Fun fact: The vast majority of our "rights" are natural. The question is who protects them?
Fun fact: The vast majority of our "rights" are natural. The question is who protects them?
A marginalized group does not receive human rights, they are stripped of them. The removal of your birthrights should be violently opposed as soon as possible.
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I don't think I believe in natural rights.
Our so-called natural right to free speech doesn't give me the right to scream at a hungry bear and not face consequences.
A marginal group does not receive human rights, but neither are they born with them and then have them stripped away. Rather, they gain rights through struggle. Rights are not natural, every single one was fought for and won.
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Rights are not natural, every single one was fought for and won.
Umm wasn't there something called primitive communism? I assume they lived in peace without "rights" written on a piece of paper
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Those rights weren't written, but even the right to live was fought for and won by those primitive hunter/gatherers in collective struggle against nature itself. Primitive communism was how humans protected human rights from nature before we dominated it.
Today rights are mostly threatened by other humans, but nature was the enemy of human rights once upon a time.
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But the fight against nature is 100% natural? The predatory animal and humans dont try to "outdo" one another because of money(this motivates people to oppress others)?
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Well literally everything is natural, the supernatural doesn't exist. :V
If the term "natural" is to mean anything at all, it must be "distinct from human choices." Dying to a predator is natural because it's something that happens to humans. The primitive commune making weapons to protect themselves from predators is not natural, that's human struggle against nature. Nature didn't give us natural weapons like claws or fangs or venom, every weapon we have we have to make ourselves. Our right to not be eaten was hard fought and won through countless deaths and through human ingenuity.
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but once the struggle to survive is gone. There is no longer any money and people have plenty of food. Everyone has their materials need met plus luxuries. Why would people fight?
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Even after we have abolished private property and wage labor, nature will keep creating new threats to our rights that we have to struggle against. Perhaps in some far future under FALGSC we can surpass nature and the eternal struggle for our rights will finally be won, but how could you call the rights we artificially constructed for ourselves "natural"? We only gained those rights by defeating nature!
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Ok but there must have been a time where people lived in peace. Then the farmers made the concept of money in the world. The word natural is extremely misleading.
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People lived in peace with other people much of the time, but we never lived in peace with nature itself. Drought, flood, fire, predators, disease, infection, and many many other natural threats to our human rights have always existed. Furthermore, natural scarcity meant that even other people could become a threat - people from a different gens/tribe could decide that it's better if the other gens/tribe dies than if everyone eats a little less to make the food last longer. Nature was humanity's first enemy, before we divided up into class society and started to war with each other.
I will say "natural" is misleading, because humans are natural too. That's why I said in order for "natural" to mean anything at all then it must be distinct from human choices. If we include humans into nature, then natural rights don't mean anything because everything is natural including human oppression.
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oppression people is an action(a thought such as making the other village the enemy put into action) while not oppressing people is nothing(natural).
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So a bear choosing to eat me isn't natural?
If we say "okay, bears are natural so anything they choose to do is natural" then you have a problem because humans are natural too.
That's why I made the distinction between humans and nature. Everything humans do is unnatural, including when we choose to do nothing at all.
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The concept of money was put into the food. But before that people respected each other "naturally". until those scumbags farmers put the concept of money in the "world" ---outside the head
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"food" is the first "money". Those who controlled the food had the power(the farmers themselves). they started to remove the rights(oppressing people) because they wanted more power. I assume they probably wanted power because of the woman. You know how "these people" are.
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The rise of agriculture/property and the historical defeat of the female sex go hand-in-hand.
The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State is essential proletarian feminist reading.
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Again, you've got to be careful here, because historical and dialectical materialism makes this tricky. The pure idealist position -- not saying you're advocating it, but it's certainly easy to fall into -- is that of Rosseau and his ilk: under primitive communism, humanity lived an idyllic life, and then property and the agricultural revolution entered and started us off on a long train of opression and conflict within the species. There is truth to this, but isn't the whole story. As every new mode of production brings with it an increase in human power over nature, it also brings an expansion in concrete "rights," because humanity can now better defend itself against external nature. Thus the great slave civilizations of the ancient world were actually an improvement on hunter-gatherer society, and feudalism was an advance over slavery, since the average medieval peasant lived a better life than the average Roman slave, and the average Roman slave was better off than the average tribesman under primitive communism (if only in terms of life expectancy and being able to preserve his subjectivity in the face of hostile nature). The long view is that humanity moves from primitive communism to advanced, technological communism, with everything in between a neccesary transitional stage as humanity pauses and asserts its control over the external world. But what we need to be careful of is applying a moral valuation to any point in the transition. The level of social development can never be higher than the level of economic development, and at any point in history, humanity basically tends to the most equitable arrangement possible under the current development of productive forces.
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Truly the bear's biggest flaw. They just don't have that sigma grindset.
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It's ok, I hereby declare it is a natural right to face the consequences of your actions.
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That just gets silly.
Going to prison for reading communist literature is just me facing the consequences of my actions. Getting put in a
concentrationconversation therapy camp for being trans is just the consequences of my actions.-
I mean, life is as life is. Would you stop talking on the street if society decides that is a crime, or if that means you'll be discriminated against? Some people might, but you can't expect everyone to do it.
It's all a big dance and societal rules fluctuate depending on who's dancing. You just gotta dare live life (preferably in a good way).
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I think you just conveniently defined the concept of “rights” out of existence
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No, it's in there. The "rights" are part of a number of societal rules which depend on the "dance" (of life). In this case, the fighting for said rights and communicating that they exist are part of the "dance".
The rest of it I was describing life, because consequences matter where I live at least. And since it seemed "natural rights" were bound only by the consequences you are willing to take, then they are the same as life itself, which I thought was pretty funny.
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Okay, but then they aren't rights. They're just things that we like and agree to protect.
Which only supports my point - natural rights aren't real.
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They aren't real "rights", but they are real. You just defined them.
I don't mean to be hard headed. I feel like I agree with you since the beginning on the idea of it. I'm just stuck on the "isn't real" part of it.
Because I can very easily say "rights" aren't real as well. It's just pixels on a screen. :)
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So when I say that "natural rights" aren't real, I'm saying that they don't really come from nature. They come from us, because nature was the first threat to our rights.
Yes, you're right, the rights we call "natural" exist in some form, because rights exist. I am not disputing the concept of rights or whether they exist at all. A right is just a fundamental building block of society; it is a First Principle that can be used to derive essential freedoms and justice within society.
My overall point is "natural rights" don't exist because there's not a good way to distinguish them from other rights. It's just ideology. All rights are unnatural because all rights are human social technologies. Rights don't come from god or nature or the inherent goodness of the human spirit, they come from human struggles.
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