God-given rights?

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@ruveyn:

Your statement boils down to: "we don't know everything, therefore we don't know anything".

Omniscience is not a possibility, therefore it is invalid as a standard.

We know what we know, what we don't know is no a valid argument to disprove that which is known,

Highly unlikely, as I know of no logical system that functions with a single axiom. And you still have to demonstrate a right to life; which the natural world certainly does not recognize.


That does not necessarily follow, at least not immediately. You need a more rigorous demonstration of that claim.


That does not follow.


That doesn't follow from anything you previously stated, and is most typically taken as an axiom by casual libertarian thinkers. I think it leads to incoherence, though, and that's a bad start.

The right to life is axiomatic, being as such demonstration is a moot point.


How is man to continue to live if he has no right to provide for his existence?

If man's has no right to the products of his own efforts, then who does and why?

The last statement is the limiting factor, which prevents man from violating the rights of others. How does that lead to incoherence?

For sake of argument, I'll grant that, although a tautological establishment of rights is vacuous.


Many notions of ethics would say that the community has some claim to the products of someone's efforts, in order to protect the rights of others to live.

The way for you to get around this is to weaken your first axiom and say that man has the right to fight for survival. However, this leads to a contradiction with your later claim that all must respect each others' rights, because my fight for survival may involve taking something which you need.


Because an absolutist conception of human rights is absurd. Milton Friedman demonstrated that years ago; at some point people's "rights" will come into conflict, and you have to have some way of balancing them against each other.

Can communities exists independently of the individuals that compromise them? This is precisely why objective rights are necessary, so that man cam live in a community without having his rights subjugated by that same community.

There are only rights to action, not guaranteed results. "fight for right to survival" only a difference in terms.

For something to exist, it must exist absolutely. The concepts of 'existence' and 'non-existence' are not applicable to the same entity concurrently.

Not as I understand things:

Intuition, instinct or insight are not measurable or observable.

I was speaking of "through direct experience".

Can individuals exist independently of the communities of which they are a part?


Non sequitur.


Begging the question.


Incorrect. You would uphold that you have a right not to be robbed or murdered. That is a result which you wish to have guaranteed for yourself. If the only rights are rights to action, then you have the right to (attempt to) defend yourself, and anyone else has the right to attempt to rob or kill you. You are promoting the war of all against all.


The difference is not just semantic. If you have a right to live, does society have an obligation to protect that right? If you only have the right to attempt to remain alive, no one else has no obligation to respect your right to actually be alive.

It is impossible to experience that which does not exist.

False. Hallucination is a well-documented phenomenon.

But more fundamentally, you are begging the question.

@Orwell:

Yes, individuals are capable of existing outside of communities.

Objective rights are necessary in order for individuals to exist with out becoming slaves to the community they exist within.

Rather than take the time to put it into my own words:

"A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)

The concept of a “right” pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.

Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive—of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.

The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values."

-Ayn Rand

Individuals form communities for mutual benefit. A community that does not recognize an individual's rights is of no benefit to the individual.

It is not begging the question. The direct experience of intuition, instinct or insight is not observable or measurable.
Hallucinations only exist within the mind of the hallucinator.

If they come from any supernatural source it would the gods, plural. The codes of the Sumerians predate the monotheistic codes.

I presume that you've studied the Founding Fathers and know what they believed as a group. For all the nay-sayers in the USA on this topic, it is clear that early Americans (colonists) subscribed to a Judeo-Christian viewpoint of morality. They believed in one true God to whom men were held in account. Understanding correctly what Judeo-Christian teachings had to say about just government, they understood that a man was accountable only to God and the proper role of government was to secure and defend individual liberties. They rejected the idea of kingship or that a caste of people were above another caste of people where rights were concerned.

You know....that "all men are created equal" stuff they wrote about.

Here is the definition I had used, and please note "or" rather than "of" ...

"Mysticism ... is the pursuit of ... through direct experience, (or) intuition, (or) instinct or insight."

Neither intuition nor instinct are "of" (or "from") direct experience, yet direct experience can lead to insight. In any case, I was speaking of direct experience apart from either intuition or instinct ...

... and it is perfectly fine with me if you or anyone must call my "direct experience" hallucination. It speaks for itself and needs no corroboration anyway.