Animal Rights

Hi,

To give a run down, I'm doing a critical writing essay which involves the question "the morality of eating animals" (a topic I chose). I am intending to state and defend the point that it is moral to eat animals because they have no rights (and animal consumption is beneficial to man), which I believe to be the Objectivist stance (or at least similar to it).

However, I'm a bit shaky on the philosophical justification (the only thing I can think of for not granting rights to animals is their lack of rationality compared to man) and I don't know where to find anything about it, could someone give me information on this issue or teach me about it?

Thanks in advance.

Post 1

Saturday, October 13, 2012 - 1:02pm

There's been a discussion of it here, before:

Objectivism 101-Vegetarianism

And a discussion of the above:

Rebirth of Reason-Vegetarianism

(Edited by Joe Maurone on 10/13, 1:13pm)

Post 2

Saturday, October 13, 2012 - 10:04pm

Brandon,

Here are 3 relevant essays on the subject:

The Problem Of Animal Rights
by Shawn E. Klein

Animal "Rights" Versus Human Rights
by Edwin Locke, Ph.D.

Animal "Rights" and the New Man Haters
by Edwin Locke, Ph.D.

Ed

Post 3

Sunday, October 14, 2012 - 8:13am

I notice some people contest "the problem of animal rights" essay, does anyone have input to add about those comments?

Post 4

Sunday, October 14, 2012 - 9:24am

What did you think about the comments and debate?

Post 5

Sunday, October 14, 2012 - 11:15am

The essays seem well thought out and informative, useful, thanks.

I've looked through parts of the ROR vegetarianism debate, there are good points in it but it's too long for me to read through the entire thing right now, mainly concentrating on the moral part of it.

Post 6

Sunday, October 14, 2012 - 11:22am

Four words: "Law of the jungle."

Humans are capable of leaving it in favor of rational law.

Animals are not.

When humans deal with each other, they should follow reason.

Humans should not bother applying human precepts to non-human entities as it is impossible to do so.

Animals do not bother reasoning with humans since they cannot, so humans should not attempt to reciprocate anyway.

Post 7

Sunday, October 14, 2012 - 3:05pm

Luke,

You took so few words to say so much that is so correct. That indicates great mental prowess on your part. What are you, some kind of rocket scientist or something?

:-)

Yes, I know ... sooner or later ... that last part is bound to get old. In fact, it's probably not even the very first time that you've heard it! Anyway, here's to your displayed prowess. It's a beautiful thing to witness.

Ed

Post 8

Monday, October 15, 2012 - 8:45am

So, if you saw a man smashing baby chicks with a hammer just for fun, you would not be concerned, because the chicks are not rational and therefore have no rights.

The police on patrol see a child surrounded by a pack of wild dogs. The purpose of the police is to protect rights with retaliatory force. Dogs are not rational creatures, therefore, they cannot violate your rights. Therefore, the police have no duty to act. However, if the child is attacked by the dogs, the police should arrest the parents for neglect.

In Understanding Objectivism Dr. Leonard Peikoff says much about the fallacy of rationalism and warns of the easy way that Objectivist men fall into it.

Luke's analysis is flawed. When dealing with a four-year old, you do not act as a four-year old, but as an adult. When interacting with animals, you do not participate as an animal, but as a human.

The question of animal rights is overly broad and poorly stated: which animals; what rights; under what circumstances.

Sparrows do not have the right to vote, or run for President, no matter how old they are or where they were born. However, just because cuckoo chicks push sparrow chicks from the nest, does not empower you to seek out sparrow nests and do the same.

A dog charged with viciousness has the right to meet his accuser, and at least to have some kind of process before she is destroyed. It is not just that she is some human's property. I have met several nice rescue dogs who were mistreated in their homes until someone else intervened on their behalf.

A horse as the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment... which is where the animal rights movement began, actually... that and fox hunting.

Cruelty to animals is wrong because it is not how a human acting as man qua man behaves. It is from our nature that their rights derive.

