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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (7188)	3/2/2001 9:21:14 PM
From: Solon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

If you have a right but no ability to exercise it, some would say it is less valuable I left this out intentionally to avoid muddying the discussion. I am surprised you introduced it. If I have a right to live but X feeds me to a tiger my right didn't help me much in a practical sense. Neither "rights" nor RIGHTS come with warranties. They are just ideas combined into principles. However they create the infrastructure of social interaction, so they are not unimportant. but by the fact if you exercise your rights you will violate the rights of someone else? Many people prefer to consider rights as merely social agreements rather than having inherency. I prefer to see RIGHTS as having fundamental justification through reason; And "rights" (at least in the U.S.) as evincing a similar set of principles--based on a slightly diminished exercise of reason (not meant the way it sounds!). Of course, one can't make an agreement with Beatrice the Cow, so when we broaden the base to animal rights we also acknowledge that human rights are often declared, sometimes on the basis of a very small group--"we hold these truths..." There is nothing magical about RIGHTS, but if we value reason as a tool for promoting life and value, then we might also value moral principles as necessary for optimising our hope for individual, and for group survival. If we are to consider RIGHTS as fundamental moral principles, then we must recognize that a right that violates a right is a contradiction, and thus not a right. I believe the only fundamental right is the right to the property of your own mind and body. I believe that if we stop recognizing this...we will probably be overgrown by the jungle once again. Most will laugh at this, but I understand the role of fences: That is why everyone has one. We all understand. Fundamental and unanimous beliefs are fences. They are the basis of all rules. If your rules have no basis--the sword does. It is an either/or. All those millions of boring pages of case law trace back to the fundamental principles that society (or at least its wisest members)...has fought to make the basis of all social interaction. Most societies DO NOT have this as a basis. I don't need to elaborate on that. So--about this apparent conflict of rights? Well, I don't see the fetus as a human person. Neither does society (I mean the rational people at the very top of society). Life continuously goes in and out of existence. Life feeds upon itself. Some people think that some life is better than other--but when the tiger eats the human, or the virus eats the human, or the squirrel eats the acorn--something has to die. The interconnections of life go back before the egg and the sperm and they go beyond the corpse. The sperm was once cows struck by lightning with maggots a foot thick teeming over their guts--and spear grass and tomatoes and cheese and coffee. The soft spot in my heart comes for aware beings. I don't remember anything about the womb--not even close. I did not exist as an aware being. I have never met anyone who did. Still, I am very glad that relatively few woman need to abort late stage pregnancies. Nobody can force a woman to bring a foetus into existence. It is her body. If you tried to force her, she could kill herself, which would prove that neither you nor I own her mind and body. If we did, her life would have no meaning, but neither would ours--because we would not own our minds either...