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Of course individual rights are alienable. What "right" to life does a murder victim or conscripted soldier have? What "right" to free speech does a nativist Britbong have? Etc. etc. Even the founders admitted that rights only exist where people demand them and are willing to back up those demands with force if someone tries to take them away.
Hypercooperation and the formation of organizations is hard-coded into us.
At the very least, the organization would have the same rights as its constituent individuals, no?
Well there's two ways you can take the line of objection you're pointing at to Liberal theory.
One is Fascism and related radical syndicalist ideas whereby individuals are actually not real and the true protagonists of history and real persons are groups and nations and corporations, etc. I think this is more sound than most people like to admit. O'Brien makes a good point. But I still believe it's ultimately disproven by qualia and individual consciousness. If God wanted us to be ants, he'd make us ants.
The other is a less radical but no less incompatible with Liberalism form of Traditionalism. Either of the perrennial or integralist variety. This I think is less clearly invalidated, but it still as incomplete an account of the human condition as the Liberal one.
The Liberal concept of rights isn't quite as revocable as you're making it out to be because it's not pointing at something that always is instantiated and can't be violated. But at natural law and the game theory thereof. It's trying to build a metaphysical understanding of the individual experience of the world and then points at it to justify a morality that would have us be good whatever-it-is-that-we-are because to not do that is tyranny and bad government, which is the same thing.
(In this sense at least, Objectivists are a a truer continuation of Liberal philosophy than a lot of other things, despite Rand's animosity towards Kant.)
The modernist puts man as a cog in a machine. The traditionalist puts him as the organ of a living thing. But both deny something real about the individual experience this coercion begets. "Everywhere he is in chains" did not come out of nowhere. And yet, we live in the ruins of the radical liberation trying to destroy his bonds with others.
I don't have a neat post-liberal answer, but completely abandoning the liberal conception of rights doesn't seem wise to me, because the things that Hobbes and Locke gesture at true in some sense. They're just not a complete account.
I should hope there's a lot more than just two! Humanity is very adaptable!
Individuals are absolutely real. Group dynamics are also real. It's not an either-or proposition - humans are social individuals. As I originally said, trying to regulate groups but not individuals is ridiculous because the group is the individuals.
I don't know what you mean by "disproven" here, but this also just goes to show how trying to distinguish between "groups" or "organizations" and "individuals" is a lot harder than you'd think. Founder-effects and path-dependency are very real forces that impact individuals and their development and outlook! So is heritability, which gives rise to the subtle, yet substantial differences between populations that we observe all over the world! So is the Overton Window! Group dynamics affect everybody, even if they're not formally affiliated in an "organization," and likeminded people are going to find ways to cooperate and work together no matter how you try to prevent them.
What? Which and whose traditionalism? I'm confused what this has to do with restricting organizational behavior but not individuals.
Then they shouldn't have used the word "inalienable," which means "can't be taken or given away."
Who's abandoning rights? I'm not. I very much like the rights I have as an American, and am frequently rather obnoxiously patriotic about it with my friends. I just don't think that those "rights" are anything other than fragile current social consensuses that need to be handled with care - like beautiful Faberge eggs - in order to keep them around and pass them along, more-or-less-intact, to future generations.
Everyone's.
But they can't be given or taken away, only violated. Locke is very explicit about this. The man who is trampled by the tyrant still has his right. Because the right itself is a metaphysical construct of logic.
Fascism is so radical in its claims of the primacy of the State (which to a fascist is a metaphysical entity, not an administrative government) that the mere observation of one's individual will suffices to disprove it in my opinion. The Fascist has to dismiss such a conception as mental illness or renounce the more radical parts of his doctrine, which are the parts that interest us in this conversation anyway.
Then you don't believe in rights. You believe in traditions. Which is as I expected but has its own specific shortcomings which I point out. You are missing the metaphysical point that Liberalism has against such traditions which allowed it to destroy them so effectively.
We can very well defend the Liberal conception of Rights as a tradition instead of a metaphysical doctrine, indeed that is how they originated, as the traditions of Englishmen. But those are fit only for Englishman not for Man.
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