On Monday, January 29, 2018 at 2:14:15 PM UTC-7, palsing wrote:
On Monday, January 29, 2018 at 12:46:20 PM UTC-8, Paul Schlyter wrote:

Human rights are rights granted to all humans. For instance the right
to not be killed.

Tell that to the grizzly bear you surprise on a hike.

Tell that to the residents of certain villages in the middle east.

Just exactly who is it who grants this 'right not to be killed'?

Human rights are not granted. Human rights are properties of all humans,
just as electric charge, angular momentum, and mass are properties of an
electron.

However, a human right not to be killed unjustly is not a guarantee that
one will not be killed unjustly. It just means that if one _is_ killed
unjustly without compelling reason by a being that is a moral agent, that
being has done something that is _wrong_.

Which makes it licit to use force against that being, either to prevent a
wrong action or to deter other wrong actions by avenging a past wrong, or
to compel the being to undergo rehabilitative therapy and so on.

It is because of human rights being inherent in humans that it is
meaningful to say that Negro slavery and the Holocaust, for example, were
wrong, despite both being authorized by the governments in power at the
time. Human rights mean that governments, while they define the laws we
must obey to avoid being punished by the agents of those governments, do
not define right and wrong; right and wrong are not defined or altered in
the least by governments or any other human creation, but are as
unalterable as the laws of mathematics and physics.

John Savard