If you want proof then read the details of Ayn Rand's development of ethics and rights. Rational explanations of key points are not arbitrary opinion. You misrepresented what I wrote in five paragraphs with your one false statement. No one said that a fetus is not alive. You apparently understood none of it, nor do you care.

How we develop and why we have rights are fact not opinion. It is a process with essential distinctions. Birth is not an instantaneous event whose existence depends on infinite precision from 5 minutes or 5 seconds or any other number, which your sophistry is trying to exploit to wipe out the essential biological fact of birth, the concept of which is obviously not arbitrary. That is sophistry no better than Zeno trying to wipe out observed fact with rationalization. Likewise for the absurd statement that human beings are nothing more than a "group of cells". If you want proof then watch a human being for a few moments. What do you think hold the cells together and accounts for the functioning of a larger observable entity of which they are the constituents?

Your arbitrary assertions are not just as good as anything else. You try to undermine rational explanations that conflict with your unfounded beliefs as no better than your own pronouncements. Rejecting your nihilistic subjectivism is not "bigotry". If you think everything is arbitrary opinion with no proof then you have nothing to say and there would be no point to discussion trading arbitrary opinions. The rest of us know better. Your gratuitous insults about a Racist mentality is in fact crude and an inappropriate diversion serving nothing but smears on behalf of your emotions. You can't even see the difference between Ayn Rand's ideas and liberals.

They are not based on the Bible. There are no such "citations". David Barton and his ilk are intellectual frauds. There is nothing in the Constitution based on the Bible. The remnants of religion still in the Enlightenment were not Christian theology. Vague God slogans in correspondence does not base the principles of this country on religion. Intellectual understanding does not come from irrelevant word counts. The spread of reason and individualism of the Enlightenment was in spite of religion, not because of it.

We have had more than enough of your crude rationalizations, false alternatives, crude equivocations and evasions on behalf of your religious subjectivism. That no one predicted an automobile accident does not mean we have no comprehension of the world. Comprehending the world does not mean omniscience. Mystical fantasies are not comprehension. Reason is not "preliminary" to your mystic fantasies; they are opposites.

A cell or a fetus having "DNA" does not give it rights and does not make a cell and a person the same thing. A human cell with DNA is not a person. Primitive sensations in a dark womb are not the perceptions of the external world on which we base our conceptual knowledge of the world. That parents experience joy does not make a fetus a child or change its biological parasitical nature. You are a sophist promoting religion and trying to undermine rational thought while your rationalize your mysticism with phony appeals to science, not engaging in serious discussion.

You have no idea what rights are or why we have them. You are a mystic pronouncing undefined rights emotionally tied to the word "human", then used without regard to meaning and context. Ayn Rand explained at length the concept of rights and why we have them; it is not "arbitrary subjective opinion". If you don't care then go away. This is an Ayn Rand forum not a repository for militant mystics stubbornly demanding to be taken seriously. No one cares about your island bubble fantasies trying to convince us that we don't know anything because we don't have your revelations.

Mystical notions of the "intrinsic" versus the "subjective" is a false alternative. Objective does not mean intrinsic.

Dropping context in equating cells and people because they both have DNA is not objective, it is rationalization refusing to make essential distinctions. We do not have rights because of the presence of DNA. That is a mystical concept pretending to be scientific.

Please stop equating anything not religious with Hitler and Stalin. It is tiresome. The long sordid history of religion has had its own atrocities from its own subjectivism pronouncing the "intrinsic". Ayn Rand explained her concept of objectivity at length. She was not a subjectivist for rejecting mysticism.

Don't forget that in the beginning of our republic, voting was restricted to Property Owners and Vets. That was changed pretty quickly, but the real turning point in our collective slide into oblivion was granting the vote to woman. Our nation has never been the same.

I'm not analyzing this point, just pointing to an observation.

A fetus is not child and not an "another", as if they were identical. You are equivocating. Fetuses do not have rights. Being "alive" does not give anything rights. You kill things all the time that are alive, such in preparation for eating.

You seem to not understand the meaning of "inherent in humanity", which leads to many problems, including some artificial 'dualism'.

Our rights are objective, conceptual principles of morality based on our nature as rational beings who must think and choose in order to live, and the social conditions required for that. They are not about insights into something intrinsic in the sense of Plato's reflections of forms, Aristotle's 'naive realism' of metaphysical essences, religious attributions regarded as intrinsic, i.e., mystical, etc.