Again, in Understanding Objectivism Peikoff goes into a long discussion on the difference between destroying a statue and destroying a living thing. He includes the fact that the emotion of revulsion to the purposeless destruction of life is an appropriate indicator of the fact that living things have a metaphysical nature different from inanimate objects. And it is irreducible. (Page 63).

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 10/15, 11:06am)

Post 9

Monday, October 15, 2012 - 11:56am

Since MEM wants to cite Peikoff to support his position, I will follow his example, though with a citation that supports my position and not his.

The climax (to date) of the campaign against �rights� is the detachment of the concept from the human species altogether, i.e., the claim that animals have rights. Rights are moral rules enjoining persuasion as against coercion, and there is no way of applying morality to the amoral or persuasion to the nonconceptual. An animal needs no validation of its behavior; it does not act by right or by permission; it perceives objects, then simply reacts as it must. In dealing with such organisms, there is no applicable law but the law of the jungle, the law of force against force. An animal (by nature) is concerned only with its survival; man (by choice) must be concerned only with his�which requires that he establish dominance over the lower species. Some of these are threats to his life and must be exterminated; others serve as sources of food or clothing, as subjects of medical research, even as objects of recreation or surrogate friendship (pets). By its nature and throughout the animal kingdom, life survives by feeding on life. To demand that man defer to the �rights� of other species is to deprive man himself of the right to life. This is �other-ism,� i.e., altruism, gone mad.

Peikoff, Leonard (1993-12-01). Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (Ayn Rand Library) (Kindle Locations 6538-6547). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.

Post 10

Monday, October 15, 2012 - 1:40pm

Michael,

I would be horrified by the sight of a man smashing baby chicks with a hammer, but it has nothing to do with animal rights. After all, I eat eggs and I had tandoori chicken last night. I would be thinking he had a violent mental disorder. And, my mind compartmentalizes the death of what I end up eating, keeping it separate from the senseless destruction of living creatures out of a joy in their suffering. Rights don't enter into it.
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On several different occasions I've pointed out the reasoning errors in your discussion of a pack of wild dogs (or coyotes), a child, and a cop. You don't have to agree but the polite thing to do is to respond.

In a way, this is like a lifeboat argument against individual rights or universal morality, but here it is the freak occurrence (boy about to be attacked by wild dog pack in the presence of a police officer), that is an attempt to somehow invalidate a police function (and then turning it around in a strange way to fit it into an animal rights discussion.)

The police are hired to protect and serve and so they will have a duty that arises from their contract. If there is a possibility that this is neglect, they can intervene on behalf of child - and be within policy, morality and legality.

And, they can act against neglect, if that is what they suspect to be happening, without waiting for some major level of harm to result. If a child isn't being fed, the cops don't have to wait for him to be hospitalized - only long enough to ascertain that it is neglect, that it appears that it would continue if not interrupted, and if it does continue that there would be harm.

They are also morally and legally charged with preventing crimes when possible - they don't have to wait for the crime to be completed.

Also, they are free to act as human beings and protect a child - quite apart from being police officers.

So, for many reasons, what you are making is not a sound argument. They are free to help an old woman cross a street, or to discuss the weather with someone, or to stop and have donuts and coffee. Not everything they do will be listed in the policy handbook, and not everything they do will be a retaliatory act arising out of rights violation.

Courts hire a bailiff to provide for functions even at civil court procedures. That bailiff's actions can't be related to the retaliation against a specific violation of a right by means of force, threat of force, fraud or theft. Yet, the hiring and use of the bailiff can be justified as needed in order to have a structure needed to be able to protect individual rights by providing an environment that permits the settling of differences in a civil fashion instead of using violence. There are many, many examples that give lie to your wild dogs, cop, and boy argument.
------------------

You wrote:

However, just because cuckoo chicks push sparrow chicks from the nest, does not empower you to seek out sparrow nests and do the same.

