[rayiner]

"Rights" are all arbitrary rules in an artificially constructed system. As an organism in the state of nature, the only "right" you have is to use your natural abilities to kill, eat, and steal from other organisms. When you impose a social organization that takes away that right, which is the only truly fundamental one, any rules you layer on top of that are arbitrary.

Consequently, society can, consistent with ethics and morality, recognize a right to hold property, and just as consistently recognize exceptions to that right such as for payment of taxes.

[Zigurd]

That is your view. Now write a constitution based on that. Or, perhaps you find a constitution, or basic law, that has a viewpoint on rights to be superfluous.

The US constitution was written with a point of view: that people have rights, and that those rights are unenumerated. You might think that's rather artificial. But so is government, in general.

[rayiner]

The U.S. Constitution assumes that people have "rights" but does not articulate a theory of what those rights are. Do they exist in the state of nature, as Locke believed, or do they arise from recognition by society? The Constitution takes no position on that.

[AnimalMuppet]

The Declaration of Independence does take a position on that, however - that those rights are given by God, and therefore that no human has the authority to take them away.

[tptacek]

In the context of the thread, this sounds suspiciously like an argument that the US constitution was written without recognition of property rights. But of course nothing could be further from the truth.

[Zigurd]

Not at all. Property rights are not listed. Nor is the right to travel. Nor the right to use math to obscure there contents of a document, etc.etc. Yet these are all rights.

[tptacek]

Not only were the authors of the Constitution zealous believers in property rights, but many of them believed that property rights extended to the ownership of people.

This is a thread questioning the intrinsic merit of property rights, and I read your comment as suggesting that the Constitution might somehow refute property rights. It clearly does not.

[Zigurd]

Not all of them. And some who did, gave up on slavery.

Are they men? Then make them citizens and let them vote. Are they property? Why then is no other property included? The houses in [Philadelphia] are worth more than all the wretched slaves that cover the rice swamps of South Carolina....The admission of slaves into the representation when fairly explained comes to this: that the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the coast of Africa and, in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a government...

[meric]

kill, eat, and steal => kill, eat, steal, build and defend.

Even birds build nests, and magpies defend their children in nests agains humans, too.

[tptacek]

Is it "morally wrong" when another animal eats those eggs, or is this not a particularly useful example?

This thread is pretty weird. Rayiner isn't saying anything shocking; he's recapitulating political philosophy that most of us learn in high school. It's one thing to debate Rousseau vs. Hobbes, another to act like the concepts of the general will and the state of nature are novel.

[meric]

Saying we designed society this way with such and such constraints and trade offs is like saying meerkats do the same thing in their societies, which is ridiculous. Nature isn't as cutthroat as the quote suggested. Clearly outside of humanity, love and stable societies exist also. I don't think this argues against rayiners point but adds to it.

[twoodfin]

What is your basis for "ethics and morality" that doesn't include recognizing the rights of the individual? Some kind of utilitarianism? Intuitionism?

I certainly hope you didn't mean "It is therefore consistent with ethics and morality that society can...", which would mean your first paragraph implies there are no moral or ethical limits on what 'society' can do.

[rayiner]

Of course societies are limited in what they can do by ethics and morality--by their own ethical and moral constructs. Or by those of other societies that might use force to impose other ethical and moral constructs on them.

[escherize]

Actually that's inconsistent. Using coercion to take something (a.k.a. theft) is wrong. Taxes are paid at the threat of violence, therefore to levy taxes is morally wrong.