Summations Only

So you see no positive benefit of keeping species from going extinct? Also, japanese whalers are whaling in international waters, not in Japan. Humans rights do not stop at the US border.

I kind of like the idea some guys back in the 1770's had. They thought that human rights were inalienable.

Unalienable rights are natural rights that no government can take away from a citizen. That is what they were speaking of.Natural rights and legal rights - Wikipedia

The same logic could be applied to legal rights. At the end of the day, what people consider natural human rights do not stop at the US border, which is the point I was trying to make.

No, they are unalienable, at least according to this school of thought. If a government violates the natural rights of a person then the government is in the wrong. This was used as a justification for the split between America and the British monarchy. Their natural rights were being violated, so they declared the British government dissolved and established their independence. Hypocrisy was certainly one of their flaws.What I am ultimately responding to is the idea that we can tell other countries what they should do with respect to human rights. Natural laws is the justification, or at least the proposed justification.From wiki, "Natural rights, in particular, are considered beyond the authority of any government or international body to dismiss."

That would be tatamount to a government declaring that water is not wet."unalienable - incapable of being repudiated or transferred to another"
Unalienable - definition of unalienable by The Free DictionaryBy definition, unalienable rights can not be taken away. There are two ways to look at this, IMHO. There is what we can do, and what we should do. What we can do comes down to power. What we should do comes down to morality and natural rights. They do not always intersect.

I will fully agree that this topic wil forever be debated so I will just leave it here.To swerve this back on topic, the two extreme views may very well be around government sovereignty and the idea of natural rights. Artemis is on record as stating that what goes on in other countries, and other states within the Union for that matter, are not our concern. I hold the other view where human rights are universal (and unalienable ) and should be fought for no matter where those humans may call home.

That certainly is the conundrum. If another government is committing genocide can we justify the use of military force to stop the genocide, thereby enforcing our view of "natural rights"? I would think we could justify military force, and we have in the past. One of the unalienable rights is to practice the religion of your choice without facing death at the hands of your government. In the case of Yugoslavia, the US/NATO stepped in to stop the genocide of muslims at the hands of the military which had support from senior government officials. If Milosevic had said, "It is our natural right to ethnically cleanse our country" would we have had no recourse but to stand back and watch? Were we in the wrong for intervening?Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

Interesting. I think we will have to agree to disagree on this one.

I know how sustainable the blue whale population is . . . not very. Nearly went extinct due to whaling. We almost lost walrus populations as well. Are you really unaware of this? Human rights are the same for everyone, no matter their nationality. That is why they are called unalienable. Do governments violate human rights? Yes. Does this mean that human rights don't exist? No.

How are they destroying the Constitution?

Their human rights were violated. That is quite different from unalienable rights not existing. You might as well claim that speed limits do not exist since your car can go 70 mph in a 55 zone.

You don't lose your rights. You always have the rights that all humans have. Whether those rights are violated is a separate issue. Correct, but doing 70 in a 55 does not make the speed limit go away. It is still there. You can still be ticketed for breaking the speed limit.Violating a person's human rights does not make those rights go away. They are not lost. They are still there.Human rights are not things that humans are physically incapable of doing. They are moral guidelines of how we should treat each other. To reference Hume, human rights are an ought, not an is. We can say that slavery is bad because it violates human rights. Showing that someone owns a slave does not make this human rights violation go away.

You actually didn't give any examples. Is there something intrinsic in Mexicans that prevents them from having human rights? Is that what you are saying? Are you saying that they are sub-human and deserve the same treatment as dogs or cattle simply because of their geographic position?

Speed limits were merely an analogy. No one is saying that speed limits are an unalienable right. They were simply an example of the difference between absence and violation.