments

[yehoshua.livejournal.com]

Bravo. Well said.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

thank you.

[polydad.livejournal.com]

>-- you have rights simply by virtue of your being human.
> They're inherent. They're inalienable.

Will you be my Senator?

best,

Joel

[msmidge.livejournal.com]

Have you been reading John Locke? ;)

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yes. And so were the framers of the Constitution. And, apparently, nobody in the government SINCE then.

[msmidge.livejournal.com]

Right. The creepy thing is if you read Machiavelli's The Prince in this context. I first read it in 2003 and it was just chilling. Though this children's version of Machiavelli is a lot of fun.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I love Machiavelli. He also wrote another book called "The Art of War", not to be confused with Sun Tzu's, which is also good. Not as generally applicable, but still fun. It's mainly about how to attack Tuscan fortified cities, though, rather than the more general principles of either Sun Tzu's book, or, for that matter, "The Prince".

[navrins]

Who decides whether "the right to free speech" exists? Who decides whether "the right to free beer" exists? Who decides whether "the right to adequate health care" exists? (Something we pretty much all agree on, something practically nobody would argue; something some people propose but others think not.)

I don't disagree with your statements, but I think the hard part goes beyond what you have said.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

That's a separate question.

I don't believe that there is a right to free health care.

However, a government may choose to help provide for good health care, and that is within the purvew of what a government may do. It is not, however within the things that a government MUST do.

"Free speech" IS a right.

"Free health care" is not. "Free choice of what I wish to be allowed to be done to myself in the name of health care" is.

"Free access to other people's billboards in order to express my views" is not a right.

Maybe I'll do another post talking about what I think the rights and responsibilities of governments are.

[navrins]

Yes, it is a separate question. You've blatantly asserted that certain things are rights. You've now agreed with me that certain other things are not. How does one know which things are and which are not? Is there something more to it than one's personal preferences?

I find ron_newman's answer to be relatively satisfying.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I started writing up a bit of an answer, to put into another post, but I think it can go right here.

The question of "who decides what rights exist" is an interesting one, and the framers of the Constitution wanted to make sure that certain ones were never going to be forgotten, so they wrote them down in the document. That didn't mean that they thought those were the ONLY rights that existed, but they wanted to make sure that nobody was able to weasel out of those ones.

What are some of the non-enumerated rights? Well, the right to be left alone is one of them, also known as the "right to privacy".

Basically, these are questions of moral philosophy, and high schools ought to have a course or two in this stuff, so that people learn HOW to decide these questions. "WHO decides what rights exist" is an interesting question, but an even more important question is "HOW do you decide what rights exist," and if you have a culture in which everyone is required to learn a certain amount about "how", then everyone can be a sanity check on the decisions of whomever the "who" ends up being.

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

You were doing so well. Governments have no rights. Nope. Governments have powers, authorities, and yes responsibilities, but no rights.

And, people were endowed with certain rights by their creator. That creator may be god, and that's a fine working assumption, but all that is recognized is the creator.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah. I was assuming that the "rights" section was going to be very, very short.

Yes. The "creator" may be God, or it may be Nature, or it may be, y'know, just that "we're here" and on that basis, we have rights.

[ron_newman]

The distinction here is between 'negative' and 'positive' rights. The latter two rights require someone to actively provide them, and therefore a certain amount of active government intervention. The first only requires government to avoid actions that infringe it.

[kimberly-a.livejournal.com]

What about the right to murder, then? Who decides whether or not that is a right? Where do you draw the line?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

No, murder is an infringement of the right to live.

A person has a right to their life, to their person, and to their property. A government exists to prevent other people from infringing on those rights.

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, the founders were not so sure about the right to property. When they quoted Voltaire who said "All persons are endowed ... life, liberty, and property" they were concerned that an absolute right to property would make the goverments right to tax suspect, and therefore substituted the less problematic "pursuit of happiness".
Nu?
Duzzy

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Well, I think they were sure that SOME kind of right to property existed -- they just weren't sure that MENTIONING it wouldn't come back to bite them on the ass.

