Will the Second Amendment survive?

[Radar]

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

Yes, any country with a nuclear weapon will not get attacked by a conventional enemy. Iran notes this, that is why I even have doubts of them giving up their nuclear weapon program in 2003. The part about them bombing Israel or giving their future nuclear weapons away is a load of crap, it doesn't make sense, but I do believe nuclear weapons is on Iran's agenda.


We did learn about unalienable rights in public school, I just disagree with that idea.


If someone attacks me with a knife, I will defend myself whether it is a right or a privilege.

Either way, besides a minor few things all we are disagreeing on is semantics. When you say discovered I say created, when you say give up I say don't have the right. We get the same result either way, you just start at the top (unlimited rights) and come down (what we have now) while I start from the bottom (no right) and come up (what we have now).

I just believe that rights is an abstract concept, like morals, ethics, and freedom, because only humans can understand or use them and there is no way to test if they are actually there or not.


You did not read my post correctly Radar. I said since no one believes they don't have a right to life, no one can ethically decide if they have a right to life or not. Society can only mold people's beliefs of rights and enforce them. If Hitler believes the Jews don't have the right to life, that means he feels he doesn't need to justify killing them. If German society believes that a Jew has no right to life, that means a German growing up in that society will most likely believe that Jews don't have a right to life and that there would be no penalty for killing a Jew. A Jews can protect him or herself with the justification that he or she has the right to life. Rights, like ethics, are highly based on perspective.

I don't necessarily disagree with the idea of living with a few unalienable rights because it makes things much simpler and sets very ethical guidelines 99% of the time, I just don't believe they are real. "Do unto others as you would want them to do upon you" is a horrible idea in some situations, but it is a good generalization to live by 99% of the time. Like unalienable rights, I don't believe that quote is the correct way, but I will tell other people it is because it is simple to understand, easily avoids conflict, and would be the most moral decision, in my opinion at least, 99% of the time.

Another reason I don't believe in the idea of unalienable is because there is nothing to enforce those rights besides humans. If everyone in the world besides me believed that I don't have a right to live and all 6 billion people try to kill me, there is nothing the universe or nature is going to do to stop them. The only person that can stop them is myself. If nature says that everyone has a right to life, then it would make sense that nature would enforce it, but it doesn't, hence another reason why I believe rights are man-made. Humans are the only ones that can enforce rights, so it makes sense that humans created rights. Nature enforces the laws of gravity, hence why it makes sense that nature "created" gravity.

Nature grants us life, and all of our natural rights. Nature does not need to "enforce" rights. We protect our own rights. Another part of nature is that we die. Our lives are fragile and we have a right to defend them. Nature doesn't "enforce" the law of gravity. Gravity just is and that's part of nature. Our rights just exist. Neither our rights, nor gravity can be bought, sold, taken, or given away. They can be overcome, but that doesn't mean they cease to exist.

I can overcome the gravitational pull of the earth by getting into a rocket. The gravity still exists. I can overcome someone's right to life by killing them. It doesn't mean they didn't have that right. I can overcome their right to private property ownership by stealing from them, it doesn't mean I have a right to do so or that they don't still have the right to own property.

Our rights have nothing to do with perception. I don't have a right to life merely because I perceive myself to have it. I'd have a right to life even if I didn't know what rights were and I were dim enough to think they were created by society.

Here's a question.

Society is made up of individuals. If individuals do not have rights, where does society gain its powers from? By what authority does "society" act? How can "society" grant rights to people when the people who make up society have no rights?

In other words, how can you give something to someone that you don't have?

Also, anything that can be GIVEN can also be taken away. These are privileges. If society could give rights to people, they would cease to be rights. They would be privileges. If rights came from society, there would be no such things as rights.

If you acknowledge that we have a right to life, (and you have done so) my entire argument is proven because rights can't be bestowed upon us, they can only exist on their own.

A right inherent and is something you do not require permission to do. A privilege is permission to do something and this permission can be revoked at any time.