In a discussion of rights that statement doesn't make sense unless you mean, "...you do not have right to push baby sparrows out of the nest." But a person does have that moral and legal right - even if it is a sick and disgusting act when a human does it.
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Your argument about dogs charged with viciousness having the right to meet their accusers makes no sense. And the legal process involved IS that the dog is someone's property. One presumes that the dog's owner will be more effective in tasks like hiring an attorney, getting the accuser cross-examined, etc., than a dog who mostly just barks or growls.
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I agree with Dr. Peikoff that we see a lot of rationalism from some Objectivists, but there is the other side of that spectrum which is treating language as if it were flexible enough to twist principles around to mean what they don't. That is, instead of applying a principle in an unthinking and overly rigid fashion, there is the issue of ignoring a principle as long as one can come up with a stream of words that pretend to justify doing so.
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I agree that to act with cruelty to animals is not how man qua man behaves. And it would be from that position, and from a respect for life and from a distaste for cruelty and out of disgust for those who would inflict pain for the purpose inflicting pain, that LEGAL rights would be granted to animals - those are not moral rights. Moral rights can not exist for species that do not have a volitional, conceptual nature. And there is a legitimate question as to the justification of animal protection laws given that they deny to a person the property rights over an animal that they own. (Personally, I'd like to find that justification, but I don't know if it's possible. I haven't seen one yet.)

Post 11

Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - 9:06am

Luke, you know the difference between citing authority and calling to authority. Obviously, we disagree based on our personal perspectives. You do not have children - and do not want children. Do you have pets? Plants? My point is that empathy for other living things is learned; and among technical people, it can be rare... which is why techies work with machines, not creatures. Fair enough.

Steve, I acknowledge your approximately objective and largely common sense approach to the problem of "the policemen versus the natural threat." I suggested the problem to show the limits of rational deduction. Rather, we must always move back and forth to integrate fact and value, theory and practice, the analytic and synthetic, logic and experience.

As you say and have said, it would be wrong for a police officer to carelessly risk their life. However, I point out that by their nature, the guardians and warriors have a larger view of their own abilities and take physical risks you and I would not. I have known two paratroopers, one US one UK and both said it scared them, which is why they did it: to overcome the fear, which both guys said never happened, actually. All of which is to say, this is the very reason why any police officer acting ethically will do whatever is necessary to rescue the child, up to the very limit of their own life. That's why they are Guardians. By definition.

But my point was to show that rationalist deductions about animals and sentience and the choice to think and the definition of rights cannot succeed in discovering necessary factual truths.

I believe that animals have all the rights we give them, just as we do. You have a right to own a gun? You have a right to worship? You have a right to be free from unwarranted search and seizure? Go to China with that. You do not have those rights there. Rights are not intrinsic. Rights are not inherent. Rights are socially required for the best life as man qua man. And I submit that we already do and long have extended the concept to animals. We prevent cruelty to them by law because we live in a just society. We protect the animal itself, not the property rights of its owner.

The example of the dog accused of viciousness is a case in point. We test the dog for rabies. Short of that, it takes a demonstration. It takes some kind of process to destroy an animal to show that it is unremediable. People have gone to court to liberate animals from their owners and then retaught them to be different from the vicious beasts they were made into. Sometimes, it cannot be done. Among the cases are not just gang-banging rotweilers, but Army guard dogs. Smart dogs learn new tricks. We allow that.

You disagree. I know that I am not going to convince you with facts and logic. You have facts and logic of your own. I have no interest in debating this. RoR has three discussions already. I just clarified a new perception of my own for the public record. We are at an impasse and I see no reason to continue this for 123 posts. I do not think any less of you, but on the contrary, it is out of respect for you.

(My review of Necessary Factual Truth by Gregory Browne here.
Dr. Browne's reply here.)

Post 12

Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - 12:33pm

Michael,

You wrote:

...empathy for other living things is learned; and among technical people, it can be rare... which is why techies work with machines, not creatures.

