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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

> individual has rights and value, irrespective of their group identity

Individuals should have rights/value irrespective of group identity.

However, individual rights don't exist without a group in general. If you are the only living human, the concept of rights is meaningless to you in general.

I live in the US, so my rights are (supposed to be) protected by the state, in case anyone wants to take them from me.

If my neighbor decides I don't have the right to live anymore and murders me, then I lost my right to live. I only have the rights that everyone around me agrees to let me keep.

> It's dismaying that there is a huge segment of academia that wants to revert to this more 'natural' state.

The opposite is true. Academia is where we get much of the evidence that socially-constructed groups (based on religion, gender, race, etc.) are not biological and should not be the basis for granting value and rights.

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If you live in the US, then your rights are supposed to be inherent and inalienable.

The question then isn’t whether you have the rights, but whether someone is violating those rights (which you still possess) or you have “given them up” by violating the rights of another. In a narrow practical sense, this is equivalent to “those around you deciding what rights you have.”

In an ethical sense, it isn’t. If people believe rights stem from the group then the group is ethically fine in deciding you don’t have those rights and acting accordingly. If rights are inherent to the individual then while the group may still violate those rights, it both remains a violation and is not ethically sound. This difference makes it far easier in the former case for groups to violate the rights of individuals and other groups.

Then in a broader practical sense, these are not equivalent ideas. Encouraging the belief that rights are inherent is in the best interests of those who do not want those rights violated.

Even if a group of people decides that certain rights are inherent as opposed to just agreed upon in the group, you are still relying on this group of people agreeing on this. If you are the only one believing in some inherent rights, then what are those worth?

Ethics are defined by personal intersection of values.

Ethics of American and Greek will be different. Ethics of Christian and atheist will be different. Ethics of libertarian and conservative will be different. But then, what about libertarian atheist American for example? There might be thousands of axes, prioritized and changing during one’s life. How could any group create a shared ethics except a few obvious exceptions (theft, rape...)?

No one grants you rights, you have them by virtue of simply existing. People may not respect your rights, and may interfere with your efforts to exercise them, but you still have those rights.

If you are the last person on earth you may have no need for your rights but again they still exist. Your neighbor can't decide you don't have the right to live anymore, if he kills you that is a violation of your rights. Others will punish the murderer for that violation.

You can forego some rights in exchange for benefits like participation in certain groups, which is the basis of the social contract. For example I agree to temporarily forego the right to privacy in an airport in exchange for the privilege of being allowed to fly. Sometimes the decision to do so is very one-sided, but its still a decision.

If people could unilaterally revoke your rights whenever they became inconvenient, what would be the point of rights at all?

The basic concept of rights stops making sense if there are no other people. You can't even define rights in the absence of other people.

> If people could unilaterally revoke your rights whenever they became inconvenient, what would be the point of rights at all?

They can and sometimes do.

The point in those cases (i.e. all cases) of rights is that they are a mutually agreed-upon boundary, just as you said.

A right means no one can stop you from doing something you have the right to do or require you to do something you have the right not to. If no one is around, there is still no one who can stop you from doing something you have the right to do nor require you to do something you have the right not to. Your rights are unnecessary, not undefined.

If you are mutually agreeing, by definition it is not unilateral.

> A right means no one can stop you from doing something you have the right to do or require you to do something you have the right not to

Then there is no such thing as a right.

>No one grants you rights, you have them by virtue of simply existing.

Eh, kinda, but it's not that black and white. There's different kinds of rights, which is why the US Declaration of Independence specifically calls out the violation of "unalienable" rights as a reason to justify revolting. Some rights are unalienable, some are granted by authority.

But we don't even have agreement on what the unalienable rights should be, which is why Thomas Jefferson changed "property" to "the pursuit of happiness."

In the end, my unalienable rights are dependent on what other people think my unalienable rights are, which is to say, they are granted by society.

Just because you and a friend don't agree on what a cloud looks like doesn't mean it has no shape.

We may believe some rights that are unalienable aren't, and we may believe some that aren't are, but in either case it is we who are wrong. By definition, they are not granted nor revokeable by society. If society does not recognize an unalienable right as such, it violates it.

