If 51% vote to kill, enslave and torture 49% then that's ok because m-muh Democracy and 'might makes right'

But LBGT people do have rights. The Declaration of Independence makes it clear that each individual is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and first amendment to the bill of rights guarantees a freedom of speech, association and peaceful assembly . LGBT people have this right by extension. You can no more infringe on these rights against the group than you can on the individual. Don't forget that there was once a time when the US government or any of its states could kill you or violate your body just for being homosexual.

Furthermore, there is no such think has a negative freedom without a positive freedom( like they need positive rights). For an individual to have freedom from something, you must take away someone's freedom to do something and vice versa.

Brainlet. Just because you have the physical ability to do something doesn't make it right. Might does not make right.

Slavery is an imaginarian scenario that couldn't occur in the real world? Make it 99% enslaving 1%. It is just as wrong in this scenario than if it was a simple majority agreeing to enslave a segment of the population.

§. 6. But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence: though man in that state have an uncontroulable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it. The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions: for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business; they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for our’s. Every one, as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station wilfully, so by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.

§. 7. And that all men may be restrained from invading others rights, and from doing hurt to one another, and the law of nature be observed, which willeth the peace and preservation of all mankind, the execution of the law of nature is, in that state, put into every man’s hands, whereby every one has a right to punish the transgressors of that law to such a degree, as may hinder its violation: for the law of nature would, as all other laws that concern men in this world, be in vain, if there were no body that in the state of nature had a power to execute that law, and thereby preserve the innocent and restrain offenders. And if any one in the state of nature may punish another for any evil he has [199] done, every one may do so: for in that state of perfect equality, where naturally there is no superiority or jurisdiction of one over another, what any may do in prosecution of that law, every one must needs have a right to do." -John Locke, Two Treatises on Government

The Bill of Rights restricts the government's power over doing certain things. That's a negative right. Also fuck off with your use of Jefferson, you're not impressing anyone

Why can't I destroy myself

The best form of society is either one in which all political struggle and inequality is removed equalizing utility and rights to all men, this has failed in the past and may work in our technological future OR a society run by a benign despot.

You decide!

The Declaration of Independence is not a legal document

It'd be better for you to quote the 5th and 14th amendments which protect people against being "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"

The freedom being taken away is merely the freedom to democratically choose to infringe upon the freedom of speech and other guarantees of the bill of rights

Samuel Adams, Rights of the Colonists, 1772

"If men through fear, fraud or mistake, should "in terms" renounce and give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the great end of society, would absolutely vacate such renunciation; the right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave."

Astounding argument... except you've forgotten a "because..." clause explaining why you are a complete fucking idiot who has no argument.

Well why is it not a right in the first place? What's up with this God that won't vlet me off myself?

You still don't understand. A positive right can always framed as a negative right and vice versa, in consequence, the freedom to speak and the freedom from censorship are the same. Every right in the bill of rights and mentioned in the declaration can be framed as a positive or negative right and the consequence would be exactly the same. It's simply a matter of logic.

It's more that the gift is of a singular nature
it only works one way.
And, all gifts are also a curse.
Had humanity not fallen from grace, we would not be free. We would be cared for in the infinite bounty of the Garden of Eden
The problem wit ha gift is that is is highly invasive, we just see it as "nice"
Really, a gift is highly formative on someone's reality
You take away the option of experiencing life without whatever it was that was given.
When given freedom of choice, there's no longer any possibility of blissful servitude.

What if I'm Hindu instead of Christian?

A right to restrict the government from passing legislation that would infringe on the right to keep and bear arms makes sense. A "right" that forces people to bake cakes for fags doesn't make sense.

>Slavery is an imaginarian scenario that couldn't occur in the real world? Make it 99% enslaving 1%. It is just as wrong in this scenario than if it was a simple majority agreeing to enslave a segment of the population.
For most of history people that opposed slavery, wether out of the kindness of their hearts or for less humanitarian reasons it matters not, weren't in control. Simply declaring something to be wrong isn't sufficient for change - you must provide incentives for change. Like threatening your opposition with violence, economic sanctions, obnoxiousness, etc.

Instead of learning of "virtue" and "natural rights" learn practical things, like how to sway people.

You already know what you feel is right, your rationalism is just window dressing on something much more visceral, same goes for the guy on the other side that opposes you. Being more "right" about "morality" is nonsense, what matters is who is more able to impose his will - that's what makes any difference.