I can't believe you wrote that! It is so wrong and so insulting and so shallow and not even a good stereotype. You should reconsider that.
-----------

You wrote:

But my point was to show that rationalist deductions about animals and sentience and the choice to think and the definition of rights cannot succeed in discovering necessary factual truths.

I don't know what you are trying to say here. You would have to clarify what you mean by 'rationalist deductions' for me. But clearly you are referring to my sentence in the post above where I said, "Moral rights can not exist for species that do not have a volitional, conceptual nature. " Are you saying that it isn't possible, for epistemological reasons, to arrive at a statement like the one I made?
--------------

You wrote:

I believe that animals have all the rights we give them, just as we do. You have a right to own a gun? You have a right to worship? You have a right to be free from unwarranted search and seizure? Go to China with that. You do not have those rights there. Rights are not intrinsic. Rights are not inherent. Rights are socially required for the best life as man qua man. And I submit that we already do and long have extended the concept to animals. We prevent cruelty to them by law because we live in a just society. We protect the animal itself, not the property rights of its owner.

You appear to be mixing up moral and legal rights. With moral rights, I have them regardless of jurisdiction because they arise out of my nature, and not out of my jurisdiction. I don't have an American's legal rights in China, but I do still possess my moral rights. We logically derive our our individual rights from human nature and that is far more epistemologically substantive than just saying they are "...socially required for the best life..." which is too close making them culturally relative or arbitrary.

Another important point is that a person can have a right even though it isn't respected - otherwise it would make no sense to talk about a right being violated.

After that you go on to talk about legal rights for animals - that isn't the same as saying that they possess moral rights - individual rights. If they had individual rights, and we respected those rights we could not own them or kill and eat them.
---------------

You wrote:

I know that I am not going to convince you with facts and logic. You have facts and logic of your own."

Michael, we are each able to have our own opinions, but there is only one set of facts, and logic is by its nature just as independent of our whims.
-----------------

You wrote:

We prevent cruelty to them by law because we live in a just society. We protect the animal itself, not the property rights of its owner.

You are talking about both legal and moral rights. We prevent cruelty to animals with laws because we believe that is the right thing to do. But we also permit the owners of livestock to kill their animals - and that is property rights which is both moral and legal.
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I don't have any interest in debating animal rights and I'm happy with discontinuing this thread.

As a last note, if someone wanted to approach this I believe they would need a different kind of concept from that of individual rights. It can't be the same because it would be for a creature that can't think and make choices as we do - it would have to be a concept that arises out of the creature's being alive and, I suspect, related to the range of its options. Perhaps some kind of spectrum where the range of a creature's 'rights' is related to the range of its options - i.e., a plant would have fewer 'rights' than an insect which would fewer 'rights' than a dog. I have no idea of how that would be done because other creatures won't respect these 'rights' and because the only purpose of these new 'rights' would be to force men to behave differently towards other creatures. But I am certain that anyone who is an Objectivist must fight any of the concepts of animal rights that I've ever seen to date because those all work to invalidate man's individual rights.

Post 13

Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - 12:36am

You wrote:
...empathy for other living things is learned; and among technical people, it can be rare... which is why techies work with machines, not creatures.
I can't believe you wrote that! It is so wrong and so insulting and so shallow and not even a good stereotype. You should reconsider that.

Nonsense. Obviously, you have not worked around many engineers and computer programmers. It is a good generality. Moreover, the observation was based on comments Luke has made about his values. I meant no insult; and I would be surprised if he took it that way.

For much of the rest, we are talking past each other.

I do see your point: I did not differentiate moral rights and legal rights. I have no moral right to your automobile... unless you rent it to me and that defines my (and your) legal rights. The problem is with the language which assigns the same word to two different things. My intention was only to discuss political rights, if that is the right sense. The rights we require to live in society.

I deny that you have rights based on your nature. If you were alone on an island, you would need morality, but you would not need rights. The concept of "natural rights" is an intrinsicist error. It had some use in historical development, like the "fluid" theory of electricity. We still speak of voltage as "pressure" and so on. So, when you say that you have "natural rights" I know what you intend.