Rational principles are neither subjective (all in our minds) nor intrinsic (all 'out there'). They are objective identifications of facts of reality by means of our distinctive conceptual form of awareness organizing and classifying facts by essentials, in a hierarchy ultimately based on the perceptual awareness that is the base of all knowledge. Objective knowledge is awareness of facts ('out there') organized by concepts ('in here'). Our concepts organize knowledge in a hierarchy of increasing abstraction based on making essential distinctions, not a form of or equivalent to perception of intrinsic essences. Facts and context always matter. Principles are contextual absolutes, not out of context absolutes. That is true of all principles, from physics to the moral theory of rights.

There is no conflict, under our form of knowledge, between saying in shorthand that rights are 'inherent' in 'humanity' versus the rights accumulated over time through normal childhood development, or in part lost through debilitating disease, or never acquired in the rare subnormal cases., or lost in whole or part by criminal activity. They are all facts of reality that provide the context of applying the concepts and principles of 'rights'. Rights require and pertain only to rational beings as the essence, but defining and implementing them in law requires much more detailed knowledge of human development, capacity, and behavior. None of it arbitrary.

The rights of a newborn infant are much more limited than adults, and must be by its nature. If you think of rights coming from "inherently being human" as something intrinsic to all "humanity" as such and without regard to facts and context then you won't understand how there could be any difference.

A common religious view is the mystical claim that a supernatural being by unspecified means gave us "rights", whatever that means, so they are intrinsic to reality without regard to understanding or proof, waiting to be revealed, and apply equally, with equal emotional fervor, to everything called "human" -- from adults to cells that have human genes. That overtly mystical approach is often inherited, in whole or part, in the common floating abstraction approach to rights whether or not the person holding it has thrown off the original religious dogmas. It's an improper emotional way of thinking divorced from facts and essential distinctions, but can be hard to throw off when inculcated through years of early education and constantly reinforced, with no one explaining the difference.

The fact of being born is an essential distinction to becoming a person. It is required both for the biological break from 'parasitism' to become a biologically independent entity and for the possibility of beginning the exercise of a rational mind to comprehend reality to live. There is a continuously developed nervous system just before birth, but there is inadequate context for it operate on. Perceptions, and later, conceptions, require the ability to make distinctions that aren't there when trapped in the darkness and relative homogeneity of the womb, biologically directly dependent for everything.

That is vastly different than a new born baby as a distinct living entity focusing and looking around for the first time in wonder, and the subsequent rapid development compared to what was. The act of birth is a fundamental, essential difference in biological context, regardless of the continuity of internal biological development. The conceptual basis of our rights is not being called "human" because we have human genes, and not because we kick or twitch when poked.

A baby does of course have a major dependency on parents responsible for having brought it into the world, but that kind of care, which lasts in different degrees for many years, is of an essentially different kind than biological parasitic dependence and nothing else. This isn't about time and effort of specific tasks of care by parents. The baby has rights not because of the dependent care, but because it is an independent entity beginning to exercise its mind through the necessity to choose and focus to comprehend the external world for the first time.

But the obvious difference in capacity also means that by nature it does not have the full rights of an adult. If you understand that the fundamental right is the right to life, by virtue of being a rational being who must choose to think and act for living, including early development, you can see that by its nature as human it has that fundamental right, something that no human ever loses until capacity to think and act are no longer possible at all (or abdicated by a criminal).

But there is no conflict between having rights by nature as human and the facts of the context of development. They are not two different sources of rights, one 'intrinsic' and the other 'assigned'. That kind of confusion arises under the false alternative of the intrinsic versus the subjective (leaving out the objective) when improperly using 'rights' as a floating abstraction. Then it is emotionally attached to something called 'human' without regard to facts and context, as if rights were not objective concepts and principles but something intrinsic, accepted emotionally as a revealed truth instead of a formulation of complex knowledge depending on many facts and distinctions, which can be different at different stages of development.

As I stated, they were based on both. If you want reference citations, I can give them.

Found this on Wikipedia, thought it applied to "your set mark":
"viability of a fetus means having reached such a stage of development as to be capable of living, under normal conditions, outside the uterus. Viability exists as a function of biomedical and technological capacities, which are different in different parts of the world. As a consequence, there is, at the present time, no worldwide, uniform gestational age that defines viability for fetuses."
I'll continue to observe that the right to life is for human beings and a fetus is not a human being until it becomes a human being, which can only occur outside of utero.

That is a reasonable position. I myself take the position that any opinion on this is just that an opinion. As such my personal position is that life begins a little earlier. If you have read this entire discussion you know where I set my mark. Though there are times when I want to argue for a MUCH later time. Though wanting to and doing are different, I stand by my position.

Eyecu2, after reading your discussion with ewv, I wanted to give you my point of view on the matter, as I agree with you, its not an easy matter to decide where one stands on such issues, and only discussions of different viewpoints give us a chance to reflect and develop our thoughts further on the subject.

