Who determines the rights that are granted by “natural law”, though? Why is “the right to be free” a natural law, and not “the right to own slaves”?
Or a different example:
Person A claims that people have a right to shoot whomever they please.
Person B claims that people have a right to not be shot.
Which of these rights is bestowed by “natural law”?
Who says rights have to come from anywhere?
Well, obviously plenty of people say it, but it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true.
I don’t see anything logically inconsistent with believing that, say, freedom of speech is a basic human right while nevertheless not believing in a higher power.
As I said on the first page, we maintain this polite fiction that there are unalienable rights that come from “somewhere”, whether it be a deity, or from our humanity. We don’t like to think that we can votes rights away, even though we can.
And I see this not only from the Religious righties, but often from the secular lefties. How often do we hear that certain rights are not subject to a vote, or should not be subject to a vote. How we decide what those rights are without voting remains a mystery.
Still, you have to admit then that someone else might believe that freedom of speech is not a basic human right.s Or that what they consider “speech” is different from you consider it to be. And who is to say who is right?
Whichever are most persuasively argued for under a system of logic. People have been talking about natural law for 2400 years since Socrates and Plato.
Sure, As humans we can agree on certain basic human rights and embrace them as correct.
I even suggested earlier that evolution might be pushing us toward these concepts as part of survival of the species.
Is natural law a part of evolution?
Yes, Dionisio, you keep saying this and keep ignoring the concept of natural law, which does not depend on a vote or the existence of one or possibly more deities. We get that you are saying that inalienable rights and natural law do not exist. We just disagree with you that they do exist as concepts and have been very influential as concepts, having provided, among other things, the intellectual foundation for the formation of the United States.
Evolutionary psychology, perhaps. There is a school of thought that our morality is in our genes. And from that morality springs our sense of justice. But that has some disturbing implications as well, since many of our shared natural impulses are not what we like to think makes a good society.
Good question. I think not. Natural law - Wikipedia
Evolution is a scientific theory, natural law is a legal theory.
It’s not a legal theory, it’s a religious belief and a complete wank-off as far as any practicality, since nobody can positively identify a single “natural law.”
I can even see those conflicts , or impulses being a part of working it out.
There’s the impulse to survive as an individual , but also the drive to procreate. We eventually figured out that forming a family unit to protect was a decent idea. Then a tribal unit. and eventually the nagging evolutionary leading to all of us as one tribe, sharing resources, and forming a harmonious society. we run into conflicts because our individual needs and desires , which are also pretty normal, come against our societal needs and we have to choose. It’s a complicated Sophie’s choice.
That’s the problem - people talk about these basic rights as though they’re some set of rights that is simply immutable. However, that goes at odds with what you mentioned in your last paragraph. This set is mutable; its elements determined at any given time by what we think they should be.
The Law of the Jungle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ivYN-j--ao From another thread the old philosopher george Carlin explains it. Of course bad language.
If the whole world voted that it was OK to stone people to death (for example), then the whole world would be wrong. Obviously, that’s my opinion, and I can’t prove it, but the fact that I can’t prove it doesn’t mean that I’m wrong. I see no reason why in principle something cannot be both true and unprovable.
Now because I can’t prove my opinions on morality and neither can anyone else it may be necessary to settle these questions by a vote, but that doesn’t mean that the majority opinion is necessarily the right opinion, or that there’s no such thing as a right opinion.
I personally believe in absolute morality. It doesn’t need to be handed down by God or anything like that, but it can still be the case that the world contains moral facts as well as empirical facts. For instance I think that it’s a fact that you shouldn’t go around killing people for no reason. It’s not an observable fact, but I still believe it’s true.
I also can’t prove I’m not a brain in a vat or that inductive reasoning is valid, but I still believe those things.
I think that’s quite possible. I think there’s a lot of things we may have evolved to believe because it would have been disruptive to our survival not to believe them. Like my aforementioned example of inductive reasoning. I can’t prove mathematically that if the first 4 saber toothed tigers tried to eat me then there’s a good chance the 5th will do the same. But I believe it is likely to be the case, probably because the people who didn’t believe that ended up as tiger food.
Glenn Beck is an escaped Sinclair Lewis character. I fully expect that one day he’ll disappear, only to show up in the desert a few days later claiming he was kidnapped.
Meanwhile, this article may clue you in as to what he’s up to.
Here you go. David Barton’s Wikipedia biography.
And our sense of what is just evolved while we lived in groups of maybe 25 - 100 individuals. When we knew all the people we dealt with quite well.
tonysidaway: Are you posting in the right thread?
The Ninth Amendment was put in specifically to make clear that the above statement is false.
Regards,
Shodan