Summations Only

What if the two have different feelings on the matter, ie, "empathy" tells each of them something different?Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Reset long signature to size=1 font.

And the Founders were wrong as a matter of simple fact. Clearly the basic rights of which they spoke are not always self-evident, because there have been countless societies that did not have the. Likewise, obviously those rights are not inalienable, because there have been countless societies that alienated them.The same way that they were wrong about the rights stemming from a Creator.The key words were "We hold," not what comes afterward. So long as we agree that we have those rights, we have them. But they can be lost at any time by mutual agreement, or by tyranny. All that's needed to lose the Freedom of Speech is a Constitutional Amendment, or a takeover from a foreign power. And if you're referring to the basic three, "Life Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," well, those are all a joke already - we restrict all three on a daily basis. If those rights were truly "inalienable," we wouldn't ever put a single person in prison, we wouldn't execute anyone, and our social safety net would guarantee a fair minimum standard of living so that all citizens are freely able to pursue happiness instead of being stuck with two jobs just to keep the lights on and no chance to ever improve.I thought I was the idealist.

Rules for social behavior can only ever be a human invention. There is no objective law of the Universe that says "torture is evil." The Universe doesn't care. Only people care, only we give moral meaning to the Universe, not the other way around, and so we are the ones who decide what rights we have by common agreement. A society that pretends human rights don't exist looks curiously identical to a world where human rights don't exist. The Nazis decided that human rights were not universal...and the only thing that stopped them in the end was military force from others who disagreed.That would seem to suggest that human rights only exist as long as we choose to keep them. Why? Because you say so?Only from the perspective of an idealist who for some irrational reason believes that morality is objective.Taq, morality (and thus human rights) can only ever be subjective, because it can only ever exist in the minds of people. Guidelines for interpersonal behavior are not written in stone, nor are they numbered among the laws of physics alongside gravity.Moral conclusions like human rights only appear to be self-evident when sufficient people have a sufficiently similar ethical goal system. If we all believe that morality is guided by human empathy, then yes, we'll tend to wind up with nearly identical conclusions, and if enough of us think that way then such conclusions will appear to be self-evident.But if a person believes that morality is dictated by an authority figure, for an example, that person can wind up with entirely different moral conclusions and thus believe something entirely different about human rights.We can probably agree on which point of view creates a better society, but that doesn't mean that our moral conclusions are somehow objectively true.Rights only exist in the human mind. Just like all other aspects of morality.