humanities.philosophy.objectivism

Reggie, AC & Charles, I didn't thank you for your replies last week. It was
a nutty around here. The responses were not what I wanted to hear, but like
AC says, Civil War justification does not depend on "rights" being the
proper term for state powers.

As I understand it (US Civil War aside), rights are essentially agreed on
social principles promoting our lives that eventually become law, usually by
some kind of supermajority. So over millennia, we've come to some vague
consensus (with significant cultural variances) regarding human nature and
roughly what principles are required.

But bestowing rights on sovereign collectives appears to trivialize rights
because the existence of states and nations are fully dependent on other
right barring entities. And it complicates the balance of human rights
because the natures of nations are so arbitrary. For instance:

- Would state and national rights be based on whatever principles are
believed to promote their existence?
- What would keep every nations' legal rights from being determined by a
supermajority of other nations (perhaps dominated by nations claiming that
State's rights supersede human rights) the same way our individual legal
rights are determined by a supermajority within a nation?
- How would that international supermajority be represented, by nation,
population, GDP, land mass, carbon credits?
- What would then justify stopping the UN from exercising all legal rights
over non-member States?
- If both nations and people have rights, what would justify resolving
differences in favor of a minority of individuals or even in favor of a
majority?

The whole concept of States rights seems to be an unnecessary complication
of the concept of powers delegated to states by people. I don't know why
references to state or national rights should be understood as anything
other than shorthand (or as Reggie Perrin notes, "legal fiction") for rights
of a population.

Bill Carson