this subject came up in my politics class the other day and i was not satisfied with the answer given, so i thought i would ask you(or anyone else) to weigh in on this. With much time and thought, I have come to truly believe the words of Thomas Jefferson as he writes,"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." The class discussion was about "Our Rights" I believe our rights as humans come from our Creator. My question however is, the person that does not believe their rights come from the Creator, where do they come from then? I'm asking this question, because i really want to understand the perspective of another viewpoint.I will withhold my response until we hear from some others. Folks?
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
A Question for Readers on Rights
Danny sends in this excellent question:
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7 comments:
Those of us who don’t believe our rights as humans come from our creator just substitutes rational for it. You don’t have to believe in god to understand moral principles, if anything, believing that god gave us rights could be misinterpreted for immoral reasons. One can say Hitler felt that god gave the German race the right and the pursuit of happiness at the expense of others. There’s a reason why that in our country there’s a separation of church and state. Believing that god gave us our unalienable rights, is but one perspective and for us to even hold that to be true we must by definition respect the rights of those who don’t believe that the creator bestowed those rights to us. Instead believe that through human progress one comes to understand everything from moral and rational perspective when it comes to rights of an individual. I personally believe that through human progress we came to understand that every person does have certain rights not bestowed by god but instead collectively agreed upon by civil people. Therefore not god but progress made throughout civilizations had contributed to that we hold dear today, such as unalienable rights.
I just wanted to clarify that the constitution does not mention the separation of church and state. Historically the mention of god has been very liberal and closely associated with the government. Also keep in mind that people originally came to this country to practice their religion not get away from it. This fanatical idea about separation of church and state comes for a letter Jefferson wrote to a priest and has been used to manipulate people into thinking that a separation actually exists. If you want a separation of church and state I suggest you write your congressmen and suggest an amendment to the constitution.
Steve
Where do our rights come from?
I remember this question as discussed in intro to philosophy and the professor handed us the Melian Dialogue
(http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/melian.htm). Rights are earned by those strong enough to successfully pursue them. Rights are just one of the rules of nature that follows the pattern "survival of the fittest". And the pursuit and use of strength can be attributed to the will of the individual or nation. Therefore not God, not progress, but strength determines rights (who gets them, who defines them, who keeps them, and who loses them!)
Hello, Danny. This is Prof. Bowles. Prof. MacLeod has asked me to weigh in on this topic & provide some historical context. Well, I'll try! There was a significant change in the discussion of "rights" around the late 1600s-early 1700s. Prior to that time, rights were thought of something bestowed by the ruler as a gift. They were not seen as something someone was entitled to. Then there began to be a change in the thinking about the concept of rights, partly as a result of some 2d & 3d generation Protestant Reformers & some Enlightenment thinkers. They began to use the phrase "natural rights." This referred to rights that a person was entitled to simply by virtue of being born. The use of the word "natural" distinguished them from rights that were bestowed as gifts by a ruler or government. There was not perfect agreement as to what "natural rights" actually were. John Locke listed three: "life, liberty, & property." Jefferson adapted this in the Dec. of Ind. but changed "property" to "pursuit of happiness." So, generally speaking, there was now a distinction between various kinds of rights. Some were considered "natural" (applicable to all human beings) & some were specific to certain societies & were bestowed by their governments. Even within that latter category there was a distinction made between "civil" & "political" rights. But where do "natural rights" come from? Obviously, all the thinkers of the 17th & 18th centuries didn't agree on this, but many would have said "God" or "Creator" (the term Jefferson used) which was more suited to deists (who believed in a creator, but not a personal caring God). There weren't too many open atheists in those days (though Tom Paine & Voltaire come to mind). I'll be honest -- it is not clear to me where they thoughts their rights came from -- other than that they just adhered to humans by virtue of their common humanity. The difficulty here is two-fold: 1. who counts as a "human"? & 2. who or what defines & guarantees these rights? Of course, but even deists or Bible-believing Christians agreed on these questions either. I'm not sure if I'm adding anything to the discussion here, other than to say the issue was quite complicated. It is one thing to talk about rights in the abstract, & another to try to enumerate them & determine who was entitled to what.
I strongly disagree with those who say the people themselves determine that. This can lead to the strong (or the majority) determining what rights the weak (or the minority) have which is a formula for tyranny.
Sorry, just caught a typo in the above. It should read "not even deists or Bible-believeing Christians ... "
SB
Prof. Bowles comments are quite helpful in understanding the milieux in which the SCFF (socalledfoundingfathers) understood the concept of natural rights. But I think she gets fuzzy just at the crux of danny's question: namely, how can one embrace a concept of natural rights without an idea of a creator or god. As she says -- and this is where my personal understanding of natural rights derives from -- "they just adhered to humans by virtue of their common humanity." That doesn't answer the historical question fully, nor does it really answer the philosophical one. But I think there was a certain sense of, as the first paragraph in the Declaration of Independence states, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." That is, we have come to agree as humans, maybe as "civilized" humans, that these rights are fundamental to what it SHOULD mean to be human. Where these rights derive from is less important than how we uphold them and what we do with them.
I don't disagree with what Prof. MacLeod said in his post immediately above. The issue in the 18th century was not really where the rights came from, but what they actually were & to what extent government would get involved in protecting or guaranteeing them. As some of you may be aware, there was no agreement on this at the Const. Convention. Some wanted a list of rights included & some didn't (not that they didn't think there were rights, but they thought it was tricky to try to list them). The original Const. had no rights listed at all & that washow it went to the ratifying conventions. The Bill of Rights was added AFTER the Const. was finally ratified.
Note to Liz: what I had in mind when I made that comment was something like Rousseau's "General Will" where the group that has the numerical majority determines what is right & wrong & the minority has no say. In a system like this, there is no objective standard of right & wrong. Right is whatever the majority says it is.
Dr. Bowles
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