>posts to /pol/ and /r/the_Donald
>calls other people neckbeard autists

funny

Not an argument.

Neither is John Locke: Second Treatise of Civil Government, but I thought we were talking about "natural rights" in this thread? And besides Declarationism is not without a basis. The DOI is a foundational document after all.

And it certainly does relate to a homosexual's freedom of expression and association being infringed by a majority when a state can vote on laws relating to sodomy between consenting adults? What are these 'natural rights' if not all individuals are entitled to them?

When did the retards get here? Fuck off

>post-modernist secular materialist reductionist subjectivist moral-relativist nihilist
You're just rattling off buzzwords, I don't think you even know what most of those things are.

A right to "force" people not to bake cakes doesn't make sense, true. But a right to make sodomy between consenting adults punishable by death or sterilization? What about homosexual propaganda laws? Does the right to own one's own life and the right to freely congregate with other assenting adults, extend to all individuals or not? If not, then it is not a right but a privilege and there was one a time when sex was a privilege for heterosexuals who happens to be the majority.

They're not buzzwords. Each one has their own specific meaning and aren't general at all. Maybe attack what he's saying and not how he says it?

Still haven't provided an argument.

Boy I sure love strawmen, great thread OP.

No.

You do not know what nihilism means.

*consenting adults
*happened to be the majority
*force people to make cakes

I guess that's perfectly reasonable.

I know what it means to me, not what it means to you, Mr. Unique Snowflake #163956

>Might does not make right.

Yes it does.

Weapons>>>>scraps of paper and philosophy

kek think you forgot to throw in marxism and neo-liberalism while at it.

Why don't people understand democracy lmao?

OP is a literal retard.

The whole point about democracy is that it is neutral, it holds no bias towards any ideology or level of intellect for it recognises that people's life experiences are different and varied.

Democracy instead gives the individual to cast for himself, based upon his own value system (which democracy is neutral to), the politician or party he would like to be in power.

Democracy removes the debate of subjectivity and objectivity, it removes the debate of morality, it removes all debates and in its place gives a single vote, with which that individual can cast in his favour.

Why don't retards get this?

The people who are against democracy because of "muh tyranny" and "muh eduction" tend to be the very same people who believe that they should be in power and run things, to place their own value system onto the world. These individuals are dangerous.

>I know what it means to me, not what it means to you, Mr. Unique Snowflake #163956

Interesting, because literally a minute ago you said this:

>They're not buzzwords. Each one has their own specific meaning and aren't general at all. Maybe attack what he's saying and not how he says it?

Very interesting how you change your opinion on things in a matter of seconds.

Really makes me think

Part of the idea of enforcing rights for every individual is to make it less likely for people resort to violence, having not the injustice to make them resort to violence in the first place.

Learn to space, newfag

Very interesting reply.

Really makes me think

Wrong. Democracy holds a bias to whatever transient spirit or personal fancy has captured the will of the majority. A bill of rights is lightening bolt that strikes both mobs and tyrants alike, and enables the individual's self actualization within society.

Madison was basically an inverse Marxist--he held a very similar view of class conflict but, being from the landed aristocracy, wanted to maintain his position from the poors; this is why only one part of the federal government was originally directly elected and why most states had property requirements to vote. These requirements were gone in most states by 1824, which is what allowed Jackson to romp in 1828 with overwhelming support from small farmers and settlers.

The "51% taking away from the 49%" and "two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for dinner" analogies are bad; the critiques of "democracy" were a ruling elite trying to ensure they would always be in a dominant position even though the US had eliminated formal aristocracy.

That's not to say there shouldn't be some limits; complex policy decisions often have to be delegated to bureaucracy and referendums on wars sound like a complete clusterfuck. But the alternatives to representative liberal democracy tend to involve a much smaller segment of the population having far more over the rest of the country.

(I'm about the only leftist who doesn't seethe with rage at the mention of Andrew Jackson. Obviously forced deportation is awful but he marked an important transition away from the aristocratic republicanism of the US before him, despite himself being a wealthy landowner)

Only insofar as the ones writing this bill of rights allow - these men are themselves subject to their own personal fancies.

That is entirely irrelevant.