For instance, if I own a piece of land. I can walk across my land all day back and forth, and there isn't a single person on the face of the earth who can tell me to stop. I don't require the permission of anyone to walk across my land.

If I want to take a shortcut across YOUR land, I'd require your permission. You could grant me permission and extend the privilege of walking across your land. But in the future, if you get tired of me walking across your land, you can revoke that permission. You can never revoke my right to walk across my own land.

You said that you would defend your own life regardless of whether it were a right or a privilege. This statement alone proves it to be a right. It's something you do not require permission to do. It's something you were born with the right to do. This right can not be taken away from you. You can't sell your right to defend yourself to me because I already have a right to defend myself. I was born with it. You can't vote away your right to defend yourself. Nothing you say or do will separate your right to defend your life from your life itself. You can end your life, but then you would have no life to defend so your right to defend it is irrelevant.

As long as you have a life, you have a right to defend it. As long as you have a life, you own yourself and no other person or group of people has any claim to your life or your person. As long as you own yourself, your thoughts, speech, and labor are your own and so are the fruits of that labor. Nobody else on earth has any legitimate claim to the fruits of your labor unless you have sold those fruits or otherwise traded them.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Radar

Nature doesn't "enforce" the law of gravity.

Yes it does. Anything that gravity prohibits can't be done. Rights prohibit nothing in the absence of human enforcement.

Our rights have nothing to do with perception.

If you attempt to do something without taking gravity into account, the punishment is failure.
If you attempt to do something without taking rights into account, the punishment is decided by yourself, in the form of guilt, and/or by the reactions of others, all of which are based entirely on perception.

Society is made up of individuals. If individuals do not have rights, where does society gain its powers from? By what authority does "society" act? How can "society" grant rights to people when the people who make up society have no rights?

This post is made up of sentences, each of which is made up of words, each of which is made up of letters. A letter doesn't have all of the properties of the post.

Again, I am not saying that we don't have rights, or that it's a bad idea to behave as if we do. What I am saying is that your assertions that rights have physical, objective reality outside the mind are unsupported. I suspect it is because they are unsupportable; not because they are false, but because the question of their validity is untestable.

[piercehawkeye45]

Most of the examples you have given me are just proving that our disagreements have to do with wording. When it comes down to it, privilege and rights are just words that you can use to turn the argument your way. To me, there really isn't a difference between the two besides a label.

I'll try to organize my argument again.

As I mentioned before, most of disagreements are just arguing semantics coming from my bottom up approach and your top down approach.

Lets take the right/privilege to life in the United States. As most of us know, some states allow the practice of capital punishment. With this, would life be considered a right or privilege since the government has the ability to take a life from a person.

Your perspective: We have the right to life and the state is just violating that right in a certain case. The person still has a right to life but the state is violating that right. The person dies against his will.
My perspective: Our society agreed that in certain cases, we allow the state to take away our right of life. From that person's perspective, assuming he still wants to live, he has the right to life so he will defend himself but from the state's perspective he doesn't so they will kill him. The person dies against his will.

The outcome is the same in both of our perspectives, it is just that you go from bottom down and I go from top down and mine allows for perspective. The only thing I don't get from your perspective is what does the state think? Does the state think that he has a right to life and they are knowning violating it or something else?

Another example.

Your Perspective:We all have the right to bear arms but the people have decided that it will let the government violate our right.
My Perspective:We as a society decided that we do not have the right to own guns.

Once again, we have the same conclusion but you go top down and I go bottom up. My question from the last example applies here as well.

So I will try to sum it up:
Your Perspective: We will have rights that can never be taken away from us, but only violated when the people decide that they can be violated.
My Perspective We as people give ourselves rights and decide which ones we should have and to the extreme. I am generalizing here because society doesn't necessarily reflect the individual.


So the question is really do we create our own rights or are we born with them?

So that gets into my previous question, what would we be like without rights? If we have rights, then there must be some way we can imagine someone without rights.
Me: Rights are an abstract concept so we physically wouldn't be any different, just our laws would be different and we would feel the need to justify our actions with "because I can ethically".
You: ???


