From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Fri Oct 24 2003 - 17:47:41 MDT
[rhinoceros 2]
A couple of issues not yet resolved about what rights are: (a) the relationship between rights and law, and (b) the question of the tautological or real-world status of rights. You say:
[rightsboy 1]
According to the definition I am using, a right _only_ "exists" if it is "written down in a constitution", and socially (governmentally) enforced -- thus 'tautological'. Otherwise it is just somebody's conceptual myth, or perhaps an item on their "wish list". "Real enough" indeed.
[rhinoceros 2]
Does it mean that the concept of rights is restricted to law and that the rights are there just because someone wrote them down in the law?
Don't we find the concept of rights in social practices before and outside the reach of law? Is the concept of rights alien to societies that don't operate on written rules? Don't the members of such societies claim "unwritten" social rights for themselves, and don't they get support from their neighbors as a result of this?
[rightsboy 1]
By "tautological" I mean a human-defined rule, as opposed to e.g. something "discovered" in "nature". Real enough indeed.
<snip>
[rightsboy 1]
No conflicts here. Again, by "tautology" I mean simply a linguistically defined and conventionally enforced rule. And no less "real" for it.
[rhinoceros 2]
Not all human conceptual constructs are tautologies. A battle-plan or an architectural design, for example, are not tautologies. How can something which can be disputed in real world terms be called a tautology. I would expect that a tautology is something (linguistic or logical/mathematical) which cannot be disputed within its framework.
For example, there was a time when the slave could say "I have a right to be free" and the master would reply "no, you don't". Both the social and the legal view of that has changed since, in response to real-world social changes, and that was eventually encoding in law.
According to what you said, the people's rights were the ones written down in the laws of that particular country at each point in time. I wouldn't call this "rights". I would call it "rights conceded". But even so, these witten rights can be disputed in real world terms, just like a battle plan or an architectural design. Hardly a tautology.
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