Quote (cambovenzi @ Feb 3 2014 05:09am)
So before the enlightenment you are telling me no one owned anything and no one thought it was wrong to steal from others?
There also ARE several instances of property rights being observed in relatively primitive cultures or places where no overbearing coercive government is in control, such as native american tribes, the "wild" west, etc
The ~1500s+ are also pretty damn primitive compared to now.
Your rejection of rights is an interesting opinion. Unfortunately it seems to put you in the Nazi sympathizer camp.
Btw you are creating a false dichotomy. Its quite possible to have property rights without overbearing police state measures.
Even in the absence of government people would want their property and rights protected and would voluntarily employ means to do just that.
There is plenty of room for me to be critical of unsavory police practices without forfeiting property rights.
In the old days people didn't effectively have social relations with one another, they were fixed and everything was done according to a preexisting natural law as interpreted by the king. If you were punished for stealing from me it isn't because you had some right to expect to be treated a certain way, it was done by the king. An example are children and a parent. My children don't have social relations to each other, they do through me. When one wrongs the other they come to me for justice, and I dispense it as I see fit, and they can have no expectations to be treated a certain way. That is how the social order was, all the way from the lowliest germ all the way up to god, with the three estates and the king in the middle somewhere.
Rights are new, a product of the enlightenment. Positive law is something older societies did, but they did not include any right to be treated a certain way. The king could have you thrown off a cliff for nothing if he felt inclined to.
Rousseau said that the first person stake off some land and said that nobody could do anything with it should have been met with derision and ridicule, and that didn't happen and now inequality exists. Locke says life, liberty, and property. Hobbes said that the sovereign can do what the hell it wants until it can't force people to do its will any longer and then it is time for the new biggest badass to be sovereign. Pick which social contract theory you like
