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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

>Privileges are things granted to you, often conditionally, by someone else. Using the word often sounds quasi-religious to me: "Thank Privilege for this meal we are about to eat, and our safe home, ...".

most people didn't do anything do get whatever rights they are enjoying - they were just born into these rights while many other people don't have those rights. Pretty much definition of privilege.

> Calling our rights "privilege" is throwing out the struggle and sacrifice of everyone that fought for those rights.

That argument works for the Lords Privileges in England too - the ancestors of those Lords were brutal knights who fought bloodily to become the Lords and to get and enjoy the Privileges themselves and by their descendants.

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I think you're conflating the exercise of rights with the existence of those rights.

"Being born "into" these rights" is close to accurate, but misses the point. You (and everyone else) are born with a basic set of natural rights which exist regardless of how much or how little you can/do exercise them. People have been struggling for hundreds of years to avoid having those rights infringed upon, not to "create" them.

Privileges on the other hand, derive their authority from a secondary source. Driving, public education, etc are good examples of "Privileges" where society builds/pays for something, and members of that society are granted the privilege of its use. Compared with your right to free speech, which doesn't disappear because someone/something infringes upon it.

> are born with a basic set of natural rights which exist regardless of how much or how little you can/do exercise them

There is no such thing as the "natural rights" except may be for the right to die (and even that is contested by many governments (and super-government-powerful organizations of the past like the Church was for example)). Any rights are created as a result of an [usually temporary] equilibrium between various participating forces established and supported by violence or a credible threat of a such.

Rights can, in theory, be had by everyone. Privileges are inherently for a select few.

Wouldn't the world be wonderful if all 7 billion people had free speech?

>Rights can, in theory, be had by everyone. Privileges are inherently for a select few.

when it is had by everyone then it is a right. Until that it is a privilege. For example voting in US was in the past a privilege of white male property owners, and today it is pretty much a right (if one discounts voter suppression state laws, etc).

Another example - free speech can, in theory, be had by everyone in Russia or China, yet it is really far from everybody having it there. Thus it isn't a right there despite that "can, in theory".

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