This statement confused me, probably because I'm not from the US and am missing some cultural dogma/context. But the way I think about it, "rights" are not encoded in the laws of physics. They are social constructs. Therefore different societies can come up with a different and even conflicting set of "rights".
There's a long history of reasoning (i.e. logic) from first principles how to best establish communities, for example Rousseau's 1762 work, The Social Contract.
Some key arguments that Rousseau expounds:
* force does not create right; we are only obligated to obey legitimate powers
* everyone is free (because we each give up the same rights and have the same duties imposed, e.g. around property rights)
* absurd for someone to surrender freedom for slavery
There are underlying commonalities between Rousseau's work and intellectual artifacts from other cultures, such as "reciprocity" expressed by Confucius in Analects: "do not do to others what you would not want others to do to you". This concept of reciprocity is also echoed in the Christian doctrine of the golden rule.
> Therefore different societies can come up with a different and even conflicting set of "rights".
Do you not think that there are universal human rights?
For example, those enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
I know attempts have been made to come up with "universal rights". But to my point, not everyone agrees with them. For example, the convention on children's rights has not been ratified by the US.
The poster I first responded to, has since clarified that he meant something like US law working as a blacklist of what is forbidden (as opposed to a whitelist of what is allowed). So the discussion about universal rights was a bit of a red herring, sorry.
"Rights" do not really make sense if you're the only human around.
But regardless of origin, a constitution defines what the country is made up of. Constitutional rights are a contract where the government is allowed to govern and secure the people if and only if they secure those rights and follow the articles of the constitution.
depending on what country you are from, you could be from a country that has a set of civil laws, as opposed to a country with a set of common laws.
common law countries tend to have enumerated rights that the government cannot take away, while civil law countries tend to have rights that because of the way that particular society is built, you have these rights.
The u.s. is the common-law state because of our declaration of Independence and Constitution that speak about how all men are created equal (before God) and thus since the government rules by the consent of the governed, the laws eumerated in things like the Bill of Rights are things that are just off limits to the US government, with limited scope contextual restrictions to non-negotiable absolute rights depending on their wordings.
The idea that our rights come from god, not the government, is enshrined in the founding documents of the US, and the idea has been discussed in philosophy for centuries before that. It's part of why US conservatives get so bent out of shape when progressives say things like "everyone has a right to healthcare".
I agree it doesn't make much sense. It's also worth noting that 75% of the men who signed that document owned slaves.