Inalienable or Inviolable rights of Man

[Laudate_Dominum]

[quote name='Paphnutius' date='Dec 1 2005, 05:48 PM']The whole problem if you deny God (or even the beatific vision) as the basis of man's rights what do you have left as the norm?

The only thing left would be the state itself and that is never bueno. Essentially you would have to accept its norms and this would be the beginning of totalitarianism
philosophy.
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Yeah, well the earlier underpinnings of natural rights have the idea that man is more or less a slave to animalistic passions. Any idea of virtue or holiness, at least in any meaningful sense, is out of the picture.
The idea is that in a society man submits to the authority of a goverment for reasons of survival or out of instinctive fear.
I don't know if I'm explaining it very well, but basically man assents to have his automony restricted because of an innate fear of anarchy. People would just kill each other and live like beasts.
So the vision of man is more animalistic than anything else and does not point to anything beyond this passing life.
The structure of human activity is divorced from higher realities and the truth of man is obscured. All of this was part of the common strategy of the early liberal revolutionaries to undermine the existing social order and religion.

And the idea that the founders of American were good Christians strikes me as odd since they were masonic and we know that many of them explicitly denied the Divinity of Christ (which makes a person non-Christian) and were deists. The deist perspective really strikes me as agnosticism, not theism proper.

[argent_paladin]

I agree with you L_D. But if Benedict says it, it is likely to be true, in some way. We need to discern how the phrase "we have inalienable and inviolable rights" is true.
We have a right to be treated as a human being, to be treated according to our purpose, made in God's image, never as merely a means, an object.
I think that gets us closer, but it still leaves a lot to be determined. Like: what does it mean to be treated as a human being?
One illuminating fact is that the Church condemns torture as immoral but not killing. It seems that some killing doesn't violate our human rights. That one can be killed while maintaining human dignity. This makes intuitive sense because we know of many instances especially in war where death did not remove dignity and purpose but underscored it.

I think the best way to understand it (this of course gets back to a natural law understanding) is that any activity that denies or perverts the natural or divine end of a human being (his purpose) is a violation of his human rights. Instrumentalizing a human suggests that his purpose is purely for pleasure or information, etc rather than for a higher end. Therefore it violates his diginity as a child of God. We have an inviolate right to our human dignity and our divine sonship.

[Cam42]

[quote]But if Benedict says it, it is likely to be true, in some way. We need to discern how the phrase "we have inalienable and inviolable rights" is true.[/quote]

And there is the crux of this thread.

I got the information several days ago that this was going to come out. That is why I started the thread and it is why I made the statement several days ago in the other thread.

It pays to have friends in Rome.

[Laudate_Dominum]

that's a very constructive and interesting crux.

me likey

[Paphnutius]

This may not work out to well but I remember reading somewhere in reference to just war theory that if one nation breaks a positive law in war, the other is free to do so as well. (Never negative or natural laws)

So then if a person breaks a positive law himself in regards to his rights (meaning violating his own dignity), would that then make it permissible for the societ, gov't, etc... to do so as well?

Not really my personal view, but I am throwing something out there to munch on and toss around.

[argent_paladin]

and that really is the heart of theology: faith seeking understanding.
I approach it as something of a game (which isn't to diminish its importance). The rules are that you have to assume that these statements are true:

Rights are a valid way to talk about the human person and morality.
Human beings possess inalienable and inviolable rights.

So, it's not fair to say that rights talk has sent moral theology astray or that we don't actually possess them. The fun is in trying to figure out how these statements can fit together and how they can avoid contradicting tradition.

[argent_paladin]

I think a good focusing question is: how does the state executing a criminal not violate his human rights? How does it not violate his human dignity and how does it not instrumentalize him? If one can argue successfully that it doesn't do these things then one can consistently say that we shouldn't violate rights.
But, if we are TOO successful, we could water down the definition of human rights to nothingness or a tautology.