It matters not whether such a time period or event captures the majority of people, even if that event is false or spreads lies, for the people themselves have still (assuming of their own volition and under no intimidation) made the decision to vote a particular way.

Not really. All humans desire a right to their own life. A right to certain personal freedoms. And a right to pursuit happiness as they wish. The principles behind the bill of rights are an abstraction of the desires of all human beings, whether Male or Female, Black or White, Straight or Gay, New Yorker or Texan etc. It's truth is no more affected by personal bias than the austere and cold beauty of mathematics. The bill of rights is no more than a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.

I agree to an extent, but it is bias in the sense that it left some things out a matter of compromise. It didn't dissolve slavery for example as a consequence of rights extending to all individuals.

You don't get it do you? It establishes the individual's right to vote, after establishing what they can't vote on, taking away freedom of speech being one of them. By taking away the right for certain individuals to speak freely by a group of individuals who constitute the majority, it is a tyranny by a mob. Pure democracy is just as potentially tyrannical as a single dictator and cannot be allowed to exist without certain constraints.

The matter of which personal freedoms are to be enabled and which are transgressions is an evolving issue. To what extend happiness can be pursued before it trangresses onto the path of other is another one.

And what to do with transgressors is a whole other can of worms.

Is it moral to kill a dangerous killer? How about someone who doesn't set out to kill people but is actions endanger the lifes of many - think criminally negligent pharmaceutical CEOs.

And at what point does my free speech trangress on the rights of the passerbies that I annoy on the street or disturbs honest people that I wish to harass?

I can understand someone having a rifle or handgun to protect himself and his property, but I wouldn't condone this person controlling a nuclear warhead. But where is the cuttoff?

These are just grains of sand in the castle that is the problem of natural rights.

That actually makes a considerable amount of sense

Good, because it's how modern society works. If the 51% were 2% and the 49% were 98%.

All human beings desire a right to their own life. I challenge you to find an exception aside from human beings who can't desire anything at all, such as a baby or a dead man.

>I can understand someone having a rifle or handgun to protect himself and his property, but I wouldn't condone this person controlling a nuclear warhead. But where is the cuttoff?

Moving the goalposts, just because there isn't a right to bear all arms doesn't mean that there isn't a right to bear certain arms.

But everyone desires a right to their own life nonetheless and a right to bear arms ensures that right.

I'm not interested in chalenging you by bringing up clinical cases of extreme brain damage; I'm concerned with practicality.

Which arms can and can't be beared is contingent on natural rights? Let me tell you: the only rights a man can bear are those he can get his hands on. And I can only ensure my right to live as much as I can overpower those that would attempt to take my life or power from me - my ability to overpower or not being overpowered depends on the other's ability to use arms as much as my own.

By the way, where you accusing me of moving the goalposts or admiting you were doing this yourself? I don't see where either of us changed our objectives, to defend what we set out to defend.

I'd like to read your thoughts on other topics I posted .

You think society does run on philosophy and old scraps of paper? Those are only adhered through because people who have power, including the vast majority of population as a collective, perceive that status quo to be in their best interest for the foreseable future.

Man so many typos. It's like 5 am here.

So why has the United States survived so long with the constitution being relatively well respected? Checkmate moral relativists.

Well, well, well. If it isn't an Tomali-Somali telling me how meaningless a constitution and bill of rights is? How is that working out for you?

...

What if you have an unalterable constitution then huh?

What is it you are exactly suggesting?

Do you know how easy it is for ANY system to become corruptible?

Because it was relatively well respected by the people of the United States for that long - it was written by people that found those terms agreeable for people that would find those terms agreeable. This generation raised the next generation along the same ideological lines and that generation did the same - with a few kinks being worked in and out of the works during the process. Ideas are subjected to selection by the environment, of course, so these long-lasting ideas would generally not be self-destructive, at least, if not conductive to their own maintenance and transmission. But then again so is genital mutilation: something that traced it's roots to dim desert people and became widespread throughout your (, ) nation; it's a social institution that lasted thousands of years more than our current understanding of "natural rights" or "constitutional government".

What I'm arguing is that your original post is a terrible misunderstanding of how the real world works. People don't colour inside the lines because papers tell them to, they do it because other people will beat the shit out of them if they don't - or they'll starve, or lose their pensions, or they'll have someone write something mean about them on facebook. People keep each other in check. Democracies are built around this principle and bureaucracy and rule of law (constitutions fall here) just keep the process predictable, orderly, efficient.