Which rights are unalienable and which aren't is not a matter of fact.

That's another of my issues with Rand. Trying to say that morality is true/false or that rights are true/false is the same as religion. It has no basis in reality. You can't prove that people have the right to do anything. It's an issue of opinion.

For example, you may believe people have the right to do anything they want to with their body (ex: refuse a vaccine).

If you take that to its extreme, they also have the right to get sick and cough on someone else.

So Rand (and most people) would say, OK, there's a limit. That person has the right to do anything they want to with their body unless it takes a right away from someone else.

But where do you draw the line? Couldn't you argue that an unvaccinated person might be sick all the time, so going anywhere crowded is inherently immoral and they have lost their right to do that?

It quickly gets very murky and very opinionated.

No one takes away your right to cough on someone else. You voluntarily forego your right to cough on someone else in exchange for everyone else doing the same. The vast majority of sane people recognize that we don't want to live in a world where anyone can inject anything into us that they like without our consent, so one of the requirements for living in our society is respect for bodily autonomy, which for better or worse means we can't force someone to get vaccinated either. You can violate this agreement, but then no one else has to uphold the agreement with you.

Every possible action limits in some way the possible actions of others. Your right to speak limits my right to not have my eardrums vibrated. The social contract negotiates how we choose to handle these conflicts. No one will give up their right to speak in general in exchange for the right to quiet, but most of us are fine with limiting how loudly we speak at certain hours of the night in exchange for the same curtesy.

Different people will have different opinions on how valuable various rights are. I'm fine with google reading my emails, so I'll let them in exchange for providing me a free email client with good tools. Others may value their right to privacy more highly and choose not to forego it for something trivial. In the end we all have a unique set of agreements with other members of society which limit what we can and can't do which we may wish to modify from time to time, there isn't one immutable, homogenous code imposed upon all of us by some vague, abstract entity called society.

>Academia is where we get much of the evidence that socially-constructed groups (based on religion, gender, race, etc.).

Social Studies in general are frequently non-rigorous, sloppy and a mess. The academic areas where those ideas are promulgated are even more so. For example, I have yet to see any evidence, for example, that a girl who plays with dolls as a child is being socially conditioned away from STEM fields as an adult ... a claim that is repeated all the time and stated as simply a fact.

At this point, given how sloppy those academic areas are, I can only be skeptical of the crap they promulgate.

>The opposite is true. Academia is where we get much of the evidence that socially-constructed groups (based on religion, gender, race, etc.) are not biological and should not be the basis for granting value and rights.

Definitely citation needed here. I agree there is a nature vs. nurture question. But, I can't imagine any biologists are arguing that people are not tribal animals.

I think you misinterpreted what I meant.

Biologists certainly would say that humans are social and tribal. They would disagree that the typical delineations of tribes (based on race, for example) are natural.

To put it another way: tribal behavior is biological, but decisions about who goes in which tribe are social and mostly arbitrary (beyond family relations).

>If my neighbor decides I don't have the right to live anymore and murders me, then I lost my right to live. I only have the rights that everyone around me agrees to let me keep.

... what? No, that's is a massive misunderstanding of the right to life. There is a distinction between natural rights (normative ethical statements) and legal rights (what the legal system actually guarantees you). Natural rights are inalienable - they can neither be granted nor taken away by anyone.

If a state decides to commit genocide against a group of people, that group didn't lose their right to life, the state is simply violating that right.

Race is not biological? Did i get taxonomy wrong?

Not necessarily or directly, no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)

Ah, i didn't realize people in the anglosphere use it as a social category now.

In German language, dog breeds are called with the same word that can also be used on humans ("Hunderasse", "Rasse"), so i always understood it as a biological/taxonomical thing.

Just like gender it used to mean that, but now we have to pretend it has always meant something else.

I have never heard of anyone claiming that modern definitions of these terms should be literally projected back into the past - only that we can analyse the past with current thought on these matters, which seems completely reasonable to me.

Are you deliberately phrasing this as an antagonistic position to the parent comment, or am I misreading?

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