My comprehensive exams meet LJ. How weird.

[msmidge.livejournal.com]

If they were following Locke then it was implicit. The right to private property is practically the foundation of society for him--we only have society because we have "want of a common judge" to decide property and other disputes.

But yeah, what rights are depend on which political philosopher you ask--e.g., with Hobbes, you have some rights in the state of nature, but then you alienate nearly all your rights to the sovereign once you enter into a social contract, because he thought that was the only way to avoid total chaos.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, IIRC, it's Jefferson who cribbed Locke's 'life, liberty, and property' in the Declaration, but changed it to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' He thought that the only natural right to property that existed was a might-makes-right sort of thing, in that if you could keep something as your own property through force or similar means, it was yours. In practice, that isn't much: your self, your clothes, a few things you can carry on your person, etc. Anything beyond that required social compacts, e.g. Alice agrees to respect Bob's property if Bob agrees to respect Alice's property. He recognized that this could be highly useful and desirable, and was basically for it, but he didn't think it was anything other than an artificial, utilitarian system that derives legitimacy from people supporting it, and which needn't be supported if it is contrary to their self-interests.

As it happens, this utilitarian model actually the model that legal theorists use today (and for quite some time). It is a lot better at accounting for how various property regimes developed and worked over time, even if they did so in an organic fashion without the participants really understanding the guiding principles involved, than the other competing models, e.g. Locke, or the idea that it went from God to the king to everyone else, etc.

[alaria-lyon.livejournal.com]

There was also a question at the time as to what constituted property. Slaves were considered property then, however not all writers of the constitution agreed with that assertion.

[alaria-lyon.livejournal.com]

As one of those people who believe there is a "right to adequate health care" thanks for bringing it up. I understand the difference that ron_newman lays out below and I kind of agree with it, but then I suppose we get into the issues of responsibility vs. rights.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I don't believe it's a right, but do believe it's something that a government ought to provide. But under a different aegis than "the protection of rights."

[undauntra.livejournal.com]

Please define the word "right". It sounds to me like you're using "right" to mean "Something that it'd really suck not to have," and then assigning a moral imperative to it.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

To start with:

I believe that "morals", "ethics", "honor", "good", "evil", and "rights" actually have some sort of independent existence outside our minds. That they are not simply concepts, but are things in some real way, outside of minds or social contracts.

So, when I speak of a "right", I'm talking about something which actually exists.

If a person has the "right not to be killed by someone else (except in self-defense, or as a punishment for an established crime)", that's not something that a society came up with -- that's real. If a person has the "right to live a life in which they have reasonably free rein to attempt to find meaning and some form of happiness," (aka, "the pusuit of εὐδαιμονία") that measns that the right to do that is real.

So, by my philosophy, I'm not assigning a moral imperative to rights. The moral imperative is there, and is real.

As to what they are. . . that's a much harder question.

"Rights" are one of the things which defines sapient beings. They are among the fundamental atoms with which you build political philosophies.

They are universal freedoms (I'm not thinking of a right which isn't a freedom, right now, but some may exist) which are inherent to sapient beings and fundamental to a "good" life. Which pushes the definition off to "good", and I'm pretty sure that I'm not using the word "good" in the sense that I usually use it.

As a matter of fact, the word "good" shouldn't go there at all, but I'm not sure what word to replace it with. Because things like "enough food" are fundamental to a good life, but "enough food" isn't a right, as I see it. Others disagree with me.

Ideas before I dash off to work

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

If "rights" exist for humans because humans exist, then I assert that the boundary of my rights ends at my body. Thus, I have a right to live because it is the natural state for my body to be vital. No one else has a right to harm my body; I may give them permission to do so, but that is (say it with me class) my right.

Society or governments come about because it is more efficacious to have an adjudicator settle disputes about my reach and your reach interferring with one another rather than having you and I settle it with tooth and claw.

