| richardhutnik said: Here is another one: Do people have a right to live? Or is life not a fundamental human right? If you then consider human life a right, and a person find that no one will help them, and they risk death, then would not them doing whatever is necessary to stay alive be justified? They can claim their right to live justified them stealing or squatting in property. Take the case of a child that was abandoned by their parents, and now fends on the streets for themselves, and steals and what not. If human life is a right, aren't they justified to do so? Or do you want to argue life is not a right people have? If life is not a right then, then what is a right? |
Do people have a right to live? In the strictest sense no because eventually they will die and the act of dying in no way infringes on someone's rights on its own ... A person has a right to not be intentionally harmed by the acts of another person (which is why intentional acts of harm are against the law, and people may still be compensated for unintentional acts that harm them) but a person does not have the right to infringe on someone else's rights to live.
Here is a hypothetical question to demonstrate the reasoning for this ...
Suppose an individual has experienced kidney failure and they need a kidney transplant to survive but (for a wide variety of reasons) the compatibility for a donor is low, would it be ethical for him to be able to force a healthy individual to give them their kidney knowing that they health of the healthy person would be significantly impacted?
