On Rights

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

And I would argue it is tangible. Human bodies (and maybe some other biology) insatiate suffering. An enslaved person's yearning to be free is a fact about the universe. It's not a *necessary* fact about the universe—a clever eugenicist in the year 2200 might be able to gene edit a non-suffering slave human. But it's true today.
[...]
It's "subjective" in the sense that it's reliant upon our biology. The rights that flow from what we are as creatures probably largely don't apply to amoeba and trees, but might apply in many relevant cases to, say, chimpanzees.

What I find interesting about your stance is that, if taken with consideration of your belief in biological evolution (presumably from non-life to where we are now), this implies that 200 years ago, you would've argued that abortion is not a right, as it had a high risk of incurring suffering upon the mother (I could mention the suffering that it causes the child, but I'll leave that out because I only mean to use abortion as an example), whereas now you argue that it is because it doesn't cause such suffering. What I wonder is how this is so much a product of biology as it is of technology (we are, even per Darwinian evolution, basically no different than we were 200 years ago, and we're no smarter, we just have more tech, which has its origins on what we had).

Your position, then, appears to be that rights change as we do, not biologically but technologically, in that biologically, the goal is the same, and technologically, we may be able to do certain things without hindering that goal that we couldn't do before.

My position is that what we are informs how we ought to be treated.

Reproductive autonomy is one fundamental part of that. So is the right to life. Abortion has always involved a conflict of rights—between the fetus’s right to life and the mother’s right to reproductive autonomy (and, in some cases, her right to life as well). How we think about that conflict should take into account a range of circumstances: the stage of gestation, health risks to the mother, whether the pregnancy resulted from incest, and so on. It also includes technological factors (e.g., the safety of the procedure, fetal viability) and social ones (e.g., whether we hold fathers accountable, support early childhood, or provide alternatives like adoption). Your post thinks about technology only going in one way (reducing the moral weight of abortion by reducing risks to the mother), but it in fact goes both ways (by making fetus viable earlier and earlier within pregnancy).

The rights themselves—rooted in our biology and capacity for suffering—don’t shift quickly. But how those rights are applied or balanced depends on the surrounding reality, which includes technology, institutions, and culture.

That’s actually a hopeful thing if you believe in moral progress. We've developed societies and tools that are more rights-promoting than what came before, not because our biology changed, but because we’ve done better at recognizing and accommodating it.

[CaptainFritz28]

That makes quite a bit more sense as to what your position is, and it makes me realize that we are very similar on our stance re: technology and its effects on rights - with the exception of what the source of rights is, you believing that said source is our biology and me believing that said source is, from a certain perspective, our biology, but only as an extension of what God has made and how it rightly works.

That leaves me with one question, and pardon me if this comes across wrong, but I don't know how better to put it - if abortion is a conflict of rights between the life of the fetus and the reproductive autonomy of the mother (when the mother's life is at stake it's a different matter, which I think we would agree should be the mother's choice, since her life is threatened), why, under your system of rights, do the other factors matter? If life is the first and most fundamental right, which I think you said earlier, then wouldn't it be the consideration that should end the conflict? Or does it come down to what you said about "what we are informs how we ought to be treated," implying that a fetus has less of a level of rights than a mother? I don't mean to pry about a sensitive topic, I'm just asking to clarify how you think about things because there seems to be an inconsistency (which is probably due to me missing a logical step somewhere in something that you've said).

[yavuzovic]

And I would say that, yes, Confederates were fighting for their right to practice slavery. I believe that this is immoral and unjust, but if they don't perceive it as such, then how can we say that freedom is a fundamental and universal right? If the majority of people carried a Confederate mindset, then today slavery would be a right as well.

I don’t mean to endlessly quibble—we clearly have a fundamental disagreement.

Put simply, I think your view conflates the existence of rights with their recognition or enforcement.

“Universal” doesn’t mean universally agreed upon—it means something applies to all humans in virtue of what they are, not because everyone signed a contract.

I believe our evolved nature—and the reality of human suffering and flourishing—provides at least one grounding for rights, independent of whatever social norms happen to persist.

I didn't disagree on this. But the existence of opposition makes it non-universal, as it is dependent on the subject. Your claim might apply to all humans, yet is not a universally accepted claim.
Your grounding for rights is valid, but since our evolved nature is subject to change, the rights are not fundamental, but rather a decision of humans. I'm not against rights. I just think that it comes down to what humans consider right, and the power holders are capable of turning these into reality. In that sense, a specific right doesn't sound fundamental to me, only a reflection of the current situation.

[CaptainFritz28]

Didn't Bert make clear that "universally accepted" was not what he was defining as a qualification for rights? So sure, his claim is not universally accepted. His claim also stipulates that it doesn't need to be universally accepted in order to establish fundamental rights, regardless of the situation.

