The Unnatural Construct of 'Right to Life'

HEADS UP: an unpopular opinion.

In Nature, there is no such thing as ‘rights' to something.

Including life.

‘Rights’ is a human construct.

‘Human rights’, ‘employee rights’, ‘animal rights’ (today, I won’t go into this, but it boils my blood and I will never get down with this, the notion that having these two construct – ‘human rights’ and ‘animal rights’ – as separate categories implies that humans and animals are different things when the simple, yet-undisputed fact is that humans, biologically and physiologically, before anything else, are animals.), ‘Nature rights’.

Having gotten that out of the way, I am not against this construct. Since we, human animals, evolved to have the cognitive and accompanying moral capacity to create such constructs, they are, clearly, extremely important to guide our rules of engagement among our own species’ members and our engagement with other-than-human Earthlings around us.

So, while it is not a natural thing, because of its importance, going forward, I will treat it as a default.

The most important right being the ‘right to life.’

The issue I have with this important construct is the basis on which we, humans, have taken it upon ourselves to ‘distribute’ and ‘assign’ those rights.

One of the main criteria we seem to have chosen to apply when decided another Earthling’s rights is ‘sentience’.

‘Sentience’, of course, is also defined and either assigned to another Earthling or not by humans.

And then we decided that ‘sentience’ is a spectrum rather than either/or.

To be fair, I don’t know if this decision appears in some statutes in a recorded form, but we certainly act like sentience is a spectrum.

We cherry pick at our convenience.

And then we dare claim moral superiority over every other Earthling. Claiming that our cognitive capacities somehow make us morally superior while, in the same breath, bending the constructs as it suits our supposed ‘needs.’

Then we trample on the rights of other Earthlings justifying our ‘needs.’

The absence of integrity our species is exhibiting is staggering. While, again, in the same breath, we claim moral superiority and use this claim to give us the further right to cherry pick at our convenience.

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I call for a new basis on which the ‘right to life’ is assigned and protected.

If an organism – ANY ORGANISM – displays an instinct to survive, then it has the ‘right to life.’

Not ‘should have’ or ‘should be assigned’ or ‘needs further research’ or whatever other nonsense we, humans, come up with to continue giving ourselves the rights to take more than we need at the expense of everyone else.

It must be the primary consideration when humans’ WANTS clash with someone’s ‘right to life’ on this new basis.