Another important point is that a person can have a right even though it isn't respected - otherwise it would make no sense to talk about a right being violated.

I agree but that supposes that the right existed in the first place. We can define the rights we want as requirements for living in society and a communistic society would not recognize any of them. So, the rights "exist" as posits, as propositions, or assertions.

After that you go on to talk about legal rights for animals - that isn't the same as saying that they possess moral rights - individual rights. If they had individual rights, and we respected those rights we could not own them or kill and eat them.

The empirical fact is that we do eat them. If you are not going to eat something, and if it is not harming you, then it is wrong to kill it. That seems obvious to me.

You wrote:
I know that I am not going to convince you with facts and logic. You have facts and logic of your own."
Michael, we are each able to have our own opinions, but there is only one set of facts, and logic is by its nature just as independent of our whims.

I agree 100%. That is Moynihan's Rule: "You have a right to your own opinion. You do not have a right to your own facts." All I meant was that among those facts which exist, you select the ones that support the case you want to make. Your arguments are logical to you because you choose your premises from those facts. In order for us to agree, we would have to agree on the pertainent facts and the premises that are valid based on them. It could happen.

You wrote:
We prevent cruelty to them by law because we live in a just society. We protect the animal itself, not the property rights of its owner.
You are talking about both legal and moral rights. We prevent cruelty to animals with laws because we believe that is the right thing to do. But we also permit the owners of livestock to kill their animals - and that is property rights which is both moral and legal.

I agree that right now, the problems are confused and entangled. I eat animals. When our vegetarian friends become unbearable, my wife reminds them that "carrots have feelings, too." Sometimes, a farmer has to destroy a herd. To take a different but related problem, we agree that a woman has a right to terminate a pregnancy. What would you say about a woman who repeatedly carried her unborns for six months and then terminated them, five, six times in succession? As you were disgusted over the chicks, you would be even more deeply appalled, I hope. It might be her legal right, but you agree that there is a moral problem here, resting on a psychological problem. So, too, with cruelty to animals. We eat them. We do not eat them alive starting with the feet.

Finally, as you note, we are not debating here, because we both agreed not to argue animal rights here.
"I don't have any interest in debating animal rights and I'm happy with discontinuing this thread. "

Therefore, as an addendum, I note your closing comment:

As a last note, if someone wanted to approach this I believe they would need a different kind of concept from that of individual rights. It can't be the same because ... But I am certain that anyone who is an Objectivist must fight any of the concepts of animal rights that I've ever seen to date because those all work to invalidate man's individual rights.

I agree 100% and that is what I sought with this. It is like the problem of "ecology." Most of the problems come from the lack of private property and none of the solutions offered do much to address that. Worse, many to most of the advocates are unashamedly anti-human.

Post 14

Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - 3:33am

Michael,

You wrote:

Obviously, you have not worked around many engineers and computer programmers. It is a good generality."

What are you talking about? Here is a sentence from my little bio here on RoR: " I created software for a long time - programmed, designed and managed (Computers have been good to me and I'm very fond of them)."

My first serious job was as a computer operator. A year later I was programming mainframes in assembler. My last position was managing a software development department of about 30 people - I know programmers and engineers inside and out. So, let me repeat what I said. When you said that it's rare that technical people have empathy for living things - it was WRONG, it is insulting, it is a superficial stereotype that is wrong in many ways.

Your comment might have been about Luke, but only in your mind, because your statement was a generality about every technical person.
------------------------------

You wrote:

I deny that you have rights based on your nature. If you were alone on an island, you would need morality, but you would not need rights. The concept of "natural rights" is an intrinsicist error.

You are correct when you say that a person alone on an island would not need rights. But that does not mean that rights do not arise from human nature. Language arises from human nature and the capacity exists even if you don't use it on the island.

