GreecePwns wrote:What of rights, then? Do they exist? Or can they be merely taken away by force?
Consider, GreecePwns, the US Constitution and all the "rights" we in the US enjoy. How is it that we came about having them?
Had the Founding Fathers lost the Revolution they would have been hung from the gallows and with their deaths so would have died the Declaration and our supposed "rights".
All rights are ultimately won on the battlefield. Once won, those rights can be passed down to future generations, but to gain those rights in the first place it takes force.
You can claim rights come from God, or a piece of paper, but when a fellow puts a gun in your face God ain't gonna save you and that piece of paper won't stop that bullet. You have to be prepared to defend your rights.
Take BBS example, he and his buddies kill my parents and take their house, has my property rights been lost? Let's say "no", then what am I to do about it? Should I go to BBS and say "Oh, legally this property is rightfully mine. You and your friends will have to leave now". If he tells me to piss off, then what? Wave a piece of paper in his face?
If there are police I'd call them and they would use force to uphold my property rights by taking BBS and his buddies under arrest, if they resisted the police would just shoot them. Application of force both.
Without the benefit of police, army or anyone else to uphold my property rights, it would then fall upon myself to uphold those property rights myself. It would take the will and capacity for me to use violence to secure what is "rightfully" mine.
Without the ability to apply force, rights will always be arbitrary and in the hands of the meanest dog on the block. We like to think of ourselves as "civilized" and everyone voluntarily respects each other's rights, but underlying all the rights we enjoy is the threat of application of force from police, militia or armed forces protecting those rights. Force, violence and the threat of violence is the power that upholds "legitimacy". It's only legitimate because of that force. All the philosophical musings make no difference to people who don't give a crap about your philosophical musings on the nature and origin of rights. In those times, against those people, violence is the only option left, save giving up your claim all together. That's always and option as well.
When the day comes that mankind no longer needs that threat of violence to protect what is right and proper, is the day mankind finds Utopia. I doubt it will be coming in the near future.......