Category: Rights and Duties
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Norms in Nature? Some Doubts
Our friend Malcolm Pollack, riffing on some complaints of mine about Michael Anton's talk of natural rights, wrote the following: Rights are normative in their essence, while Nature simply is. Therefore, I see only two possibilities: 1) “Natural” rights flow from an intrinsic source of normative authority. Since brute and indifferent Nature cannot be such a…
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John Locke on the Right to Self-Defense
Let's go through the drill one more time. You have a natural right to life. This right to life entails in others a moral obligation not to harm you. Should anyone attempt to do so, you yourself have a right, directly and not via the invocation of the help of a police agency, to defend…
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Benatar on Suicide: Is Suicide Murder?
This is the eleventh entry in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). I have decided to skip ahead to Chapter 7, "Suicide," and leave Chapter 6, "Immortality," for later. This episode discusses pp. 163-172. We have seen that for Benatar death, being a part of the human predicament, contra Epicurus, is no solution to…
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Guns and Rights
Do you have a right to life? Yes. If you have a right to life, do you have a right to defend your life? Yes. If you have a right to defend your life, do you have the right to acquire adequate means to self-defense? Yes. Do you understand that this implies that the law-abiding…
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The Gun Issue in a Few Sentences
Do you have a right to life? Yes. If you have a right to life, do you have a right to defend your life? Yes. If you have a right to defend your life, do you have the right to acquire the means to self-defense? Yes. Do you understand that this implies that the citizen…
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The Right to Free Speech is Unalienable
This important point is explained clearly here: We do not derive our right to freedom of speech from the Constitution. More specifically, it does not “come from” the First Amendment. [. . .] The Constitution is not the source of our right to freedom of speech because freedom of speech is an unalienable right. What…
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Deriving Gun Rights From the Right to Life: Short Version
This is a summary of a much longer and more carefully articulated 2009 entry. Humans possess a natural right to life. This right entails the right to defend one's life. The right to defend one's life entails the right to acquire and possess the appropriate means to the defense of one's life. Appropriate means are…
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“I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Misattributed to Voltaire, the above saying yet captures his attitude. The parroting of the saying in the wake of the terrorist attack by Muslim fanatics on Charlie Hebdo is becoming tiresome. It is high time we take a squinty-eyed look at it. I will be arguing that it does not bear up well under examination.…
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On the Putative Right to Health Care
John e-mails and I comment in blue: I found your most recent post on a right to health care very interesting. It seems to me that much of the discussion of rights, not only about putative rights to health care, but about rights in general, depends on a certain controversial principle, namely: If…
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A Right to Health Care?
Food, shelter, and clothing are more important than health care in that one can get along for substantial periods of time without health care services but one cannot survive for long without food, shelter, and clothing. Given this plain fact, why don’t the proponents of ‘free’ universal health care demand ‘free’ food, shelter, and clothing?…
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Did Bentham Say That Natural Rights are Nonsense on Stilts?
He said no such thing according to this informative post by Keith Burgess-Jackson. And while you are at Keith's place, read his piece on leftist journalist Elizabeth Drew. He patiently demolishes her edifice of self-serving misrepresentations.