Topics Ethics

Question Why is it so widely accepted that human beings have intangible rights such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Humans as a part of nature, have these "rights" broken all the time by other humans and our environments. Do you think this may have to do with a strong desire to feel secure in the world we live in? It seems that in reality, the only natural rights are granted by whether or not you have the power to seize them.

Accepted:
April 17, 2008

Comments

I'm not sure what you mean by "intangible" here, but no matter. It strikes me that the question is based on assimilating the existence of a right to its observance. It may well be, and I believe it is, that rights are being violated all the time. I don't see how that is evidence that one doesn't have any rights, unless of course what one means by having rights is having them respected. But why think that? Now another question one might ask is, if there is such wholesale violation of rights, what good do they do me? Here I think the answer is, sometimes very little. Still, moral obligations, to which rights give rise, hold even if people by and large don't carry them out. Also, I think we do find many domains in which people making moral arguments does serve to change behavior for the better, and it's crucial to the cogency of such arguments that there really exist the rights and duties to which they appeal.