Now to the right versus privilege.

Your Perspective: A right is something that cannot be taken away from me and a privilege is something that can.
My Perspective: They are just labels created by humans. If society agrees that we can not take something away from me, it becomes a right. If we agree that something can be taken away from me it is a privilege.

Then the question comes up, who decides the difference between a right and privilege?
Your Perspective: ???
My Perspective: People decide.

Honestly, I do not understand how we decide what the difference between rights and privileges are? How do we know that the ability to bear arms isn't an unalienable right but a privilege? How do we know that the ability to marry isn't a privilege but an unalienable right? Who decides what is what?


Hopefully that answers your question.

[Aliantha]

Is there anyone reading this who'd like to speak up on UG's behalf?

While I rarely agree with UG on anything, I much prefer discourse with him than some of the other arrogant arseholes around this place.

At least he doesn't take himself seriously enough to be truly deluded unlike some others.

I also have to say that UG does have a good sense of humour on a number of levels and while he is quite unbelieveable in some of his assertions, on the whole he's just another dwellar with a certain way of doing things.

Like all the others that rub the wrong way, there's no need to respond if you don't want to.

[Radar]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

Yes it does. Anything that gravity prohibits can't be done. Rights prohibit nothing in the absence of human enforcement.

To enforce something is to use force. Since gravity IS a force, nature does not need to enforce it. Not being able to do something because gravity exists, is not enforcing gravity.

[Radar]

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

Most of the examples you have given me are just proving that our disagreements have to do with wording. When it comes down to it, privilege and rights are just words that you can use to turn the argument your way. To me, there really isn't a difference between the two besides a label.

I'll try to organize my argument again.

As I mentioned before, most of disagreements are just arguing semantics coming from my bottom up approach and your top down approach.

Lets take the right/privilege to life in the United States. As most of us know, some states allow the practice of capital punishment. With this, would life be considered a right or privilege since the government has the ability to take a life from a person.

Your perspective: We have the right to life and the state is just violating that right in a certain case. The person still has a right to life but the state is violating that right. The person dies against his will.
My perspective: Our society agreed that in certain cases, we allow the state to take away our right of life. From that person's perspective, assuming he still wants to live, he has the right to life so he will defend himself but from the state's perspective he doesn't so they will kill him. The person dies against his will.

The outcome is the same in both of our perspectives, it is just that you go from bottom down and I go from top down and mine allows for perspective. The only thing I don't get from your perspective is what does the state think? Does the state think that he has a right to life and they are knowning violating it or something else?

Another example.

Your Perspective:We all have the right to bear arms but the people have decided that it will let the government violate our right.
My Perspective:We as a society decided that we do not have the right to own guns.

Once again, we have the same conclusion but you go top down and I go bottom up. My question from the last example applies here as well.

So I will try to sum it up:
Your Perspective: We will have rights that can never be taken away from us, but only violated when the people decide that they can be violated.
My Perspective We as people give ourselves rights and decide which ones we should have and to the extreme. I am generalizing here because society doesn't necessarily reflect the individual.


So the question is really do we create our own rights or are we born with them?

So that gets into my previous question, what would we be like without rights? If we have rights, then there must be some way we can imagine someone without rights.
Me: Rights are an abstract concept so we physically wouldn't be any different, just our laws would be different and we would feel the need to justify our actions with "because I can ethically".
You: ???


Now to the right versus privilege.

Your Perspective: A right is something that cannot be taken away from me and a privilege is something that can.
My Perspective: They are just labels created by humans. If society agrees that we can not take something away from me, it becomes a right. If we agree that something can be taken away from me it is a privilege.

Then the question comes up, who decides the difference between a right and privilege?
Your Perspective: ???
My Perspective: People decide.

Honestly, I do not understand how we decide what the difference between rights and privileges are? How do we know that the ability to bear arms isn't an unalienable right but a privilege? How do we know that the ability to marry isn't a privilege but an unalienable right? Who decides what is what?


