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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg or e who wrote (20551)	6/21/2005 3:19:52 PM
From: Oeconomicus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

"It is still up to society to decide when one becomes a person with rights that society will act to protect." This seems to be somewhat at odds with the idea of inalienable rights. Not at all. As I said, under Locke's theory (which again is what our "inalienable rights" are based upon) our natural rights are ours alone. They are not society's rights, nor does society have any inherent right or obligation to protect them. Society derives its right and obligation to protect the rights of its members only from their mutual consent and agreement. Absent such consent and agreement among people, each alone has any right to seek redress for violations of his rights. But with the formation of society, the members agree to the terms under which they, as society, will act to protect each other's rights or judge and punish those who violate them. It is only by that agreement that society acquires any obligation or powers to do anything. To relate it back to the original topic, we may decide that, being fallible human beings, we aren't willing to infringe on the liberty of the mother-to-be until we are sure that the unborn has a high likelihood of survival. Or even that it is impracticable to protect its means of survival, against the wishes of the mother-to-be who could do any of a number of things to put it at risk, because the infringements on her liberty would have to be so onerous that we, as society, find it unacceptable. OTOH, we may decide that after some point (and absent unusual complications) such protection becomes reasonably possible (with a reasonable chance of success) without undue infringement of the rights of the mother-to-be and, therefore, that abortions under those circumstances would be prohibited in order to protect the rights of the unborn. You see, in a "state of nature", there is no society to protect our rights on our behalf. That society does not act to protect them does not mean we don't have them. We must protect them ourselves. If we can't protect them ourselves, they are liable to be violated. Yet they still exist.