richardhutnik said:
* Abortion. You have the rights of a woman to her body and to decide whether to be a parent, the rights of a man to be a father if he got her pregnant, and also you can factor in the said rights of the unborn. Of course, you can end up denying rights to one of the parties here and think you work around, but you end up missing nuances by only thinking in terms of rights. * War. Innocent civilians do die, individuals who had nothing directly to do with a possible conflict, but who are part of a nation and contribute to the events in the war by their own personal actions by being part of the nation. Like, the individuals who voted for the Nazi party and Hitler coming into power. * The teaching of evolution in school vs parental rights. Parents are to have rights over their children, but children are to have rights to correct information. * Individual's rights to access goods and services in markets vs the rights of shopowners to serve who they want. There are cases of racists collective belief systems that had African-Americans denied access to stores to be able to buy items they needed, or operate under the same set of rules as everyone else. * An entire issue of community rights to social conventions people operate under vs the rights of individuals to do as they please. Included in this is public property rights and access. Take the example of Occupy. They decide they want to use a park for camping as a civil rights protest, to make a point about Wall Street corruption and income inequality as part of first amendment rights. You then face the fact the parks were not designed for such use, and the community opposed them being in there. * Smoker rights vs the rights of non-smokers. Smokers argue they have a right to do what they want with their body. Non-smokers argue they have a right to clean air.
Pretty much anything that isn't simply resolved comes about when you have rights in conflict. When everything is merely framed in context of rights, there is a lack of yielding or seeing a larger collective good picture. In short, you can't build an optimal ethical structure on rights alone or even one based mainly on rights. |
Abortion: No one has the right to be a parasite on the body of another person, so that logically concludes that abortion is not a violation of rights. A woman has the right to decide whether or not she wants a parasite living off of her.
War: War doesn't validate the taking of someone's life. As far as morality is concerned, it's murder (though I suppose this is debatable).
Evolution: No one has a right to correct information. You do, however, have the right to question information that you are given.
Shopkeeper's rights: A store owner can refuse to serve whoever he wants for whatever reason. No one has a right to a good or service.
Community Rights: Communities don't have rights, they're abstract entities. If the Occupy movement has permission of the owner of the park (presumably the government, though I'd argue that their ownership is illegitemite) then they can protest there. If not, then they can't.
Smokers: Smokers have the right to smoke where the owner of the land/building says they can smoke. Owner's land, owner's rules.
It's not about whether or not rights come into conflict, it's about accurately identifying what rights are and which rights you have, something that has become increasingly muddled as almost no one outside of philosophers actually think about this anymore.
It's actually quite easy to build an ethical system based entirely on rights. Only one type of rights actually. Property rights, which are fundamentally the only type of rights that exist.
