In this lesson I did a review. I also had to write a 250 word essay on the following topics. Is the state the source of human rights?
When all else is gone and you don’t have a home, a job or even a name, you still have rights. I’ll mainly be talking about three rights, the right to life, liberty, and property, though in the last lesson I learned the the right to property is an extension of the right to life. The question at hand is whether or not the state is the source of human rights? My answer is that the state is not.
Let’s start off with what I think is the easiest right to comprehend, life. The right to life is your right to live and your right to control yourself, now again it extends to property but for the sake of simplicity let’s just keep it at that. Do you think that you have the right literally to be alive right now because the government says you do? I don’t think so. I don’t think that I have the right to live because a bunch of people in Washington said so. Also where did those people get their rights? From another group of people when they were born? To say that the state is the source of our rights is to say that humans gave humans rights. That doesn’t make any sense to me. Whoever gave us rights, no matter who you believe the source to be should logically also have the power to take them away. Should the state be able to take our rights away? That’s not the understanding of freedom I grew up with.
The state is not the source of our rights, man cannot give man rights, and man cannot take them away. A higher power endowed us our rights, a higher power than ourselves. So when the state abuses people’s rights, they must answer for their crimes.
Connor's corner 