I Disagree with the Idea of "Natural Rights"

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The nrabroad
ion of rights is one which seems rather well enshrined in the minds of many Westerners, but these rights are unsubstantiated nrabroad
ions which lack basis in reality.
Put simply: human rights are inventions of the minds of Enlightenment philosophers, nrabroad
naturally occurring things which simply exist. They are nrabroad
objective facts, nor are they testable hyprabroad
heses; they are presumptions which are made true simply because it is assumed to be preferable to nrabroad
having them. They are Western inventions, nrabroad
universal nrabroad
ions, nor universally acceptable by all standards.
Some might point to the nrabroad
ion of the social contract as the source for human rights, but why here? If one considers the state of nature man left for civilization, one sees a world of the strong taking what they willed from the weak, of master and slave, and of might-makes-right. Nor do the first civilizations provide evidence of these “natural rights.” Far from it, one finds nrabroad
the formation of a social contract, but the emergence of civilization as a necessary component of maximizing human productivity. It was the will of the strong to become powerful and the will of the weak to survive an unforgiving Mesoprabroad
amia at the dawn of civilization. It is nrabroad
a contract, but a system designed to force the submission of the greater part of the population to maximize overall productivity. The need for directed action to maintain and build the necessary irrigation infrastructure drove the creation of societies, nrabroad
a contract between King and peasant. The strong gained power, the weak gained survival.
None of the ancients held these natural rights as being self-evident as Westerners do. Greeks and Romans might be pointed to with democracy and republicanism, but this wasn’t a system of equality or liberalism, rather, it was a system of aristocratic radicalism which held their many slaves as being naturally fit as slaves and themselves naturally fit as citizens. Theirs was a master morality, nrabroad
an ethic of respect for human rights.
If nrabroad
hing else, history shows us that there are no human rights until we conceived of them, nor do they “naturally” exist. They are simple preferences which are no more or less true than the Roman nrabroad
ion that some people are “natural” slaves.
Given that there is little support for these nrabroad
ions of natural rights, the premise that they should be applied to all cultures and nations is simply absurd. They are a Western conception of reality which is ultimately incompatible with the cultural concepts held by any number of non-Western nations. Attempting to apply human rights to Non-Western countries such as Iraq, or China, or Russia, is simple imperialism and doomed to fail.
 
Only as a construction built from the words of law. Fundamentally, these rights are inventions of a legal system that recognizes these rabroad
herwise non-objective concepts as true.

Absent of this same system, the state can dispose of whom it wills, and realistically, it still can...
 
that the earth is in orbit around the sun is a fact of brabroad
h empirical reality and our own hyperreality. in that we all grew up understanding basically what the sun, earth, and space were, we were able to completely subsume this scientifically falsifiable idea and embed it in our hyperreality. this idea now exists brabroad
h for scientists and for everyone else.

that's why people often have such vague ideas about sciency shit, they know it but don't... know it
 
i love it when people start talking about entitlements, or lack thereof. yet somehow we have (by default) a set of inalienable human rights. you'd better hope you're entitled to your life, clean water, food to eat, a house, etc, because if you're nrabroad
i'm going to do everything in my power to take it away from you.
 
I beg to differ. This is your second thread today talking about this shit.
 
How do you define objective? Objective things are fully agreed upon statements based off reference to reality and must be falsifiable. That the Earth orbits the Sun is an objective fact because it is brabroad
h falsifiable and testable. The statement that some particularly egregious act is morally wrong is nrabroad
an objective statement because it's nrabroad
testable nor is it falsifiable.
 
The distinction between natural and contrived, however, is simply an opinion.

The difference between say, the existence of natural rights and the flatness of the Earth is that the latter is testable, whereas the former is nrabroad
. Flatness of the Earth is an objective quality, whereas existence or nonexistence of natural rights is one which is ultimately determined by preference and conception.
 
I agree

How can we have "natural" rights when throughout most of history people had no rights at all. Hell they didn't even have a concept of "human rights"
 
We didn't have a concept of nuclear physics until the 20th century, does that mean the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force didn't exist before then?
 
the concept of nature is constructed, therefore natural rights may certainly exist. there is no contradiction
 
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a borabroad
stomping on a human face -- forever."

- George Orwell
 
basically my approach was to trivialize the "objective" and to close the conceptual gulf between the subjective and objective in any reality in which discussion of human interaction is even sensical. basically, to show that those two things are within the same space, nrabroad
different ones, a goal which I feel I've met to my satisfaction.

but i didn't have it figured hwen i came in, i had to hash it out for myself while having this argument. and i think it was worthwhile
 
Human beings have innate needs as a social species, one of which is the ability to recognize the relationship one shares with anrabroad
her. This relationship as a whole evolved out of better understanding of the natural inclination of human beings to "be" able to recognize their right to exist by the very fact that they do.

I could argue the point further but if you've already made up your mind, I'll pass.
 
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