Do humans have an intrinsic right to life?

Question

Do people have the right to live just by nature of them being people?

If not, who should decide which people have the right to live and what criteria should be used to determine a person's worthiness of this right?

Answer 1

If humans had a right to live intrinsically, there seem to be two possible ways in which this could obtain. First, God (whatever that is) could confer such an intrinsic property. Second, if it is not God that ultimately confers such a property, one could rgue for some natural law whereby the right to life is a property of being human. The thing to note about these two possibilities is that the right to life is a real property that exists independantly of human values, interests, and beliefs.

Personally, of these two choices I consider the first the most plausible. But both are highly problematic. The first for a number of reasons, the most obvious being that it requires that God exist (which has proven to be a notoriously difficult thing to prove), and second because even if God does exist, that in no way explains why differing views of God yeild differing views of the right to life. The natural law view is problematic also. One problem is the epistemic problem of determining and identifying just what the right to life is. The second being the problem of just what such a property would be in the first place. How is it that merely being natural means that it is also a right? Natural law theory has a hard time explaining this.

For these reasons (and others not mentioned) most thinkers today reject the above possibilities; in the enlghtenment, however, natural law theory dominated discussions of human rights. Prior to that, Christian doctrine helped progress our understanding of human rights from the clutches of Greek Neoplatonism. Christian doctrine had a metaphysics that in some way or another had God be the conferring agent by which the property of the right to life obtained. Aquinas, the great Christian philosopher and theologian even combined Christian doctrine with Aristotelianism (which is markedly NOT Neoplatonist despite being Greek) resulting in a fusion of Christian metaphsyics and natural law theory.

We are left with, then, some form of conventionalism, whereby rights are conferred by human values, interests, and beliefs. This means that the right to life is not a property that ultimately exists independantly of human thought; it is not something found in nature nor is it something bestowed by a deity. It is something chosen, defined, and created by some person or group of persons. The belief that humans have certain rights may be psychollically disposed, but that is not to say that it is a belief that corresponds to anything real independant of human concensus and thought.

Today, as ontology and epistemology become more and more naturalized (that is, an approach to what there is and what we can know that views humans as just another natural phenomena that exists), the conventionalist view has become more predominent. The bottom line is, however, that when one asks what it is in virtue of being human that automatically means a right to life, it is hard to come up with good answers. If it is that humans possess conciousness, why is conciousness so special that we should have the right to life because of it? There are good reasons for thinking a number of things that don't have conciousness still have a right to life, so why privilidge the possession of conciousness? (As the thought goes.) Similarly is the claim that we are rational (in the sense that we reason propositionally) and that should be why we have a right to life. But many things are not rational in that sense but we intuitive still think they should have a right to life.

The conventionalists usually, then, will give some sort of pragmatic or aesthetic argument about why we should agree that humans have a right to life. Recall, that agreeing to confer a property is to say that the property is not really distinct from what is agreed upon.

There are a number of realists (like Searle and Boghossian) that have made arguments against constructivism without seemingly to commit themselves to some Divine law theory or natural law theory. This is the route that seems like it can be compatible with naturalism.

If it were conventionalists who should decide who has the right to live? Well, i fear leaving it up to a direct democracy, since the majority rarely ever makes good decisions. I think the experts ought to decide based on a representative democracy, whereby the experts make the decisions but whose decisions are delimited by objective criteria, such as a constritution.

Answer 2

A libertarian would tell you that all humans have an intrinsic right to life just by virtue of being human, unless they do something inhumane to lose that right. They do not define what makes someone/something human, however.

Conservatives would tell you what the libertarian said, but add that it's because God ordained it that way and they're not so sure about the details. They also debate the nature of humanity, though not as much as the modern liberals.

Modern liberals will tell you that they are not sure about anything, really, because things are relative to other things and situations. But, they do believe in the list of universal human rights, the contents of which are debatable and relative.

Christians will tell you mostly what the conservatives say, unless they are non-traditionalists, in which case they will tell you what the modern liberals say.

