I smell Hobbes...
As long as I have the power, I have the right to do it. When I lose the power I no longer have that right, its pretty simple.
This is Hobbes' asssertion, in
Leviathan and elsewhere, that pre-societal humans have limitless rights: I have the right to murder you, and you have the right to murder me (Moderator: this is not an endorsement of illegal activity). This led him to the accurate conclusion that the life of the pre-societal human was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."
The very REASON that societies arose among men (he posits) is so we can GIVE UP RIGHTS to achieve safety: I give up my right to murder you (that is, now consequences will be attached), you give up your right to murder me, and we institute a "big hammer" (government) that can hurt us if we overstep our (newly limited) rights. This was the basic idea of the "social contract."
From this perspective, we have seen a "diversity" of societies emerge: some (many) have been founded on the idea of doing away with as many individual rights as possible, and subordinating them to the "collective good" (read: "whatever Big Brother says").
One society, ours, has had as one of its founding principles reserving as many rights to the people as possible. But as we know, the government, by its very nature, will try to expand its powers over time. A written constitution and a constitutional court (SCOTUS) are supposed to be a brake on that expansion, but they are imperfect safeguards.
Hobbesians will argue that whatever liberties a nation agrees to abandon in the name of safety, well, that's just their choice of how to arrrange their particular social contract.
Of course, there are those of us that argue (following Locke and Jefferson) the opposite, and say with Ben Franklin, that "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
But that still leaves the question: what's that word "essential" mean? From what (if anything other than "consensus") do human rights derive?
As Cosmoline says,
If we are something more than that, with an inherent autonomy by virtue of our physical and mental existence, then rights flow from our very form and function.
I would posit that those who argue for the existentence of essential (unalienable--such a great word, does anyone even know what it means anymore?) rights are very close philosophically to those who argue for universal moral standards.
Unfortunately, authoritative texts for what essential liberties are are
not legal texts (even our Constitution's guarantees are subject to change by amendment), but ratheer religious and philosopical ones. And few respect those documents as much as legal documents, these days.
But it does come down to the question: do I NOT have a right to murder you, because in joining society I agreed not to, or because a human being, by virtue of nothing other than being human, has a right not to be murdered--and that trumps my supposed right to do so.
I agree with the
intrinsic value of the human being idea. Perhaps living just a few miles from Concord, where the shot heard 'round the world was fired, has influenced my thinking.
(Is this fun? I think so! But it's also incredibly serious.)
