Reply #25: They are an agreement with ourselves--to extent that they exist at all

[kenny blankenship]

there's no such thing as a "natural" right to anything--not to life, not to property, not to the benign or approving regard of our fellow beings--NADA.

All so-called rights --human rights, civil rights, political rights, etc-- derive from practice in the state of civilization, not nature. As such, the rights we like to call "inalienable" are subject to continual maintenance and re-creation (and emendation). Any and all rights people may be said to have come not from their birth, or from nature, or god(s) but from Man and the LEGAL arrangements, or contracts as they are known, among human society.

The only purely "natural" right is the right to be eaten, or to eat; the right to kill without excuse (that is, the need of excuse), and to be killed: in other words no concept of "right" at all exists within nature. If a right was inherent in your DNA, (or your materialist cause(s) which an Aristotelian might approve of), or if it were inherent in what Platonists or Existentialists might call your substance or essence, respectively, then it could possibly be called ineradicable, self-evident and inalienable. To invoke the category "Man" would invoke also his "rights" in the same breath. But no such thing can be found with a microscope, nor discovered with a table of syllogisms. And God who is the other prospective ground of human rights cannot be found with a telescope. Man has no inherent, natural, inalienable rights. Look around you. Look back into history. Isn't it blindingly obvious? Rights are only what we accord or grant each other; when they exist they vary considerably from place to place and time to time; and usually most human beings have not granted nor been have granted rights (rights others were obliged to respect) at all.

To the extent that we live any better than this is due solely to our own provisioning. Inalienable rights in the strictest sense are a ridiculous absurdity. (A wish with a portentous and solemn sounding name is still just a wish. ) But through invention and vigilance we have CREATED them. Any rights that exist at all, exist solely within the operating context of a constitutional government, within a legal tradition insulated from arbitrary, centralized power, and within democratic popular sovereignty. Scratch those, or any one of those, and you will soon find any supposed inalienable "right" to be a most alienable commodity.
Whether, having created them, we can manage to keep them, is a test of our vigilance and ingenuity. There will always be those who plot to rule over society for their own narrow benefit, with minimal respect for law and utter contempt for others' rights. It's up to us to guard against barbarians, kings, and pirates in our midst. Nobody should protect our rights if we aren't willing to do it ourselves. Knowing that is we who created them in the first place, we might even manage to improve them.