Buddhists, if you can find them, will tell you that humans and the rest of the universe are actually the same. Compassion!

I will tell you that I have wasted 5 minutes writing an answer to a question that I cannot answer. Damn.

Answer 3

This is a big ongoing debate in philosophy dating back from the times of the ancient Greek. Many people think that human beings are capable of innate thoughts, that the thoughts of goodness and virtue are intrinsic and essential to us, and that the source of goodness is not outside human mind or soul. If we believe in this intrinsic concept of human nature than we can be assured that human life has its own intrinsic value, and that human nature is essentially good. Upon this being considered as the chief difference between the general nature and human nature, we can say that human beings are capable of doing deeds of goodness upon will, and not merely in response to external incentives, or due to motives the sources of which are not intrinsically human.

Answer 4

If a human being has an intrinsic right to life, then surely any interruption of its teleological progress towards death would be a violation of those rights.

If that were the case, would it not be a pre-emptive murder to prevent a zygote from having been formed? If humans have an intrinsic right to life, then is a potential person therefore inherently inviolable, as the human it will eventually become will invariably have the right to have existed in the first place?

If so, isn't masturbation genocide? Contraception massacre?

Answer 5

Life is a gift, not a right.

But, having said that, once life has been given it should not be taken away ("should" being the operative word).

Since some tend to disregard the "should" part of it, we take measures against this (take the gift of life from them/kill). Some measures "seem" to be acceptable to many in specific instances:

1. Self Defense
2. Defense of another person/persons
3. Participation is a "just war" .

The first and second would seem to me to be easy enough to accept (and I could, but would not want, to do). The third is difficult to accept since it is difficult for me to comprehend a "just war".

Taking the life of another human being who is found "unfit to be in society" also is difficult for me.

I would not want to be in a position to decide to "take someone's life"; but in the first two instances, I think I could do it. In the third instance, I would follow orders that did not conflict with the rules of warfare.

Who should decide? Members of society should decide.

The criteria? The criteria should be that which the particular society establishes to be acceptable to all (... if an individual cannot accept the criteria agreed upon, that individual is free to leave that society ...).

Now this ... Is it "civil" to take the life of another?

Answer 6

The concept is a social contract with other humans that is unevenly enforced and whose validity often depends on human factors and decisions.
As far as the rest of the universe goes, we have as much right as a particle of dust or a rabid fruit bat.

It's all about recognizing that life is an unceasing struggle and a person has to try to get as realistic and rational as possible in order to stave off the opposition.

There are no freebies in the big, cold, hot, exploding, imploding, radiating universe except those we barter with other people. The big daddy in Andromeda is totally indifferent.

Answer 7

It seems that if humans have an intrinsic right to live that they are placed at a higher level of importance to animals. As Nietzsche often claimed, humans are nothing more than advanced animals. Evolution has taken us to a more advanced state than all other known life forms.

Answer 8

The answer to this question, at least to a human perspective, has to be yes.

If that is not the case then the door is opened to any and all problems. How long before we start euthanizing people for not being "normal?"

Hitler wanted people dead for a number of reasons. He wanted people killed because they were of another race. We're not that far off from that as soon as we let the inherent right to life slip.

I do believe that people can forfeit that right by their actions, but not because of their inherent nature.

Answer 9

it is not nature that gives anything rights. there is not a "natural argument" for anything being any way. Using Nature as a moral guide is spiritual insanity. Nature merely reflects the ordered purpose of the Right Giver. All rights come from God. Without the Ultimate, all loses purpose and worth.

Answer 10

Yes has been the standard reply.Right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is embedded even in the constittution. Note that "life" is first and foremost.

I qualify my answer as being standard because we easily run into the grey areas of murder, mercy killing, abortion, genocide and other atrocities of man on the basis of one humans power over the life of another.
What gives some men power to determine whether another lives or dies?

1. The other is unable to defend himself/herself. Infants, elderly, weak and infirmed, etc.
2. Medical decisions, errors, "ethical" decisions
3. Legal rulings such as executions.