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by david_p 1899 days ago
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.

2 comments

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.