They absolutely are axiomatic.
Duh, okay.
I think I’m done. It’s one thing to debate concepts of natural rights vs. legal rights, and to discuss whether objective morality is feasible. It’s quite another to attempt to defend a millennia-old philosophical tradition against repeated misrepresentations and absurd dismissals. I’m not seeing the fun in that.
Imagine how we feel when one person repeatedly spouts absolute nonsense about the world in the face of every other person telling him that he is wrong in everything he’s saying, yet insisting that we’re the ones who somehow don’t understand the issue?
BTW, all “millennia-old philosophical traditions” are quite likely absolute nonsense.
I certainly believe in natural rights, or human rights. They can be violated, but that doesn’t render them out of existence. It seems like sophistry, but in how we construct our legal system and our construction of self governance, I think the distinction matters. Of course there is not perfect overlap between the two.
The legal vs philosophical is further compounded in that our legal system recognizes the existence of these natural rights - rights that are not derived from or granted by the Constitution. So even if natural rights are not legal rights, our system of laws recognizes the existence of natural rights. What that means is that even if you are not a subscriber to natural rights theory, it is a fact that our legal system operates that way.
Can you give examples of these natural rights? Can you then explain in what way they are natural rights rather than rights we’ve decided on ourselves?
The Supreme Court has held that the right to arms predates the Constitution and does not rely on that document for its existence.
I’m not sure if the concept of moral axioms being fundamental and unprovable is widely understood.
This does not address how these are somehow natural rights rather than rights somebody decided upon that got adopted into our system.
If you are saying that moral axioms are the equivalent of religious beliefs then I certainly agree with you.
Equally certainly there are those who believe that the right to arms exists because it is God-given.
But I thought that “because God” had been explicitly abjured in this thread. If that’s the fallback position, then it is folly to argue the existence of natural rights on a rational basis. I’m of the opinion that Left Hand of Dorkness was indeed making a case that was the equivalent of a religious belief. I’m curious whether you, Bone, have a different argument you want to put forward.
True. I don’t find that an interesting line of discussion until there is agreement that natural rights are a part of our legal system.
I’m not advancing an argument so much as I’m stating my belief, and identifying a fact of our legal jurisprudence. I’m not religious, so I’d never argue from a position of religious teachings.
Some think natural rights are a fiction of our legal jurisprudence. Whether or not natural rights existed prior to the common law of England in the eighteenth century (or any arbitrary time) is not a question of fact, because the existence of natural rights is itself not a question of fact, because natural rights are an abstract concept and the existence of an abstract concept is not a factual question, especially when asking if an abstract concept existed before we have evidence that people articulated it.
~Max
What about agreement that the US Supreme Court has decided that certain things are “natural rights” for a subset of American citizens and that decision has been reflected in our legal system?
Good. I am in fact asking you to identify where natural rights come from using a purely rational basis, without any recourse to religion or metaphysics. It’s trivially true that people claim that part of our legal system is based on natural rights. That makes the question of the origin of those rights of supreme importance.
Interesting that some find that possessing a man-made object is a natural right. Actually more sad than interesting. The most important right someone can think of is the ability to kill other humans.
We like to think that there are universal rights but it’s clear that there aren’t any. Some people have no rights at all, say in the depths of third world countries run by warlords. Even modern countries with booming economies can have precious few human rights- in China nobody has unlimited right to free speech. It might be interesting to compare lists of rights that you think should be (but aren’t always) universal. My list would include free speech, free religion, freedom to be educated, freedom to work.
I think that’s missing a large part of the disagreement, here. Certainly, many people responsible for crafting laws have bought into the concept of “natural” rights, and have written laws reflecting that assumption, but that’s not evidence that they are correct in their assumptions. I can recognize that the legal system of Saudi Arabia is based in an assumption of the objective correctness of the Quran without personally believing in Allah.
In my view, the question about the origin of natural rights is interesting, but from a legal point of view, not very important. I doubt I could lay out a more persuasive argument than the great philosophers over the centuries.
Earlier there was a link to the natural vs. legal wiki. Here is one that talks about the history of natural rights. The idea is pretty old. Natural rights are integrated into the founding of the country and are fundamental to our sense of ordered liberty. There is no answer to the question about the origin that would change that.
The founding of the US and the charter of the current government are based on the concept of intrinsic human rights. Even with that being factual it is still very difficult to get even educated members of this country to buy into the concept of intrinsic human rights when it’s politically, socially or ideologically inconvenient.
Which is why if people value so-called freedom they need to work to promote freedom for all. To do otherwise is exceedingly illiberal in the classical sense of the word.
You do understand that despite your claim of not being religious, this answer is in no way different from claiming that rights are God-given or that the U.S. is a Christian country, don’t you? You are stating a belief in a mystical concept and then insisting that because the concept has been around for a long time, it doesn’t need any rationalization, even though its history emerges almost entirely from Christian thinking. It is a moral axiom that not only needs no defense but cannot have one, nor can it be argued with, falsified, or unseated.
The problem with moral axioms is that they are equivalent to “The right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.” Your moral axioms have no right to impinge on my reality. Rights are not found in the ether and then recognized by enlightened mystics. As I said earlier, the origin of what your claim are natural rights is the supreme issue. If that origin has no validity, then neither do the rights.
That some courts have found them to be legal is obfuscation. Courts get overturned every day. And many of those decisions involved rights that were once thought of as absolute. Ask Christians about gay marriage. Are gay rights natural? Are Christian beliefs natural rights? Were gay rights out there in LHoD’s unseen spirit world until people wisely at long last recognized they had been there all along? Or were they man-made constructs that violate the natural order of things? You cannot possibly dismiss the origin of rights as inconsequential any more than creationists can dismiss the origin of species as meaningless.
I honestly can’t tell if you’re deliberately misrepresenting what I said, or just really really don’t understand post 49. Whether it’s deliberate or not affects whether I’m irritated or pitying. In any case, “unseen spirit world” is a profoundly misguided misrepresentation of what I’ve written.
Even being axiomatic you ought to, out of the sense of self interest of not just yourself but of your family, insist that they be accepted on faith and with some reason as true. The reason being that having a set of axiomatic rights form the basis of a government , philosophy, social mores, and legal code leads to a more pleasant outcome for each individual.
On a personal note, this is why I argue for what I argue for. Things that negatively impact fundamental rights to guarantee politically desirable outcomes often have nasty 2nd and 3rd order effects. That’s why the debates on things like being forced to bake a cake are so interesting.
If they’ve always existed then they have had to exist somewhere. Humans didn’t always exist. Not with our usual definition of linear and non permanent time. So what contained these natural rights? That’s why references to Plato were made earlier.
Really, the only right that *actually * exists is might.