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.html
http://www.libertocracy.com/Librademia/Essays/Government/%%5B7-univerdefinlaw.ht...
http://jim.com/rights.html
http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1206.html
http://www.freecolorado.com/2003/12/naturalrights.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights
*********
You can either try dazzling us with your "brilliance" or baffle us with your
"bullshit," but it still comes down to "might makes right," or in this case
"rights."
Dionysus
