Rights and duties
If you live in the USA, you are familiar with the concept of unalienable rights, which are the rights that no one can take from you, not even government, without either specific due cause, as decided by your peers (court trial) or your express and uncoerced permission. These include the big 4: life; liberty; pursuit of happiness; and property. What made them unalienable was the concept of a Creator of all things and the belief that this Creator would have wanted it no other way.
The concept of unalienable rights has been determined in other ways. Rawls demonstrated how logical process can reach the same conclusions. Recent neuropsychiatry studies with advanced imaging techniques seems to indicate that we are hard wired towards these same values. Past experiments with governments taking a different approach to any of the big 4 has usually found these governments winding up on the wrong side of history. It is an evolution of rule of law, of government, of social structures.
Grafted on top of this is the desire for a powerful leader, a powerful country. The conflict between these two impulses may lead to compromises in the unalienable rights.
Then, there is the concept of group good as opposed to individual good. One has little difficulty understanding how a person who pollutes a stream on his property adversely effects those who live downstream, but more difficulty seeing how a baker in Kansas, who sells all his bread in Kansas, effects a baker in New York, who sells all his bread in New York and has to be regulated by the Federal government.
If you award a right, you place a burden, a duty on others. One clear example is the right to a fair trial. This places a duty on citizens to serve as jurors. Courts level fines or even imprisonment on those who do not appear for jury duty. A soldier who goes AWOL is subject to penalties, which can be as high as death. If the courts found an unalienable right to eat a McDonalds hamburger, a McDonalds employee who did not show up for work might be in serious trouble with the law.
Those who accept the duties of aiding and abetting your rights, as defined by government, have themselves to some extent enslaved themselves to the government for the greater good. They are subject to penalties that do not exist for a free person.
A society where everything seems to be a right will be a society where everyone is enslaved.
One of the mottos of the revolution was Live Free or Die. As we nationalize everything in the USA, we can see how far we have come.
The concept of unalienable rights has been determined in other ways. Rawls demonstrated how logical process can reach the same conclusions. Recent neuropsychiatry studies with advanced imaging techniques seems to indicate that we are hard wired towards these same values. Past experiments with governments taking a different approach to any of the big 4 has usually found these governments winding up on the wrong side of history. It is an evolution of rule of law, of government, of social structures.
Grafted on top of this is the desire for a powerful leader, a powerful country. The conflict between these two impulses may lead to compromises in the unalienable rights.
Then, there is the concept of group good as opposed to individual good. One has little difficulty understanding how a person who pollutes a stream on his property adversely effects those who live downstream, but more difficulty seeing how a baker in Kansas, who sells all his bread in Kansas, effects a baker in New York, who sells all his bread in New York and has to be regulated by the Federal government.
If you award a right, you place a burden, a duty on others. One clear example is the right to a fair trial. This places a duty on citizens to serve as jurors. Courts level fines or even imprisonment on those who do not appear for jury duty. A soldier who goes AWOL is subject to penalties, which can be as high as death. If the courts found an unalienable right to eat a McDonalds hamburger, a McDonalds employee who did not show up for work might be in serious trouble with the law.
Those who accept the duties of aiding and abetting your rights, as defined by government, have themselves to some extent enslaved themselves to the government for the greater good. They are subject to penalties that do not exist for a free person.
A society where everything seems to be a right will be a society where everyone is enslaved.
One of the mottos of the revolution was Live Free or Die. As we nationalize everything in the USA, we can see how far we have come.
posted by DocBrain at
4:29 AM
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