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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (326580)	2/20/2007 12:06:25 PM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577996

""something to which every human is entitled by the community of man"?" like what ???

To: Road Walker who wrote (326580)	2/20/2007 12:37:22 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1577996

We have redefined "human right" and "natural right" many times over the history of mankind. No reason we can't do it again. Yes and we can call war "peace", slavery "freedom", and ignorance "strength", but there is no good reason to do so. Changing the labels you attach to the concept, doesn't change the concept. And we haven't really changed the overall concept that goes with the label "natural right". We may have different opinions about how, why, and if such rights exist, and what specific things are rights, but the general concept has remained pretty much the same. Some people have attempted to assert the idea of "positive rights" ("rights" that impose a positive demand on others), where you supposedly enforceable demand on others (society, the government, whatever) to provide something for you (rather then merely not preventing you for doing or obtaining something). But that's not just a new idea of a natural right, but twisting the term around to mean something very different, and very problematical. You don't just have the right not to be abused or unjustly constrained, you supposedly have the right to force others to provide for you. A positive right wouldn't be freedom from coercion but the power to coerce others either directly, or more likely through the government with a declaration that someone else has an obligation, and the power to back up the obligation. -- en.wikipedia.org fee.org fff.org an properly ---- Moving away from philosophical principles to issues of practical communication and semantics, if you change the meaning of natural rights to include "positive rights", then you just have to come up with a new term to have the same meaning as the old one. Fortunately "negative natural rights" is available. The downsides to it being that it's longer adding an additional word, and also that some people might be confused by "negative" taking it to mean something bad, rather then to mean an assertion that you have a right to not have something unjustly done to you. That type of possible confusion reminds me of a story of a former NFL left tackle. When he was in college he played "weak tackle", meaning he lined up on the week side of the formation and had no help from a tight end. It was the more challenging position than the "strong tackle", but when his girlfriend heard his position she supposedly said something like "maybe you can lift more weights". Getting back to rights, why it is certainly possible to replace "natural rights" with "negative natural rights", or "rights against unjust actions" or something like that, I don't think any net benefit is gained from requiring that change by including assertions of obligations on others under the label "natural rights".