Dachshund:
I would be particularly interested to hear from Mr HAN....etc., etc.
Found quite by accident this post. The issue is human rights and you think equal and inalienable rights is nonsense. I wish you would first of all read your own post, that long and tedious, paragraph after paragraph, possesses nothing whatever of an account of the argument that denies such human rights. It's is just reams of the history, what was said here and there, then another dissertation on how you absolutely, categorically, emphatically deny this absolute nonsense.....Now it would do you well to see that you do nothing to give analysis to the matter, and this is typical of you: too much to say, yet not nearly saying enough.
The matter can be easily put: Rights are ethical in nature. If have a right to something because you deserve it, and you deserve it because there is some justification that imparts desert. We are so used to talking about rights without thinking about justification that the term has become loose and distanced from it truer, more substantive nature.
No ethical justification, no right, not in the authentic sense, and the reason for this is that without justification the word becomes divested of its meaning, it becomes ethically arbitrary. Take having the right to citizenship in a country: we use the term to designate this kind of thing all the time. But it is more like a game rule than a true right, like the "right" to take the queen when she is moved in the path of a rook. It is this extension of the ethical term, or, the broad use to include non ethical contexts for its use that muddies the water when we talk about true ethical rights. But let's be clear here, rights to things without ethical justification have no meaning beyond the mere pragmatics of a rule.
When we talk about human rights in the "natural rights" sense, we are not referring to a pragmatic rule that grants a right; it's about justification, or rather, the lack of justification, and it goes like this: no one is equal to anyone else when it comes to talents, gifts, beauty, charm, social standing and so on. Obviously. So an cursory look at rights sees only the inequality, but these are
given in their origin. You may be a genius, but where is the basis for deserving this? All that you produce is qualified by your genius, and you reap great rewards, there is no ethical part to this as you did nothing to deserve, or, have the right to, all that you took in. And if you were born into wealth, this would be equally ethically arbitrary, for being born into something has nothing of deserving the advantages you receive.
You should be able to see where this is going. We are thrown into a world where the advantages and outrageous fortune are given to us without any basis in a justified right to what we get. Einstein did nothing to deserve his genius, the Hiltons did nothing to deserve being born into wealth, and so on. If there is no desert, there is no right, either. Thus, without the obvious advantages figured in to the inequality of rights, there is no longer a basis for judging one better endowed with rights that another. The assessment of rights as humans becomes altogether equal: we are equal in that there is no ethical basis for inequality, for the observed inequalities are distributed in an ethically arbitrary way. If you try to divest the concept of a right from its ethical mooring, all that remains is a rule that CALLS what you have a right, but this carries no weight, has no moral aspect, and as such, anything can be devised as a right, for right emerges out of pure say so, caprice, fiat.
In a nutshell.