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

To: one_less who wrote (21378)	7/19/2005 6:41:15 PM
From: Oeconomicus	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 28931

"How could any serious person suggest that in a world of over seven billion persons every single one of them could just fly out into the world without any limitations on their conduct." I'm not aware of anyone, a serious person or not, who has suggested such a thing. As I said here several weeks ago, liberty as a natural right means the liberty with which we are endowed in a state of nature, sans society. When we come together in society, we voluntarily compromise our natural liberty by agreeing to limitations on our behavior designed to protect the rights of others (and of ourselves from others). So from the very beginning of society, this "inalienable" right to our natural liberty is, in fact, voluntarily alienated (but only partially, of course). In other words, we agree that while we have a natural right to liberty, we will accept certain kinds of limits on our liberty, as well as certain limits on our property rights, in the interest of preserving the greater part of our rights to life, liberty and property. That is why it is silly to argue that "inalienable rights" can not be compromised or forfeited. Such an argument, from what I have seen, is usually made by those who are really arguing that there are no inalienable rights - that all rights are just what other men choose to allow us and so could just as well be taken away. If we do not have these inalienable rights - if there are no such things - then we start from no rights and only get what society grants us. If they do exist, we start from all rights and only lose them to the extent that we, in forming society, agree to compromise them. It's a difference in the starting presumption. That's the same issue that caused some of the framers of the constitution to resist having a bill of rights - the concern that if they listed specific rights, the presumption might be that no others exist unless granted by the state. Their intent, of course, was the opposite.