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by bitdizzy 1892 days ago
We live in a society
2 comments

Please don't do generic ideological flamewar on HN. It leads to repetitive, boring, nasty threads, which are the opposite of what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

So we must surrender our rights?
Almost by definition society is the negotiation of our behavior toward each other because otherwise we would impinge on each others' freedom to act as we please in intolerable ways.

Perhaps you think that is a bad thing and to be honest i wouldn't blame you if you decided to ignore all laws and norms of society and behaved like a feral animal towards others. I just don't think you would get very far before you're put in a cage or gunned down.

Do you have legal rights or restrictions outside of society? Living in society inherently means having a discussion of enforced boundaries and imposed burdens.
Where they conflict with others rights, something needs to give. Which one has to how much is the interesting question every time.
In case you did not realize it: yes, in times of crisis governments can take away your rights. If those governments are democratically chosen then that's society taking away your rights. If they are dictatorships then that's a different matter, but that does not seem to be the case here.
This is way too absolute. "Democratically" picked representatives can just as well exert force not in alignment with what the society of said democracy would want when the question would be voiced directly rather than indirectly taken care of. Or are we really going to be so naïve to believe representatives will stand behind every single one of their words their entire term, and pretend they don't pull stunts to bait & switch potential voters for a win rather than a loss?
Democracy isn't perfect. But that we already know. It has nothing to do with the subject though, so as far as I'm concerned you're off topic, I tried very hard to show why a democracy may sometimes opt to limit the rights of its denizens, and one of the times when this is legitimate is during times of crisis or when the lives and or well-being of its citizens are at stake.

This may not be absolute enough for you but then you'd have to cast the laws in stone without the ability to ever change them and then it ceases to be a democracy.

In a society you agree to rules. One of them might be that someone puts a vaccine shot in your arm. The concept of rights is given you by the society.
You have no rights outside of society.

If you disagree with me, go argue your right to life with a hungry grizzly bear.

Awful idea, and also wrong.

The only two true rights are freedom and property.

You are born with free will, and you can do whatever you want, unless someone actively prevents you from doing it.

You are born with your body, which is yours, your original property, and is the source of all other property you may gain through your life by using your body (including your brain) as a tool to obtain it.

Those two rights are yours by origin, you were born with them, society doesn't need to give them to you, all the other rights are just corollaries of those two, and whatever infringes these rights are not true rights.

The right to life is derived from the respect others should have for your will to live, and the fact that they shouldn't damage your body (property).

In your comment you are painfully confusing right with a warranty. There is no warranty for anything. Even in the midst of civilized society there is no warranty you'll live, what you do have is the warranty that society will do its best effort to punish those who killed you.

Some, yes.
We already do surrender some rights, like the right to eat your neighbors, which other animals have.

That's what makes us human I think.

It's called the social contract.

You never had a right to eat your neighbours. Neither Homo sapiens nor other animals.

Your human rights are yours because you are human, they don't derive from any social contract, they are not granted by society. Society can only respect them or violate them, not give them to you.

You might wonder what are your human rights then? The answer is easy, is what you were born with: Freedom and Property.

Freedom because you have a will, and you can do what you want if no-one hinders you. Property because you were born with your body, it's your to do with it as you please.

Any other so-called rights that violate these two fundamental rights are false rights. The "right to eat your neighbour" could never be a real right because it presupposes that you can eat them no matter what, you wouldn't need their consent in order for you to eat them and that would violate their freedom.

Actually, there is a bunch of other false rights that are in the same line as your "right to eat your neighbours": the right to food, the right to health-care, the right to housing, the right to anything that requires someone else's labor. Saying that such things are a right imply that someone else has to labor in order to grant said false rights to you. The "has to" part violates someone's freedom. We have a name for that: slavery.

I have trouble believing that you truly believe this, but in case you are not trolling:

You are not born with any rights. Rights are social constructs, always were, always will.

You decide that your right to roam the world is more important that the right of ants to live (you squash them when you walk). Some buddhist think otherwise and sweep in front of themselves before moving somewhere where ants might be.

Your distinction of “what requires other beings’ labor” will take you no where, almost all your actions will impact others. Do you think killing yourself is misusing your parents’ labor? No definitive answer exists, just social constructs.

Is is right to force selfish humans to vaccinate themselves to prevent doctors from working overtime in countries where health is socialized? I think so. Is it right to ask people to get vaccinated to prevent someone’s grandparents from dying 10 years too early? Well, yes, I believe that’s fair.

You have the right to disagree, but don’t trick yourself into believing there is any universal truth to be found here.

In parent's defense, eating your neighbor is an explicit action. Banning certain actions is indeed inevitable in a society.

Not vaccinating though is an inaction. It's more akin to a right not giving blood every couple of months. Yes, someone may die because of it, but making blood donations mandatory would be a strange thing. Or would it not?

The case isn’t saying that you must be vaccinated.

The question in this case is — does the government have to let your kids attend school without being vaccinated? The explicit action is “attending school”. You can choose to not have your kids vaccinated. That’s your right. But then you have to live with the consequences of that action. In this case, that consequence is not being able to attend preschool in the Czech Republic.

Good point.

However for virtually every child there's no choice whether to go to school. I don't know if Czech laws say explicitly that school education is guaranteed to the citizens, but de facto skipping school is not an option.

> Not vaccinating though is an inaction

Not clear at all to me that failure to vaccinate is inaction rather than action. Viruses push our understanding of moral culpability and causality, but the comparison to blood donation isn't apt. In the case of donation, we're talking about an abstract stranger, in the case of the virus, perhaps we're discussing a distant downstream effect, but we could also be talking about killing your neighbor or grandma.

Not vaccinating is inaction, but seeing other people while being contagious is not.

We could accuse you of homicide if someone dies from covid because you infected him and that could have been prevented by you not refusing the vaccine. Instead we make vaccination mandatory and consider infection to be an accident, which is the same idea, but more fair.

Paying taxes is a mandatory explicit action.