What does it mean to have a right to life?

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by fess, Jan 30, 2019.

  1. Beaconator Valued Senior Member

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    It means if your good you are allowed to suffer the retardation of psychopathy... Or embrace it with jovial persuit.
     
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  3. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    lawful assembly ?
    patriots act ?
     
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  5. Beaconator Valued Senior Member

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    Words and thoughts are kind. History is not
     
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  7. Beaconator Valued Senior Member

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    Our first president killed people himself for not following him., Wheather he was following the Bible is up to someone else else to make a category for in some random "ninsequential"(somehow passes spell / ) but not nonsequential which I spelled first...

    So some nonsequential category on this"" www site can argue against me on that.
     
  8. fess Registered Senior Member

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    Many people see it as more than a legal concept. E.g. Fetuses have a right to life regardless of what current law says. What I was trying to say is that the only 'rights' you have are those that nature and society allow you, and they can be taken away at any time. Your right to life completely depends on my motivation to pull the trigger.
     
  9. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    No it doesn't.
    You violating someone's right does not mean they don't have that right.
    That's what societies are.
     
  10. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    That's their prerogative, but I'm not sure how they expect to enforce a supra-legal concept without enlisting the help of the law.
    So, they can try to change the current law through +/- democratic means, or else resort to illegal means of attempting to enforce their own notion, in which case they'll likely go to jail.
    Which is the social contract.
    Certainly. Contracts are breached and nullified all the time. The social ones are no exception: there may be a revolution or coup d'etat; a radically different faction may rise to power through various means and by various methods.
    Motive+opportunity+means .... + the wits to evade capture or willingness to pay the legal price.
    No right is inviolable. That doesn't make it any less morally binding.
     
  11. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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  12. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    The Right to Life rests on the assumption that Life is sacred and it is immoral to take it, if it is human.
    Wikipedia

    George Carlin as usual had a wonderful perspective on the concept of "Sanctity of Life";
    (warning, crude language)
     
  13. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    Love that guy!
     
  14. fess Registered Senior Member

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    A right that can't be enforced is a meaningless right. Rights only exist as legal terms. There are no inalienable rights. Someone living alone in a forest has no right to life
     
  15. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    It certainly can be - and is - enforced.

    Yes they do.
    Inalienable rights are a human construct - and applies to humans in regard to other humans.
    You will be prosecuted for murder should you decide to knock them off.
     
    Last edited: Feb 9, 2019
  16. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    Someone living alone in a forest has no rights, and no need for any... unless he joins and is accepted by a pack of wolves.
    The concept or rights exists only in the context of a society, and comes with a concomitant set of obligations. That society doesn't need to be human: the same concept exists in a herd of bison, a flock of geese and a troop of monkeys.
    Rights can always be violated; obligations can always be abrogated - but there is a penalty.
     
  17. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    No, he still does.

    Do you suppose the law enforcement of that country, coming across his bullet-ridden body would say "Well, we didn't know him, so I guess it's a wash"?
     
  18. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    Point taken. Even hermits are covered by the laws of their nation, whether they acknowledge those laws or not.
    (aamof, I've spent many hours attempting to identify the remains of random guys who went off into the woods and offed themselves or had help doing it. It's a lot easier if the rusted shot-gun has the guy's thumb-bone still in the trigger guard.)
     
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  19. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    enforcement of the life being taken is unable to enforce the life to be given back.
    thus your idea of quasi-logic to this confuses me.

    if the essence of the enforcement is to kill the offender, then the life has already been taken AND can not be given back.
    what comes after is more clearly defined as a form of punishment.
    punishment can be torture or murder or various other things...

    thus my strong dislike for the modern US word term and use of the word "justice".

    justice for a women who has an abortion
    vs
    justice for someone who steals peoples life savings
    (one example is that bery madolf guy living a life of luxury jail time paid for by the working class poor tax payer)
    is that justice ? (subjective metaphors of a predefined set of moral values which tends to depend on how rich you are in the USA)

    the playing field is not really level to begin with so the word has no intrinsic value of meaning toward a system that prioritizes a sense of value of money against a value of life.
    the only common logical value of the word justice would be to be of differing value to the value of the person seeking it.

    thus common thought values = "some people do not deserve justice"

    please explain more of your thoughts if you can ?
    {({fyi emotionaly disturbed folk, im pro choice}])
     
  20. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    the harsh reality of the situation is that suicide of men is seen much like casualties of war by many cultures.
    meanwhile they still define females as being owned and having more value because of the ability to own the women.
    its a pretty weird mind scape to get into and i suggest you do so with a safety line & buddy system.

    nasty subject i dont really wish to get talking about right now but thought since you raised it... i would give a glance of my opinion
     
  21. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    Yes... Right to life raises the corollary questions of who owns the life in the main question.
    While we've done the suicide debate, there is still another aspect to control and decision-making.
     