Hopefully that answers your question.

My perspective is never that people allow the government to violate our rights. I say the people are coerced and threatened into allowing the government to violate our rights because they fear if they stand up for their rights, they will be the nail that sticks out the most and they'll get hammered.

People aren't ALLOWING the government to violate their rights, they are merely scared they'll be outgunned. Most people pay income taxes not because they feel a sense of duty or because they think they are the right thing to do. They pay taxes out of force and coercion. If they knew men with guns would not show up when they refused to have their income stolen from them, they would cease to pay them and exercise their right to keep what they earn.

If someone is raped, it doesn't mean they ALLOWED themselves to be used for sex.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Radar

To enforce something is to use force. Since gravity IS a force, nature does not need to enforce it. Not being able to do something because gravity exists, is not enforcing gravity.

Semantics. The fact remains that you can't ignore gravity, you can only work within it. You can completely ignore rights, and the only results will be based on human perception.

[Radar]

I disagree. You can't ignore rights. You can violate them, but not ignore them. As a person with rights, you can choose not to exercise them, but they still exist.

This isn't a semantics argument, it's a HUGE point.

The fact that you can kill someone doesn't mean they didn't have a right to life. The fact that you can steal their property does not mean they don't have a right to that property. The fact that you can use a rocket to escape the gravity of the earth does not mean the earth has no gravity.

[Radar]

Also, since Pierce openly admits he doesn't know the difference between a right and a privilege I'll ask him to read the links I've provided again.

Rights and privileges are not labels. An apple and a Buick are very different things. Calling them something else doesn't alter this fact. A rights and a privilege are the exact opposite. People do not decide what your rights are, but they may extend a privilege.

Your rights can not be numbered because all people have the right to do ANYTHING as long as they do not infringe on the person, property, or rights of a non-consenting other. Infringement means preventing another person's equal use of their rights, property, person, etc.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Radar

I disagree. You can't ignore rights. You can violate them, but not ignore them.

Why not? What happens if you do?

The fact that you can kill someone doesn't mean they didn't have a right to life.

Or that they do.

The fact that you can steal their property does not mean they don't have a right to that property.

Or that they do.

The fact that you can use a rocket to escape the gravity of the earth does not mean the earth has no gravity.

But the fact that you have to use a rocket to escape Earth's gravity does mean that the Earth has gravity.

The first two are unfounded assertions. The third has been supported by evidence.

[Radar]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

The first two are unfounded assertions. The third has been supported by evidence.

False. All of them are supported by evidence and all are equally factual. You yourself say we have a right to life and so does Pierce. Ask every human being on earth if they have a right to live and they will say yes (assuming they can talk or communicate).

It is unanimous. It is factual. It is right. It is axiomatic. It is undeniable. And nothing you say or do will change it.

[Shawnee123]

It's the truth
It's actual
Everything is satisfactual.

(Sidenote: just because every human being on earth believes something doesn't make it so. There was a time when every human on earth believed the earth was flat. Just sayin')

[Radar]

He is saying because gravity is associated with measurable results it exists and pretends there are no measurable results with rights. Violate my rights and you can measure how deep the bullet goes into your skull. You can't see gravity, but you can feel it. You can't see my rights, but you'll damn sure feel it if you violate them or try to deny me of them.

[ZenGum]

Originally Posted by Radar

He is saying because gravity is associated with measurable results it exists and pretends there are no measurable results with rights. Violate my rights and you can measure how deep the bullet goes into your skull. You can't see gravity, but you can feel it. You can't see my rights, but you'll damn sure feel it if you violate them or try to deny me of them.

Radar, please stop with this bullet argument, will you? Its a fallacious argument.

Your shooting victim will not be feeling your rights. They will be feeling a bullet. The reality and tangibility of the bullet is no evidence for the reality and tangibility of your rights.
I'm not saying your conclusion is false, just that this argument doesn't support it.

[Shawnee123]

I don't think that every single person on earth would agree that having their rights violated should result in any tangible experience for the violator.