In any case, our rights are particular to us as human beings, so we have to first acknowledge that human beings have the right to life among others. If we follow this rationale, then we can say that first we must identify what is human being and what is not. I agree with ewv that the fetus is not identified as a human being until it is born, or is removed from the mother. Although I have toiled with this notion from having 2 daughters of my own, but it becomes necessary to stow the emotions from the equation to have an objective perspective on such ideas. Someone smarter than me pointed to this reasoning for such identifications: you have a chicken and an egg, is the egg a chicken? No, it has the potential to be a chicken, but it is not a chicken until it hatches. It is still an egg for as long as it remains that way. A fetus is not a human being until after birth, that is when it changes its identification as a fetus (potential human being) to a human being. The fetus (at any stage) is still the potential of a human being, only when it is removed from the womb does the potential become a human being.

Your assertion was that one must be able to perceive the external world before one qualified for rights. I have shown that by any objective standard those in utero demonstrate that capacity. You set forth that test as the standard because you believed that it created a separation or distinction - I simply demonstrated that by those qualifications the infant in the womb passes that test and that no distinction actually exists. I made no inference or assertion that such was a valid test for recognition of rights in the first place - that was your contention and one I have repeatedly shown to be arbitrary.

"That is not enough to comprehend the external world"

And that is a nonsense argument. Comprehend means that we understand something well enough to accurately predict what is going to happen. You yourself can not "comprehend" the external world or you could have warned me that I was going to be involved in an automobile accident yesterday. The simple fact is that none of us "comprehend" the external world. Even the so-called "experts" specialize in specific fields of expertise rather than a general knowledge of "the external world". If you are going to place that as a qualification for rights, you place all rights beyond the capacity for humankind. I reject such a notion for what it is - a subjective and utterly nonsensical argument. Reason does not equate to comprehension by any stretch of the imagination. Reason is the ability to separate one's self from one's environment and draw conclusions about cause and effect. Reason is preliminary to comprehension.

"You also misrepresented my statement that "it's not a biologically separate entity at all beyond the status, literally, of a parasite."

You misrepresent the status of a fetus as a human being. A parasite is undesired and brings no positive outcome to the host. The vast majority of pregnancies are desired and the resulting children bring joy to the parents. I took only the portion of your argument which could be considered a real argument rather than a personal statement of opinion. (PS - do you have any children yourself?)

"Trying to ban abortion..."

The fundamental premise you argue is that anything still in the womb is not human. I have demonstrated repeatedly that such is a subjective argument and thus opinion. I take the stand that an organism constructed of human DNA is a person with rights deserving of protection no matter how developed they are. You take the stand that somehow DNA isn't good enough, but some action on the part of the human is requisite for realization and protection of rights. We disagree because your argument relies wholly on subjective judgement.

*

Let me present a question for you. In the movie "The Island" (spoiler alert), the protagonist lives in a protected bubble of life under the auspice of a global calamity. He is one of the few who have been rescued and brought to an "island" - a temporary sanctuary awaiting a more permanent relocation. He is among thousands who while away their days waiting. But he begins to develop an attraction (forbidden) to one of the other "rescued" and he inadvertently witnesses the actual relocation of one of the other "rescued". They finally escape "the island" and discover that the real world isn't at all like what they had been told at all. The protagonist then actually meets his original and gets brutally awakened to Reality: that the "rescued' are actually clones - created and raised in the event that their original suffers some trauma or accident which requires donor organs. "Relocation" in actuality is the death of the clone to provide donor organs (100% compatible) for the original.

So what say you: are these clones (as depicted in the film) human? Do they deserve protection and rights?

"The concept of rights is not intrinsic."

If they are not intrinsic, then they must be earned through some process of qualification - a subjective process. Thus it very much is a question of intrinsic and objective vs earned and subjective.

The only difference between an adult and an infant is their state of development. If given two DNA samples, no lab technician is going to be able to tell the difference, all one may conclude is the gender and that both specimens originate from humans. That is a completely objective test. "Capacity" is always a subjective measure based on whether or not a person can complete some arbitrary task. But the measurement and goal definition and task assignment come from another human being's judgement - thus it is subjective.

Your argument is that rights are not realized (and therefore subject to protection) until that individual meets an arbitrary standard of expression. I reject that notion as subjective in nature. And once a subjective standard has been applied it is very easy to rationalize adjustments to that subjective standard. Hitler granted only the highest protection to his "master race" (the SS was notorious for this). Mao used political affiliation as his standard. Stalin as well. All justified their use of force because in their minds those whom they persecuted were not sufficiently "human". I use their examples because the atrocities they committed were entirely based on subjective viewpoints because they had abandoned the objective viewpoint of equality based on simple humanity.

