Fundamental rights

[Holiday20310401]

Fundamental rights are silly to think of as absolutes that exist anywhere. A right corresponds to a time and a place simply for stability.

The political power of a society is only concerned about maintaining power and stability. If those establishments are threatened or compromised only then would the government actually act in concern to the public, for the public is where the potential of the power lies. This is just my view of it so correct me if I am wrong.

There would only be universal rights if everybody had equal say in the rights distributed to everybody. The government are the ones who establish moral equities and rights.

Rights are not like morals because they really don't act in concern to morality, just the public's view of what is justified for themselves. Rights do have moral attributes though for the time and the place.

However, morals change, they have to as technology changes. Slavery was acceptable back then but today our society is beyond that. In terms of virtue I suppose people back then were ok with having a theocracy, it was moral as long as the state religion appeared as a positive influence. It suited the expansionism trend of the medieval times or whatever period, period of feudalism.
Now today with immigration and the fact that borders do not drastically change there are many religions which must be accounted for if you want the supposed virtue of immigration (under the assumption that it would be moral to fulfill the virtue). So Canada has the 'cultural mosiac', accepting all religions, I think.
Also, with Islam, and the Koran, it was acceptable that woman were treated poorly as opposed to males. Obviously, here today rights are more equal in this respect.

So with morals there is a time and a place that they can correspond to, no absoluteness about them, which would be insane (ex. relating to an absolute period in time, Bible).

With rights they are just there for balance of the hierarchy of the society, again no absoluteness about them.

As for undeniable basic rights, I suppose anything that is ethical and can't be influenced or excluded from technology and other non-stagnant 'innovatives' (for lack of thinking up a better word) should be basic rights for humanity; but unless the public works to gain them nothing could really be already provided for us, we must "contravene" to quote Jazzman.

[GoshisDead]

So if morals are relative then there is no fundamental rights, in a such a usage fundamental is the same as saying universal, and universal is a stone's throw away from saying absolute.

[Doobah47]

Originally Posted by Mr. Fight the Power

aI do not believe in fundamental rights as I don't believe there is an absolute moral code.

I completely agree, and find the way of Western governments' perpetuation of common morality utterly repulsive. But we have to live with it, so why not ignore the nation's law and reside out of sight?

As for morality, surely it is immoral! If wasting time were detrimental to a decision then wasting time considering the good/bad of a situation is totally pointless, useless and worthless. Of course good/bad is simply a connotation to religion, so must obviously be considered with doubt - if one considers good/bad with doubt then neither could be absolute thus refuting their existence as definitives, thus negating any reason for good/bad. Ha!

So what we are left with is ethics, and the notions of quality of life for example, or pain - if one person were subject to great pain and 1000 subjected to minor pain, whom would you choose to medicate? (Is that ethics? I might be confused...)

[Holiday20310401]

Originally Posted by Doobah47

Of course good/bad is simply a connotation to religion, so must obviously be considered with doubt

And yet good and bad are fundamental pawns to the situation of religious powers. Always, a religious power is unethical due to the fact that their conveyance(lol I can't believe thats actually a word) of good and bad reflects the corresponding God that they themselves do not follow. Hypocrites. And the god conveys the morality for the society the religion is being evoked upon, but God is just a way for people to think that the rights are moral when they are all about power not morality.

The crusades is a wonderful example. In the name of the pope, who christianity beholds as having direct insight to God or whatever you want to believe torture was approved. I'm sure a lot of the protestants questioned the ethical nature of torture and whether it is a good outcome for heretics (it's definitely not).

So you are right that religion trys to connote to good and bad. Its just too bad that people do not recognize that a connotation has no actuality, and dennotations are more important in this case. Religion denotes to a way for the society to have a uniform purpose, a way of coming together so as to acheive the will of the political power, (or religious power) much more easily. Stability and power, blind assertion of the public provides the ability for useless customs that tend to false spiritual need. So religion is really diminishing the connection there should be between morality and rights.

Innocent III aka -

[GoshisDead]

And yet good and bad are fundamental pawns to the situation of religious powers. Always, a religious power is unethical due to the fact that their conveyance(lol I can't believe thats actually a word) of good and bad reflects the corresponding God that they themselves do not follow. Hypocrites. And the god conveys the morality for the society the religion is being evoked upon, but God is just a way for people to think that the rights are moral when they are all about power not morality.

And Governments, and Educational Systems, and Clubs, and Social Movement, and any other organized group, finds a way to say this is good or bad because of some higher power.

Look at the Nazis, Stallinist Russia, the Modern Education system, Richard Dawkins ....
I figure if we are going to cast stones of blame we might as well go all out, and just realize its a human trait and not the bailiwick of one particular social order.

[Holiday20310401]

Yes but education systems have a more rational outcome than to not have an education at all. I mean especially with a teen's and kid's apathy ( me included) who would actually decided to educate themselves, and then decided to actually learn something.
And we are not morally achieved yet (or ever will be) to say that not having a government would be more beneficial.
Yes I agree with you on clubs and social movements.

Religion is different, where there is tainting of the actual symbol of right vs. wrong.

[GoshisDead]

What I was really getting at with that last post holiday is that morals, all moral, must be justified externally if they are to be binding. One does not say, hey i have my own moral code unto me. There, at least in practicum, is always an authoritative entity who's rules we justify our morals and behavior, whether it be religion, parents, , teachers, friends, culture, whatever, that has its own internal behavioral norm and belief structures. People with institutionalized externally unjustified morals and behavior are considered deviant in some way by society from mentally insane, to that creepy kid of the Jone's.
As far as religion bashing goes, it is the vogue in some circles to blame the world's woes and historical woes on the "uneducated ignorant masses who can't see the world for what it is" etc... When a good portion of the people who throw this out are simply railing against what they were taught as kids, and it is their right to believe what they like, in what seems to me a reactionary tantrum reminiscent of the Christmas they learned that Santa wasn't real.

[Didymos Thomas]

I was contrasting positive law with normative law.

I can work with that, too.

The non-existence of the legal/positive right has no bearing on the existence of the moral/normative right.

The non-existence of legal/positive rights does not necessarily demand that moral/normative rights are non-existent, though they may be non-existant anyway.

When we say that everyone should have the right to healthcare, we say that they have a moral right to healthcare, and that someone who does not have access to healthcare has had the right violated.

So what? People can claim to have a right to go to the moon just as easily as they can claim a right to healthcare, or anything else. Doesn't mean they have that right -doesn't even mean they should have that right.

And that's what these rights amount to - what people want. What they think they can safely demand. 10,000 years ago the whole notion of rights would have been insane, but today, we can claim some rights and be reasonably satisfied with the response to our claim by government.

[Holiday20310401]

Originally Posted by Didymos Thomas

10,000 years ago the whole notion of rights would have been insane

Not insane, just against the social norm if any one person imagined such a unique idea. Abstractness seems so insane but is really where innovation comes from, and when such ideas are proven to have virtue, only after the virtue is noticed will the norm think the abstract idea to be 'cool'.

[Didymos Thomas]

Not insane, just against the social norm if any one person imagined such a unique idea.

In this case, they are the same. The notion that the individual was significant would have been entirely contrary to early man's understanding of reality - community, not individual, was the currency. The tribe.

For rights to make sense to man, we had to develop newer understandings of reality to fit the changes in society. Eventually, individual rights made sense for society - still do, I think.