[QUOTE="tycoonmike"]
[QUOTE="-Sun_Tzu-"] Because everyone has the right to life unless they infringe on another person's right to life.-Sun_Tzu-
Three situations to refute that:
1. I'm drowning in the middle of an empty ocean. I cry out to the sea to save me and bring me to shore. It doesn't save me. If I, and indeed we, have a right to life, why wasn't I saved?
2. Two people of equal physical and mental condition are lost in the desert. The only way for one of them to make it out alive is to cannibalize the other. Which person has a right to life?
3. A mother must choose between saving her children and saving herself. If she chooses to save her children, does she do so as a matter of right or of maternal instinct?
1. You weren't saved because there was no one there to save you. Just because it's a right doesn't mean it's going to always be protected. In an ideal world they would be, but we don't live in an ideal world. Rights are infringed all the time.2. Initially they both do. This scenario plays out in four ways; a) Person X starts a fight with Person Y thus negating Person X's right to life (or vice versa) b) they mutually reach an agreement where they fight to the death, thus negating the right to life of both individuals c) one of them dies of natural causes before the other, d) they both die at the same exact time due to natural causes
3. I don't really see what this is trying to prove. If the mother chooses to save her children, it most likely is because of maternal instinct. I don't see how that refutes a right to life though.
1. So then I have the right to life so long as I can protect it? How can life be a right if I never always have it no matter what? And, indeed, you've hit upon the truth about rights: THERE IS NO SUCH THING! In an ideal world, yes there are rights. This is far from an ideal world, though. Right is a function of might and if I cannot defend that right I do not have that right. I could not defend my life from the sea and thus I did not have the right to live.
2. You've avoided the question. If both of them are of equal physical condition then neither of them can decisively win without some form of leverage, in the form of a weapon and, thus, in either case, both would die. The point is to see one of them survive. In that case, which person has the right to live?
3. If the mother has a right to live, then in choosing to save her children she also saves herself. Though I may not have made myself clear in my last post, either the mother can choose to sacrifice herself for the sake of her children or she can save herself and let her children die. In either case, the life or lives of the survivors has come at a cost: the death(s) of those left behind. How can something be a right if one must pay for it?
In all three scenarios, I have displayed life as being something that must be fought for and won, not something that is just given to you at birth. Indeed, even the moment of birth comes with a cost, the pain, suffering, and stress of the mother.
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