  22. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    "Okay guys, one more thing, this summer when you're being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha, don't forget what you're celebrating, and that's the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn't want to pay their taxes."

    ―Ginny Stroud, re: 4 July 1976 (Dazed & Confused)

    I suppose the "lol" stands out.

    The Declaration of Independence is a 243 year-old political document; it wasn't so much bullshit at the time of its publication, but the Revolution itself is kind of filthy; cf., Nace, Gangs of America (2003)↱; it was, ultimately, a fight for access to and control of the bourgeoisie.

    A more appropriate analysis of bullshit would pertain to the American heritage of what we have done since.

    The Constitution might aspire to lofty principles, but its context is also that of mulligan, at best, if not craven forfeiture. Both, the failed Articles of Confederation, and their successor, the Constitution, betrayed the Declaration. Article I, Section 2↱ of the Constitution of the United States of America stood for seventy-eight years, and required a war to settle (Amendment XIII). Even now, one hundred fifty-one years after the adoption of the Equal Protection Clause (Amendment XIV), Americans have yet to escape their heritage of betrayal; we continue to pay the toll, and give societal tribute unto our supremacist and slaving heritage.

    I recently joked↗ about a strange assertion of Christendom leading me back to a stoner comedy from once upon a time; the same line comes up, here; see above. Article I, Section 2, was about taxation, and its endorsement of slavery implies a particular point that has certainly come explicitly to the fore, repeatedly, throughout the history of this Republic. If we follow the concept of the declared right to life through laws pertaining to slaves, the rules seem to rely on the idea of statutory permission or exclusion, a notion American courts pretend to disdain but are willing to enforce as long as they don't have to come right out and say it. To wit, punishing a slave to death was more akin to an organized crime question than any consideration of justice. With organized crime, dead men don't pay; with slavery, dead slaves don't earn. One need not be a slaver to recognize that wrecked assets do not produce; one does need to be a slaver to so consider human beings that manner of business asset. Still, murder has always been wrong, in these United States; we've just had some strange standards about what constitutes murder compared to what does not.

    And these hundred fifty-four years after the slavers formally surrendered their war, it is quite clear the color of one's skin still makes a difference to the definition of a declared right to life.

    That the police can shoot a black man to death for the crime of obeying their instructions, or beat a black girl for not looking girly enough and therefore looking scary like a black boy who looks dangerous like a black man who needs to be whooped, and we're all supposed to be okay with it, certainly makes some sort of point. After all, the black man providing his identification on demand—(officers were so frightened they required forty-one bullets to assuage their mortal fear)—or following instructions being shouted at him by two cops—(so enraging police that one officer physically assaulted the suspect, and then both officers shot the suspect to death for behaving in a dangerous manner by falling over)—are clearly shown a lesser right to life than white people who actually attack police.

    The Declaration was forfeit in the Constitution; we have adopted an Equal Protection Clause, and occasionally even use it, but by no measure do Americans truly believe it, because believing it means supremacists can only dream about hurting other people for the fact of skin color, or womanhood, or queerness, or having the wrong religion, or having religion at all, or their own sexual inadequacy, or whatever, instead of actually hurting people.

    Liberty and Justice for All makes a nice pitch, but we never really have been on about that. Indeed, the American politic bringing Trump to bear is nothing more than American first cause losing patience with its own ruse. The less traditionalists can hide behind the glory of American potential, and thus the less they can protect their supremacy under law, the less interested they are in being Americans. This is what our conservatives preserve; it is what our centrists insist on meeting halfway; we weren't really kicking out tyranny, but merely tyrants. Revolutions rarely smash the state and break the cycle, but, instead, merely usurp the monopoly on coercive force. Certes, that is all the American Revolution ever accomplished.

    The Declaration says some nice things, but we gave them away five years later, and again six years after that. It doesn't have to be bullshit, but Americans generally seem to prefer it that way.
     
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  23. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    He won't understand you. The question, though, is whether, as you raise your gun to shoot him, he has a right to life, because you can understand that.

    The guard taking you to the gas chamber is presumably infringing on any right to life you might have. That doesn't make the concept meaningless. Infringing on rights is considered a moral wrong (and sometimes also a legal wrong). The existence of an infringement does not negate the right.
     
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