[yavuzovic]

I see. But then, definition of rights is reduced to merely "how I would like the world to be.".

[CaptainFritz28]

If you take it subjectively.

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

That makes quite a bit more sense as to what your position is, and it makes me realize that we are very similar on our stance re: technology and its effects on rights - with the exception of what the source of rights is, you believing that said source is our biology and me believing that said source is, from a certain perspective, our biology, but only as an extension of what God has made and how it rightly works.

Yes, I think we basically agree entirely on this point.

The evidence strongly suggests that we are living beings who have been shaped by natural selection. But that's not necessarily in tension with a religious worldview. God could have created life. Natural selection could be part of God's plan. It would be difficult to totally disprove a theory that God intervenes strategically in natural selection.

Human rights, and human morality more generally, should conform to our nature. Such moral insights might be a discoverable fact about what it means to be human (my view). Or, such morals might be laid down by our creator, who would no doubt impose rules / imbue rights that are relevant to the particulars of human creation.

That leaves me with one question, and pardon me if this comes across wrong, but I don't know how better to put it - if abortion is a conflict of rights between the life of the fetus and the reproductive autonomy of the mother (when the mother's life is at stake it's a different matter, which I think we would agree should be the mother's choice, since her life is threatened), why, under your system of rights, do the other factors matter? If life is the first and most fundamental right, which I think you said earlier, then wouldn't it be the consideration that should end the conflict? Or does it come down to what you said about "what we are informs how we ought to be treated," implying that a fetus has less of a level of rights than a mother? I don't mean to pry about a sensitive topic, I'm just asking to clarify how you think about things because there seems to be an inconsistency (which is probably due to me missing a logical step somewhere in something that you've said).

No worries, it's a touchy subject but it's obviously very useful problem to test ones moral intuitions.

I do consider the right to life to be foundational, in the sense that without it, no other rights can be exercised. But calling something foundational doesn’t mean it’s always overriding in every moral conflict. Rights can conflict—not just abstractly, but in real-world situations where the well-being of one person cannot be fully preserved without violating the rights of another. In those cases, we have to weigh the rights at stake, not just declare a winner based on the title of the right involved.

We could sidestep fetal rights with this uncomfortable example: consider a woman who uses lethal force to defend herself from an attempted rape, even though the attacker doesn’t intend to kill her. It's not obvious to me, in this case, whether the attackers right to life is more important than her right to defend her reproductive autonomy (and to avoid the indignity of such an assault).

Addressing the fetal question head on—while I think the right to life is a discoverable principle of human nature, the challenge lies in how that right is applied in specific cases. A viable infant, a conscious adult, a terminal patient in a coma, and a 6-week-old fetus are all biologically alive, and we might say they all possess the same fundamental right to life. But that doesn’t mean every rights claim plays out the same way in practice.

Even if we affirm that they all have a right to life, there are still mediating factors—things like awareness, dependency, relational ties, developmental stage, or competing rights—that shape how we resolve conflicts. A Catholic might hold that all human life has equal moral weight because of the soul, perhaps extending even to a zygote (or even further to each spermatozoon and ovum). But even many people who share that belief typically recognize that real-world tragedies force difficult prioritizations, as in the case you mentioned earlier, where a mother’s right to life may outweigh the fetus’s when her survival is at stake due to the pregnancy.

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

I don’t mean to endlessly quibble—we clearly have a fundamental disagreement.

Put simply, I think your view conflates the existence of rights with their recognition or enforcement.

“Universal” doesn’t mean universally agreed upon—it means something applies to all humans in virtue of what they are, not because everyone signed a contract.

I believe our evolved nature—and the reality of human suffering and flourishing—provides at least one grounding for rights, independent of whatever social norms happen to persist.

I didn't disagree on this. But the existence of opposition makes it non-universal, as it is dependent on the subject. Your claim might apply to all humans, yet is not a universally accepted claim.

In that very narrow sense, there is no such thing as a "universal". Gravity applies to all humans universally, but flat earthers earnestly believe that some other force prevents us from floating around. Belief and truth are separate things and I think there are in fact moral truths one can discover.

Your grounding for rights is valid, but since our evolved nature is subject to change, the rights are not fundamental, but rather a decision of humans.

To me rights might be more like mathematics. They don't exist out there in the universe, but they are implied by a logic that, once understood, does apply universally.

In the same way that no one could credibly deny that 1+2=3, I would say a careful study of what humans are would lead an independent observer (some alien anthropologist) to a conclusion like "no human has a right to enslave another".

This isn't universal in the sense that it's contingent on humans existing and having a form similar to what they have now. But it's enduring—anatomically modern humans are on a 200,000+ year run, and I'd argue that many of our most consequential rights well pre-date that (and are in fact shared by many animals). And it is universal in the sense that, if humans (or creatures very much like us) evolved anywhere else in the universe, then these beings would have discoverable rights much like our own.