A right is a privilege granted by law or custom, whether that is social, divine or natural law.
an alien is a stranger. so inalienable does mean inseparable, something which cannot be estranged from you.
so yes, by definition, I find those two words mutually exclusive. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and all that.
those particular rights postulated by the Declaration as inalienable being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as examples:
this one has always bothered me; the right to life is quite obviously not alienable, because life is taken and given without mutual consent all the time.
the right to physical liberty is equally obviously alienable. the right to mental liberty, the freedom of choice? assuming there is life, this right exists only if you know you have it. You can point a gun at me; I choose whether or not to submit, or die. However, if I have been trained to believe differently, the choice might as well not exist for me. Ergo why nobody at Columbine laid those boys out with a math book upside the back of the head. Vice versa, why the last plane did not fly into the capital.
and lastly the pursuit of happiness. we can be trained out of that too.
our rights are those which we are willing and able to enforce, whether as individuals or as a society. What those rights SHOULD be and how they should be enforced is a whole nother ball of yarn. The Founders were stipulating those they intended to enforce in the new society they were trying to build, and invoking Deity to justify their rebellion. not that I necessarily think this was a bad idea, just rhetoric, not literal.
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rosecarmine
inalienable
Date: 2008-04-30 06:03 pm (UTC)an alien is a stranger. so inalienable does mean inseparable, something which cannot be estranged from you.
so yes, by definition, I find those two words mutually exclusive. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and all that.
those particular rights postulated by the Declaration as inalienable being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as examples:
this one has always bothered me; the right to life is quite obviously not alienable, because life is taken and given without mutual consent all the time.
the right to physical liberty is equally obviously alienable. the right to mental liberty, the freedom of choice? assuming there is life, this right exists only if you know you have it. You can point a gun at me; I choose whether or not to submit, or die. However, if I have been trained to believe differently, the choice might as well not exist for me. Ergo why nobody at Columbine laid those boys out with a math book upside the back of the head. Vice versa, why the last plane did not fly into the capital.
and lastly the pursuit of happiness. we can be trained out of that too.
our rights are those which we are willing and able to enforce, whether as individuals or as a society. What those rights SHOULD be and how they should be enforced is a whole nother ball of yarn. The Founders were stipulating those they intended to enforce in the new society they were trying to build, and invoking Deity to justify their rebellion. not that I necessarily think this was a bad idea, just rhetoric, not literal.
my 2 cents and probably obvious to everybody.