non-humans
Michael,
Charity is not a being. One could speak (however erroneously) of having a
right *to* charity, but it would be absurd to speak of charity itself having
"rights". Similarly I don't think Ayn Rand believed that literature has
rights or deserves special consideration under the law as somehow different
from other speech. Individual living beings including animals and plants are
a fundamentally different matter.
My theory, brief and poorly developed though it is, and with credit to
thinkers like Teilhard de Chardin and Peter Singer, is that rights are based
on *awareness*, as measured by the capacity to suffer, and that the
obligation to recognize the rights of others is also a function of
awareness. I see awareness as a positive value, though not without its
serious downside (I think there's *some* truth to the familiar proposition
that "ignorance is bliss"). Awareness is something toward which the universe
(or perhaps multiverse) is evolving, with life being the main current means
or process (so far as we know) by which matter is organizing itself into
awareness.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))