• hb
    I think that's a better way of describing the nature of rights: they can only come in the context of duties. See how "endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights" sounds a little presumptuous?

    I have some doubts, personally, about what duties human being have by nature, rather than by nomos. I don't, for instance, think we are obliged to live. But, once we take up the task of living, there quickly come rushing in lost of things we'd better do for ourselves and others. Still not sure those are obligations, so much as practical choices to achieve a given end. Does that difference make sense?
  • I ran across a passage that helped me see it from another angle:

    "In the Torah's depiction of moral reality, nobody has rights--only obligations. Naturally, if everybody discharges their obligations, we all end up enjoying those things we vainly attempt to obtain by claiming them as our rights."
  • hb
    Sorry if I wasn't clear. It just struck me during junior year that we hadn't heard of rights before then. I eventually traced the notion to Hobbes's using a word from the Scholastics that hadn't been used in that way before.

    To me, rights aren't on the same order of being as human beings and plants or as justice and beauty. They don't have independent existence (that is, exist at all) outside of the way we talk about human duties. People exist, and they have desires; rights, if taken metaphysically rigorously, seem like they would stretch out to infinity ahead of every human possible action, not as potency, but as pure assertion. I don't think it's strictly accurate to say that humans are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That might be a fine notion to underlie the laws of a country, but not strictly true.

    So, that's where I was coming from in asking that question.
  • kristi
    after reading the public discourse article, it seemed to me that one could not vote at all. (incidentally, that is the path i am leaning towards anyway for this year.)

    no politician abides by such golden rules.
  • I'm not sure what that question means, but I think I'd go with yes, they exist, independent of human constructions.
  • hb
    Out of curiosity, do you believe in rights? I mean, do you think they exist, independent of human constructions, or are they ways of describing human notions of duty that have no independent existence outside of human ethical accounts?
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