A right to one's own life in no way gives one power to terminate another's.

I dismissed 5 paragraphs of opinion since you offered NO PROOF, therefore, it is completely irrelevant weather you wrote 5 words or 500 pages. When life begins IS a matter of opinion and you offered that life begins at birth. So what about 5 days, or 5 minutes, or 5 seconds before. Seems pretty arbitrary to me or maybe you mean the instant that the cord is cut. So what about just before that cord is cut? Is it still OK to abort?

As to you finding it crudely insulting that I compared you to a Liberal. I find it the height of bigotry and insulting that you offer your opinions as facts and refuse to entertain the possibility that another's opinion might carry some weight. This is something that Liberals are FAMOUS for and as someone here in the Gulch I would expect better from you.

Once again, the parent to this post did not deserve to be downvoted, so I gave ewv a point back. I think that the origin of some of man's rights is inherent in humanity and that other rights are earned as one progresses through childhood. I think my biggest issue with Rand's delineation of birth as being as critical to her definition of life is that it is somewhat arbitrary. Yes, it is the point at which the newborn can function more autonomously than before, and it is the point that creates the least philosophical conflict. However, I think that a newborn in the first few months requires more time and effort on the mother's part than while in the womb. If one is to argue that the basis for one's rights is solely based on one's independence from needing the help of others, then birth is definitely too early to assign rights. A baby abandoned in a dumpster is not going to self-generate enough self-sustaining actions to survive any better than a fetus. Yet I think everyone in this forum would agree that newborns (and going back to the earlier discussion, senior citizens) should have some rights. The whole point of this thread is whether or not some rights are inherent, and if so, what impact does that have.

It's a direct link to the essay "Man's Rights" in both The Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal that has been referred to several times on this page.

Appreciated. I'll read this later.

For those who have not read rand's essay on rights and for those who have and need a refresh:

https://ari.aynrand.org/issues/govern...

Floating abstraction means the use of a word manipulated rationalistically without regard to the meaning and source of the concept in reality. The concept 'floats' away from its moorings in reality.

Leonard Peikoff once described it as "A floating abstraction is not an integration of factual data; it is a memorized linguistic custom representing in the person's mind a hash made of random concretes, habits, and feelings that blend imperceptibly into other hashes which are the content of other, similarly floating abstractions."

To see how concepts are validly an "integration of factual data" see her book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. (And yes you are smart enough and educated enough to understand it.)

The concept of "rights" depends on its factual basis in the requirement of human reason to live and make choices, as explained in more detail several times elsewhere on this page and with reference to Ayn Rand's article "Man's Rights" in particular. Too often 'rights' is used as a word with only emotional ties to a vague notion of "humanity", then transferred with no recognition that the meaning and source of the concept does not apply to cells, embryos, fetuses or any sentient being.

You dismissed five paragraphs of explanation with a misrepresentation. The explanation was not "nothing but opinion" saying that "life begins at birth".

Arbitrary opinions are not equally valid, or "might be", or "just as valid as anyone else's". You are expected to read for understanding, not "fall in line". Your gratuitous accusation of the "Racist" mentality is false and crudely insulting.

Those who seek to control others are often not just lazy, they are ideologically committed to altruism and collectivism as the essence of how they think. Some of them work quite hard at it. (Remember Toohey and his many counterparts everywhere.) The spread of that thinking makes it easier for the lazy to justify themselves.

The concept of rights is not intrinsic. You are arguing like a Platonist with mystical essences. The intrinsic and the subjective are a false alternative.

We are talking about adults or normally developing children with objectively identified and well understood limited capacities. No one has said that anyone looses rights for not "expressing" them and none of this has anything whatsover to do with the likes of Hitler and Stalin.

We do not have rights because we feel pain, respond with kicks, and have "organs" and unique DNA. You don't appear to have any idea what right are and how they arise conceptually, instead dealing with floating abstractions and the notion that rights are somehow just intrinsically there in the usual mystic religious sense.

You left out that I wrote that there is "no way to perceive the external world other than occasional crude sensations of bumps or noise". That is not enough to comprehend the external world and is not even remotely like the exercise of focused perception following birth. You also misrepresented my statement that "it's not a biologically separate entity at all beyond the status, literally, of a parasite."

Trying to ban abortion because they woman expels the fetus (which is not a "baby") instead of killing herself by removing her own organs is circular.

I dismissed you because you offered nothing but your opinion. Although as this entire discussion is based on opinions I guess yours is just as valid as anyone else's. Just not one that I am willing to accept. Since you seem unwilling to admit that any other opinion might have any validity. Much as a Liberal screams "Racist" if you don't fall inline immediately.