GENIUS FORUMS

Natural rights seem to be quite frequently mentioned as a "trump card" in everyday ethical situations. Dr. Phil uses rights language all the time. Gun rights people in the U.S. talk about the "right to bear arms" as if the Second Amendment did not create it, but merely affirmed it. But does a code of rights actually exist independent of human lawmakers? If not, this is a rather nasty debater's trick, made more insidious by centuries of bad political philosophy. Does rights-language stem from anything more than a wish to project one's personal desires and inhibitions upon others?

If I say:
"You do not have the right to do that."

am I ever communicating anything more than
"I don't like it when you do that."?

If I say:
"I have the right to do this."

do I ever mean anything more than
"I want to do this." or "I can do this."

If so, when?

You're mixing natural rights with societal rights. Natural rights are the sorts of rights we would have if it were not for society - and even those have limits. The rights to eat and breathe are considered natural rights, but if you were the only human on Earth, and some tiger decided to eat you (and accomplished that) you would no longer have the right to breathe.

Rights granted by society, whether through government, religion, or personal moral codes, are only as valid as the assigning body. Dr. Phil usually uses "rights language" based on interpersonal causality to promote the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people over the long term (although sometimes I disagree with his judgment, he is getting better).

tadao.ando wrote:If I say:
"You do not have the right to do that."

am I ever communicating anything more than
"I don't like it when you do that."?

That depends on the source of the right you are citing. You could legitimately say "You do not have the right to do that" when you mean "I'd really like it if you would, but it is against a code." For example, if you told your girlfriend you were short on money, and she said she could embezzle some from her company for you, you might really want the money but truthfully say "You do not have the right to do that."

tadao.ando wrote:If I say:
"I have the right to do this."

do I ever mean anything more than
"I want to do this." or "I can do this."

If so, when?

Trickier, as it is usually at least one or the other, but say your parents were in a bad car accident, and you knew they did not want to be hooked up to life support with no chance of recovery, but you were emotionally attached to your parents, and their doctor was morally opposed to termination of life support for any reason, you might have the legal right to have their life support discontinued even though you wanted them alive, and the doctor would block your efforts to discontinue their life support to a point that your legal right is not met, that might be an instance - but only if you did not want to terminate their life support even to do as they would have wished for you to do. In this case, you would have a right that you would not exercise.

Now why you would say "I have the right to do this" under those circumstances is wide open to conjecture.

Awesome topic. Words like freedom, liberty, rights, and terrorism, to name a few, have been grossly abused by the powers that be. The fact that someone else can have a right for me not to do something, that is a right to have me not have a right, shows the shear hypocrisy of our governing systems. Terrorism is just as much someone telling you somethings might happen to you, as it is someone claiming they might do it. The US Gov. controls it's people by threatening them in their homes. Language has been destroyed from abuse through propaganda and every other control tactic. People think they have freedom.