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You do not have a right to live

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Bob_Hall Posted: Wed, Jul 14 2010 8:57 PM
There is no right to live , you have a right to life, to live is your responsibility to your life.
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Eric Bal replied on Wed, Jul 14 2010 9:59 PM
In the state of nature there is no right to live, anyone there being free to take anyone else's life if fit enough to do so. But once we mutually agree to have a government we have, not a natural right to live, but an agreed upon right not to be killed.
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Aquila replied on Thu, Jul 15 2010 7:23 AM

There is no right to live , you have a right to life,

You're contridicting yourself.

to live is your responsibility to your life.

Living is a responsibility? What about the people who don't want to live? Should we forcibly prevent people from committing suicide at (lol) the point of a gun? Isn't being at the point of a gun kind of what they want anyways?

I agree with the general sentiment here that there is no right to life. Such a position seems consistent with libertarianism, which espouses that there are no positive rights, only negetive rights.The right to life is a positive right.

It is impossible to engage in social corrporation if people are violating each-others rights. E.g., I cannot trade with someone who is stabbing me without my permission. It is not a stretch to say that it is a duty of every individual in civilized society to respect rights, and that those who do not should be exiled.

If someone wants to stop working and will die of starvation, it is not anyone's duty to feed him unless there is a right to life. Since a right to life has been demonstrated to constitute a positive obligation on "society," there can be no such thing as a right to life under libertarianism.

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I believe property rights come from the right to life. Reason being: your reason is your means to live, and your property is the physical manifestation of your ability to reason. Therefore, any encroachment on your property affects your right to life... This also means that your right to life does not outweigh another's right to property, so you cannot make someone your slave out of your right to life, or at least should not in a moral society. Obviously, this also means your property rights are protected as well.
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It is impossible to engage in social corrporation if people are violating each-others rights. E.g., I cannot trade with someone who is stabbing me without my permission. It is not a stretch to say that it is a duty of every individual in civilized society to respect rights, and that those who do not should be exiled.
But you can trade with someone who is coercing you...specifically, you can convince them to take a "longer-term" exploitation arrangement over a short-term one, where both the strong and weak party are better off in a "protection racket" than they are with ad-hoc takings. I am better off paying my taxes than not paying them and inviting the wholesale seizure of my property in complete. Does that mean I consent to the taxation, or choose the lesser of the two evils?
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