You clearly have decided to side with a theory of rights that is totally different from what Rand described. And her theory is NOT intrinsicist. She says, "A 'right' is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man�s freedom of action in a social context." That is not an intrinsic attribute. She also wrote, "The source of man�s rights is ... the law of identity. A is A�and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man�s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work." Rocks don't have rights. But if we found a rock-like entity from another planet that had a mind, and whose survival required the exercise of its free judgment... well, then we would have to consider that that alien rock might have rights.
---------------------------------

You wrote:

We can define the rights we want as requirements for living in society and a communistic society would not recognize any of them. So, the rights 'exist' as posits, as propositions, or assertions.

This is the relativist position. This is making rights into floating abstractions. This, if taken seriously, would mean that every form of government was morally equal in their relationship to man's rights! These are not arbitrary assertions where the communist's claim to take from those who produce to give to those who have need is morally equal to the capitalist's claim that man has property rights.
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About animals, you wrote:

If you are not going to eat something, and if it is not harming you, then it is wrong to kill it. That seems obvious to me.

Your reasoning isn't sound. That argument would work for cannibals - they eat the people they kill. People that weren't harming them. It is obvious to me that isn't a sound argument for or against vegetarianism or animal rights.
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You wrote:

...many to most of the advocates [of animal rights] are unashamedly anti-human.

That is so true!

Post 15

Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - 7:41am

Michael, I have been in IT for my entire career. You are making undue generalizations about computer programmers and techies.

Post 16

Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - 8:20am

I am an extreme example and an unwarranted data point for generalizations about engineers. Most of my colleagues have chosen the childed path and seem generally competent at it. Many have pets, too. When discussing children and pets elsewhere on this site, I was only talking about myself, not about those in general inclined toward science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. I am surprised that MEM, who loves to recite the mantra that "the plural of anecdote is not data," would make such a statement.

(Edited by Luke Setzer on 10/17, 8:21am)

Post 17

Thursday, October 18, 2012 - 12:14am

Well, please, allow me to extend apologies all around...

1. I read Steve's, Luke's and Deanna's biographies and I visited Luke's website. (I also updated my own bio.)

2. Our anecdotes will have to remain as they are, as we have no data. (But I am working on it.)

3.

You wrote:
We can define the rights we want as requirements for living in society and a communistic society would not recognize any of them. So, the rights 'exist' as posits, as propositions, or assertions.
This is the relativist position. This is making rights into floating abstractions. This, if taken seriously...

I claim to do this for a living, but the hot pen method can be a challenge. Again, I apologize for the misdirection. I meant to make several points and failed to do so. And in fact, the quote is incomplete.

My statement began with: "I agree but that supposes that the right existed in the first place. We can define the rights we want as requirements... " By "that supposes that the right existed in the first place" I intended that the right must first be recognized before it can be violated. It must exist as recognized in your society.

Up until recently (1991), in eleven states, atheists had no right to serve in public office, even though, literally and strictly, there was no "religious test." You could believe in God any way you wished. You had a right to be an atheist, but an atheist did not have the right to serve on a jury, to testify at trial, or to serve in public office.

Where in the stars or in your nature is it written that you must have a right to trial by jury? The Hebrews had judges. The Romans had tribunes. In Athens the jury that convicted Socrates was drawn from 500 citizens. The roots of our 12-person juries are in the Danish towns of England. How is any one objectively moral or immoral? All are social conventions. You have no inherent, innate, natural right to a trial by a jury. It is quite arbitrary. But, granted the existence of the right, then, yes, denied, it is violated.

Relative to a society that does not recognize innate or natural rights, your claims just that: claims.

Steve: "You are correct when you say that a person alone on an island would not need rights. But that does not mean that rights do not arise from human nature. Language arises from human nature and the capacity exists even if you don't use it on the island."

You learn language socially, but alone on an island, you need it desperately, because the primary purpose of language is to think. Talking to others is secondary. Also, we have a topic here about a man raised to adulthood without language. Language may be in our nature, and so is society; and raised apart from society, you do not acquire language. You are incomplete, lacking a fundamental aspect of human nature. You can survive apart from society. You can survive at a less than human level We know that.