>Implying any vote that close on an issue that controversial would stand

You do realize that once the singularity arrives every individual will live his own utopian virtual world that he thinks is the real world and within which he will be the only conscious entity and unbeknownst to him everyone will be computer simulations bound to respecting his natural rights as defined by the parameters of the program. The only way for someone real to enter his world will be through a dream state in which individuals tunnel through to another simulation, but can only exist there for the duration of the dream. This is extremely unlikely however because it would require someone to dream of someone else's exact same simulation by accident and to be dreaming lucidly so as to be bound by the rules of their own simulation rather than the simulation they traveled to.

>turning your back on the real world
>knowing there are other AIs out there that could erase you to take over your CPU and amass so much processing power as to sweep over the whole network and become Demiurge
pleb

I bet you don't won't even fork yourself and send out copies of yourself on probes to other planets and planetary/star systems.

>You do realize that once the singularity arrives

Stopped reading right there, he actually thinks the "singularity" is coming lol!

>it removes the debate of morality
it doesn't....

You still don't understand, but you are on the verge of grasping it. The constitution and bill of rights as a form of social contract is indeed a tradition as you are describing, passed from generation to generation, by people who enforce such a tradition through punishment and reward. The environment also has a role in the persistence of this tradition. What you seem to have trouble grasping about the real world is that a constitution and bill of rights was not thought up arbitrarily. It is based off an observation of human history, recognizing for instance, that denying the individual the right to their own life when that individual has not himself murdered another is a common cause of conflict and is universally reviled by people who are wronged, and preempts a majority allowing it to go unpunished. No man wants the right to their own life to be violated. Even those who wish for death by another's hand are still making a decision about their own life. The theory of evolution is itself an abstraction, but that does not mean it doesn't exist.

Pure democracy similarly is constrained by the constitution because there is a recognition that it inevitably leads to issues like I just described, where a mob bands together to rob others of their natural rights, including their right to life. Where this has happened in the United States, the consequences have tended to lead people back to the constitution, bill of rights, and founding documents like the declaration for guidance, because there is a tradition of respecting them and simply because they are there. They have also formed the basis for extending rights to women, blacks, homosexuals, etc. You could almost consider the idea that all men are entitled to "Life, Liberty and pursuit of happiness." a counter tradition to the constitution, forming a basis for its progressive evolution to something more abstract and broadly applicable to people including the groups I previously described.

>implying that an ai or a person connected to the simulation who realized that they were part of the constitutional sleeping godhead's simulation of everyone else's simulation wouldn't either achieve zero-sum upon realizing that they were a dream but refusing to believe they were real or achieve chim achieving godhood over others but not having the motivation to control their simulation and violate their rights.

>implying that a person or ai wouldn't inevitably wake the constitutional sleeping godhead collapsing every single simulation, essentially killing the sentient ais and restarting the whole simulation in which everyone previously connected is now bound to the new godhead whose will constitutes law by which all subsimulation are hitherto bound by.

MORAL RELATIVISM WINS AGAIN!!!

reminder that dems havent won a presidency while losing the popular vote

maybe thats why they havent complained in that situation

Luckily the country is not a pure democracy. The Founders set up diffused powers for this very reason.

What you don't seem to grasp is that you didn't need a bill of rights for that, because unlawful murder will generally meet punishment anyway, it doesn't take take dictatorship nor democracy, it's been the standard at all times, even between warring tribes where death is relatively no biggie, there are blood prices to be paid.

Your idea that all men are entitled to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is utopic. We don't allow all to men equal access to all those things, because society relies on limiting those things for the sake of protecting them - this is the social contract you speak of, but it doesn't call for a consitutional government. And the extension of rights to opressed groups didn't stem from the bill, it was the bill that was made to conform to societal change. A leviathan sovereign or mob could be equally trusted to preserve the social contract for as long as it was in their interest - the bill didn't protect tons of people until the people with power (this group came to include the people previously unprotected) wanted it to protect those people.

The amendments just make stuff official. The bureaucratic state relies on such writtings.

>implying votes mean shit
Le political party of the current senate puts propaganda in the media to brainwash future voters into thinking their ideas are their ideas.

Notice how many liberal retards mindlessly hated Trump after hearing the R word said about him.