>> Think ... think for a minute about "animal rights."
>> Think ... think for a minute about "animal rights."
>
> But if rights are just language based innovations created by humans
> communicating with each other how can they be evidence for an argument
> for having rights over other animals? You are merely repeating in your
> conclusion some unnsupported argument in your premise. How could some
> idea of language based arguments be used in this way? Or are you
> assuming that rights are something other than language representations
> of possible outcomes of human interaction?
>
> By consenting to be a member of a community, citizens consent to a
> Social Contract. They agree to abide by the decisions of the majority,
> because the community is a body which is governed by the majority.
> Government by Consent of the Governed.
>
> In essence the social contract theory is an agreement whereby people
> accept certain restrictions on them for the benefit of society.
>
> Social contract theory is the view that morality is founded solely on
> uniform social agreements that serve the best interests of those who
> make the agreement.
>
>
http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/s/soc-cont.htm
>
> (1) Human rights, or natural rights, are rights which some hold to be
> "inalienable" and belonging to all humans, according to (2) natural
> law. Such rights are thought, by proponents, to be necessary for
> freedom and the maintenance of a "reasonable" quality of life.
>
> 1. Natural Rights: political theory that maintains that an individual
> enters into society with certain basic rights and that no government
> can deny these rights. The modern idea of natural rights grew out of
> the ancient and medieval doctrines of natural law , i.e., the belief
> that people, as creatures of nature and God, should live their lives
> and organize their society on the basis of rules and precepts laid
> down by nature or God. With the growth of the idea of individualism,
> especially in the 17th cent., natural law doctrines were modified to
> stress the fact that individuals, because they are natural beings,
> have rights that cannot be violated by anyone or by any society.
> Perhaps the most famous formulation of this doctrine is found in the
> writings of John Locke . Locke assumed that humans were by nature
> rational and good, and that they carried into political society the
> same rights they had enjoyed in earlier stages of society, foremost
> among them being freedom of worship, the right to a voice in their own
> government, and the right of property. Jean Jacques Rousseau attempted
> to reconcile the natural rights of the individual with the need for
> social unity and cooperation through the idea of the social contract .
> The most important elaboration of the idea of natural rights came in
> the North American colonies, however, where the writings of Thomas
> Jefferson, Samuel Adams, and Thomas Paine made of the natural rights
> theory a powerful justification for revolution. The classic
> expressions of natural rights are the English Bill of Rights (1689),
> the American Declaration of Independence (1776), the French
> Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), the first 10
> amendments to the Constitution of the United States (known as the Bill
> of Rights, 1791), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the
> United Nations (1948).
>
>
http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/n1/natrlrig.asp
>
> 2. Natural Law: theory that some laws are basic and fundamental to
> human nature and are discoverable by human reason without reference to
> specific legislative enactments or judicial decisions. Natural law is
> opposed to positive law, which is human-made, conditioned by history,
> and subject to continuous change. The concept of natural law
> originated with the Greeks and received its most important formulation
> in Stoicism . The Stoics believed that the fundamental moral
> principles that underlie all the legal systems of different nations
> were reducible to the dictates of natural law. This idea became
> particularly important in Roman legal theory, which eventually came to
> recognize a common code regulating the conduct of all peoples and
> existing alongside the individual codes of specific places and times
> (see natural rights ). Christian philosophers such as St. Thomas
> Aquinas perpetuated this idea, asserting that natural law was common
> to all peoples—Christian and non-Christian alike—while adding that
> revealed law gave Christians an additional guide for their actions. In
> modern times, the theory of natural law became the chief basis for the
> development by Hugo Grotius of the theory of international law. In the
> 17th cent., such philosophers as Spinoza and G. W. von Leibniz
> interpreted natural law as the basis of ethics and morality; in the
> 18th cent. the teachings of Jean Jacques Rousseau , especially as
> interpreted during the French Revolution, made natural law a basis for
> democratic and egalitarian principles. The influence of natural law
> theory declined greatly in the 19th cent. under the impact of
> positivism , empiricism , and materialism . In the 20th cent., such
> thinkers as Jacques Maritain saw in natural law a necessary
> intellectual opposition to totalitarian theories.
>
>
http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/n1/natrllaw.asp
>
>
http://www.spectacle.org/0400/natural.htmlhttp://www.libertocracy.com/Librademia/Essays/Government/%%5B7...