So, I have a right to maintain the health of my body, but I should not have an expectation of health maintenance provided by someone else as a matter of course. That I and my fellows may decide it is in our common interest to provide health care to all of our group is something that we can assign a value judgement to.

So, rights simply are and the value the Constitution is assigning is not "rights are good" but rather "the recognition and awareness of rights is good."

Re: Ideas before I dash off to work

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I mostly agree, but I would argue that one may have a right to one's posessions, as well, which do extend beyond one's body.

Re: Ideas before I dash off to work

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

I think throughout the course of human history people have developed an expectation of retaining possessions and property without having to put up a fight which can be mistaken for a right. But in the days of ancestal humans, possessions were won (and maintained) by winning or surving a struggle with others who wanted the property in question.

As you were defining rights above, I wonder if there are any rights that exist in a societal context?

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Because things like "enough food" are fundamental to a good life, but "enough food" isn't a right, as I see it. Others disagree with me.

Quite, and whether a person disagrees with you or not will correlate significantly with their cultural and sociopolitical background. Human rights textbooks distinguish between "first generation" rights, which are the civil liberties and fundamental freedoms you mention and are the creation or discovery of Western liberalism; "second generation" rights, which are collective rights to things like food and education and until recently were typically promoted by socialist countries; and "third generation" rights, which are typically about things that require cross-border co-operation, such as self-determination, rights to natural resources and the right to a clean environment, and largely made their appearance as a response to colonialism.

I'd love to come up with a good, rationally defensible and cross-culturally valid methodology for deciding which of these really are rights, and other questions of that type, especially since I agree with you in principle that rights exist, along with certain other moral absolutes. The epistemology of moral absolutes, on the other hand, I find deeply puzzling.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The thing is, I consider those "third generation rights", at least the ones you listed, to be simple property rights, considering "the commons" to be property.

I've got another post that I'm working on about that.

So, weirdly, I'm all there for the things you're listing as "first generation" and "third generation", and am not on board for the "second generation" ones.

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

In otherwords you disagree with classifying the second generation items under the heading of "rights" at all? Or am I missing the point.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yes, basically. Although I am ready to be convinced otherwise.

[sethg]

As a statement of abstract political philosophy, I'm not sure I agree.

But as a statement of how to interpret the United States Constitution, this is spot-on.

[patsyterrell.livejournal.com]

>-- you have rights simply by virtue of your being human.

I agree, completely, with this. And I love the point that people even outside the US have these rights - something that seems lost on many of "my fellow Americans." But I think our perception of what those rights are are colored by many things - including the governmental system in which we grew up. I haven't really thought about this in this context, but I will. Thanks for spurring an interesting thought process.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

I have to completely disagree with "you have rights simply by virtue of your being human". Can you really state *any* rights that existed for early homo sapiens? From my perspective, and considering that previous sentence, "rights" to me are a matter of social contract between individuals, other individuals, and organizations.

Don't get me wrong; there are certainly "rights" I want put very strongly in my social contracts, but I don't pretend they necessarily exist because I happened to pop out of a womb. More that I happened to pop out of a womb in a particular culture.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yes, all those rights existed for Cro-Magnon and Neandertal man.

They simply hadn't yet, in most cases, developed governmental structures to guarantee those rights.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

You're limiting your use of the word "rights" to what I would instead call "human rights". This is great for the moral imperatives arguments, but seems to ignore the legitimate broader usage.

As in, when I buy a toaster, it has a warranty, and that warranty grants me the right to get a new toaster if this one breaks on its own within one year. It's not a human right, it's just some company guaranteeing that they will accede to certain specific demands that I can make upon them under certain conditions.

The government does something similar. It grants civil rights, which are written down somewhere, and are essentially promises that it will accede to certain demands that its citizens may make upon it. These may or may not be correct demands to accede to, but they're still usually called rights.

If it's in the constitution or any law, it's a civil right. It might also be a human right, and there's enough discussion above about who gets to determine which are which that I feel no need to discuss it again here. :)