What rights should any person have?
What restrictions should be placed upon freedom?
Hello,
This is my first post on this board. I started as a philosophy major in college and changed because I started to listen to everyone else about how impractical it is to be a philosophy major. I should have listen to my mind, instead of theirs. I miss philosophy classes and discussions.
Now onto the questions:
What rights should any person have? I will give a very general answer to start things off. I think everyone has the right to be happy. but the restriction on this should be if one person happiness means physically hurting someone else, then that person needs to be restricted.
I don’t think I correctly worded what I am truly thinking. Also, I think this answer could open a whole other discussion on what happiness is.
I guess I will see what everyone else has to say about this question.
Christy
The citizens of a country are allowed any right their country has given them.
They are allowed to petition for any right they do not have.
Every Citizen is allowed to vote as long as they are of age.
They are not allowed to enslave another person.
They can say or write anything about anyone but they must be held responsible for their statements thus anything written or said can be questioned and argued against; also anything they say can be used against them.
They have the right to bear and use for defense and hunting any unrestricted firearm or unrestricted weapon. The government defines the restriction, but any restriction must be within a reasonable measure.
They have the right to follow any religion they wish, but those who preach a religion are now allowed to ask for any form of payment for their preaching and can only receive donations if they are given with out being asked for.
None.
None.
Let Kajunism reign free!
(tricky situation, isn’t it? Totally restrained without any restrictions… totally free without any ability. Sounds like life.)
There’s no such thing as rights, though it’s a handy term in some situations. Any expression of the rights of a citizenry can be more correctly expressed as a series of obligations and restrictions for the people in charge.
I agree with you, but people give each other Rights because they themselves would like to have Rights. Rights and Morality go hand in hand, as what would be deemed a Right would be based off Morality. Rights are just social contracts.
PV
But are their any new ones you can think of?
any other rights other than the bill of rights?
“Also look at what’s happening to your personal liberty laws in the name of Terror. Remember the show trials of the 50s? If not you’ll be seeing them again real soon.”
Those who forget their freedoms and stop trying to obtain them loose them.
Rights seem more trouble than they are worth. Arbitrarily providing legal support is a recipie for conflict, as some rights (take discrimination for example) mutaully oppose one another - and their legal status makes compromise near imposible.
If you cant carve your own existence unaided, should you still be here?
The only way a person can carve their existance alone is to be alone, to never see another person untill there existance is established.
no its not. Why would you think that?
because stimlus from others makes anything you do not exactly yours, it has a source in another person
OR in cases of adverse things where who ever the person comes in contact with enslaves, kills, maims and so on.
For every contact with some one there is a reaction.
One can not be truely free unless they are alone
Being alone is a restriction more than a freedom. It is a state of being that restricts life choices to only those options related to the individual alone. Self-love is a limited kind of freedom if I can’t choose it over love of others. What about being free to love another? The image of the man/woman alone does not answer the important question about what is freedom in society.
A working definition: Choice is freedom but not all things are allowed. When you are alone you are not free to ignore food - you must find it, get it, and eat it, otherwise you are dead. Society provides a way of easing the tension of certain musts (like food, health) and enables one to live and choose among many alternatives. If society removes all alternatives and requires only one course of action for all areas of interests, then that is not a free society. A free society is defined as a society that allows individuals to choose among options. But not everything is possible. The fabric of the society through legal and social customs reduces the set of options. But freedom exists nonetheless if society is tolerant of different styles of living. This issue of tolerance then becomes the answer to the question What is freedom. Freedom is what is desired and demanded by the individual and tolerated by society.
I said, unaided, i.e. no assistance. This mentions nothing of hindrence or personal contact. The situation you describe is not really feasible, just an pointless abstraction.
We can never give anyone rights. Having the ‘right’ to do whatever you want is the natural state of man, or given to us by God, if you prefer. All we can do is take away from that pool of allowable actions, in the form of restrictions and obligations. We agree on these restrictions because, like you hinted, there are things we don’t want other people to do to us, so we can agree not to do them ourselves.