And so, to survive in human society qua human, you must have rights. Like languages, rights can follow different formulas and origins and applications, but without a common understanding of personhood and place, we do not have civilization. In Russian, the word for peace is the word for village: MIR. (We know it from the Latin murus=wall. In Japanese kanji, the character for "husband" is the same as "prisoner" a guy inside four walls... but I digress... ) To live peacefully in the same place, we need rules. Everyone knows that. The question is: Which rules? Over the millennia, we have made progress in finding the right way to discover and implement those rules. Some time back Steve nicely provided two codes of law antecedant to Hammurabi.

By extension, when we domesticate some animals and bring them into our midst, we treat them in civilization differently than we do in the wild because those animals now have a different 'nature' by their un-natural context.

About animals, you wrote:
If you are not going to eat something, and if it is not harming you, then it is wrong to kill it. That seems obvious to me.
Your reasoning isn't sound. That argument would work for cannibals - they eat the people they kill. People that weren't harming them. It is obvious to me that isn't a sound argument for or against vegetarianism or animal rights.

At least you recognized that I was talking about animals. Also, A implies B does not yield B implies A so being able to eat something (like a person, or my cat here) does not give you the right to kill it. I grant that it is a bad argument, but I insist that it was not the point I made. It is not my reasoning.

Post 18

Thursday, October 18, 2012 - 3:59am

Michael,

You wrote:

My statement began with: "I agree but that supposes that the right existed in the first place. We can define the rights we want as requirements... " By "that supposes that the right existed in the first place" I intended that the right must first be recognized before it can be violated. It must exist as recognized in your society.

Individual rights are violated when a person initiates force against another, or threatens to do so, or steals their property or deprives them of property by fraud. This is defined by the hard metaphysical difference between force and choice. And arises from human nature's survival requirement that man choose. That remains the case even if the society does NOT recognize individual rights. Individual rights do not require recognition. The Cultural Revolution under Mao killed millions - their rights to life were violated, even though those rights were not recognized.
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You mention that an atheist could not hold public office in some states. And you talk about the conventions regarding a trial by jury and the number of jurors. You are still ignoring the difference between moral rights, that is individual rights, and legal rights. That difference is enormous and your thinking will remain hopelessly muddled in this area till you focus on that.
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You went on to say that these laws (e.g., regarding the number of jurors) are all social conventions and are not objectively moral or immoral. That is only partially true. They aren't totally untethered from reality, or from morality. For example, take the decision to exercise retaliatory force by a government that is done in response to evidence that a person committed murder. That person is presumed innocent until there is a verdict of guilt based upon adequate evidence and where that ruling was arrived at by a process that provides rational confidence in its fairness and accuracy. We create laws to implement our individual rights. It may be arbitrary that we have 12 jurors and not 10 or 14, but the legal principle is sound. We don't want the state to have the sole say in a decision of the facts that is more safely arrived at via a jury of our peers. It is common sense to want significantly more jurors impaneled than just 1 or 2, and we also don't want a hundred because of how cumbersome that would be. There are principles that are not arbitrary yet allow a latitude in their implementation. You are looking at the details of the implementation and not the underlying principles.
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Stay focused on the differences between these:

individual rights (which arise from human nature, predate government, are universal and inalienable),
the philosophy and founding principles of law,
objective law,
bad law,
various social conventions or unwritten rules.

Those are all different things. Think of individual rights and the philosophy of law as things that must be discovered as we do in science. Where as objective law is crafted or engineered, based upon the philosophy of law. Objective law is the bridge engineered using philosophy of law that, done properly, will take us to the optimum environment based upon individual rights. Bad law is anything from sloppy engineering to tyranny dressed up as if it were legitimate. All the rest is psychology and cultural evolution and the accidents of time and place.

Post 19

Thursday, October 18, 2012 - 5:01am