So, what’s the difference between thinking in terms of rights vs. obligations? If you think in terms of what you are allowed to do, social responsibility is always put off on someone else. i.e. “You’re violating my rights. You can’t stop me from doing this”, and the tendency is to find what a person can get away with. On the other hand, a system of obligations and restrictions becomes very personal. Each person has a set of things they must do, they are responsible for their own morality, instead of being constantly on the look out for other people to blame for violating your rights.
I don’t believe rights come from God, or what some would call natural rights. As they come in fact from, how we would like to be treated under the same circumstances. Right’s are about fairness, fairness is a derivative of Morality. People have a right to a fair trial, because that is what we would want if we where on trial. People have the right to freedom of speech, because we also want to be allowed to express ourselves freely. Free speech is limited when you start slandering somebody, as we don’t want unfair and untrue things said about us, so it must be the same for everybody else.
Every Right is based off this principle. If one person is entitled to something, then all the other people should also be entitled to that same thing. Rights are needed when people live together, even just two people creates a need for rights. A person living on a deserted island has little need for rights, as s/he can do as s/he pleases without offending anybody.
Pax Vitae
I agree with this. I would add that being on an island has its own set of freedoms and restrictions, like weather, wild animals, food - in other words, being on an island puts us directly in conflict with nature’s restrictions.
In other words, isn’t “freedom” only meaningful when you state clearly the context that you are speaking about. If you are speaking of society, you can talk about freedom of speech. Freedom of speach means nothing if there is no political context, or nobody to listen to you. Yet, in the context of a family, the nature of freedom of speech changes so dramatically that you ought to call it something else.
Furthermore, or as a natural conclusion of the above, I also don’t speak in terms of “natural rights” or “god-given rights”. I prefer to speak of what kind of right makes sense in a specific context. If I am at work, or at school, I think of what rights make sense to the meaning of those contexts. If I am in a nation or in the UN, I talk of rights in a different way. All that being said, it is sometimes useful to use the persuasiveness of universality of a right. Think of Martin Luther King.
[quote]
As they come in fact from, how we would like to be treated under the same circumstances.
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This seems a bit formulaic. I don’t think this is the way we always think of freedoms, nor how we got certain inaliable rights in the past. It is true that self-interest is a useful way of speaking about rights, but as the general underlying meaning of freedom, it is neither historically nor theoreticall accurate.
The true meaning of freedom is in its history of development, which can be called a fight for freedom. Rights are formed over time and differenclty in different cultures (and contexts) mostly in groups like classes, genders, races, ethnicities, property owners, countries, etc…
Yes, all because they weren’t treated the same as others, which is my main point. It’s this inequality that gives the powerful their power. That’s why the oppressed have to fight for rights, as they are claiming back power, which the others don’t wish to give up. Take slavery for example: this cost the slave owners a lot of money, as they now had to find other paid workers who would earn money, while the slaves would have only worked for food and other basic needs.
To have a Right and use it is to exercise a form of power. Those that have power don’t want to lose it. That is why “human rights†violations occur throughout the world. Everybody wants power as it brings freedoms, rights are the common persons only real form of power. Which can only stem from personal interest, as any God given rights are usually revoked for heretics.
Pax Vitae
My own thinking goes along the lines of Uccisore–rights are absolute, and a government’s refusal to recognize a right does not mean that it does not exist.
sedan1800: What right(s) is/are the right of discrimination opposed to? The right to force someone to offer you a paycheck against his will? The right to force someone to serve you a hot meal on that person’s own property, just because he’s willing to do it for others?
Actually he’s probably talking about the right of autonomy. Being forced to treat someone different to how you wish to is violating your autonomy, without a doubt.
And autonomy is pretty much the fundamental ‘right’ if you look at moral philosophy. Not that I think rights are in any way absolute, but if you do hold absolute rights it’s usually grounded on autonomy, e.g. Mill’s liberty principle.