Natural moral rights, as you called them, are what I have in mind. And it seems we agree they are not granted by government. The proper function of government is to protect those rights.
Two natural moral rights are the right to private property and the right to self defense, both of which would be violated by a ban on guns.
So what? So, the government is acting immorally and should be resisted.
This isn’t a terribly convincing argument. In the first place, I’m not convinced that a right to private property is a natural moral right; property seems to me something which is meaningful only when validated by societal acceptance or endorsement. If you live in a society in which (say) all land is held in common, I don’t see on what basis you could argue that you had a natural moral right to the ownership of any particular tract of land. If you live in a society in which (say) the atmosphere is considered to be something in which property cannot inhere, I don’t see on what basis you would assert a right to private ownership of any particular volume of air. And so forth.
Basically, you only own something if your society agrees that you own it. If it doesn’t, then you don’t own it, and I don’t see much basis on which you could argue that you have a right to own it.
But park that. Even if we do assume that there is a natural right to private property and a natural right to self-defence, if that establishes a right to keep and bear arms doesn’t it also establish a right to keep and bear, say, thermonuclear devices? Or chemical or biological weapons? (In modest quantities, of course; just as much as you might wish to use to defend yourself and your possessions.)
I think where you argument falls over is that it only considers rights in absolute terms. I can assert that there’s a right to marry (say) and at the same time assert that the state can delimit that right by prohibiting sibling marriage, or by prohibiting marriage below the age of 18, or by prohibiting the marriage of someone who is already married to someone else. The truth is that much of what the state has to do is to negotiate the tensions between competing rights, or between rights and other important values or interests. If your right to self-defence doesn’t extent to a right to defend yourself with (say) mustard gas, then it’s not a given that it must extend to a right to defend yourself with (say) a handgun. There may be other important considerations which justify the state in putting a limit to your right to self-defence which does not extend to allowing you to keep and bear arms.
I admire your patience, UDS. I was going to ask him if he was a Freeman-on-the-Land, or just an anti-Illuminati conspiracy nut.
Obviously, since the supreme court somehow found those rights in a constitution which did not mention either concept.
The idea of a well regulated militia is explained in Art. 1 Sec. 8 and the Militia Acts.
I presume as much, but could you elaborate?
If the National Guard is the only well-regulated militia then are they the only ones with a right to keep arms? If so what’s the point since the state provides them with guns?
Because in the 19th century state governments became afraid of labor unrest, led by immigrants with radical leftist ideas making common cause with the poor and threatening the sanctity of private property. So state officials decided they wanted a group of people vetted for loyalty who could be relied upon to shoot striking workers and the looting mobs. IOW, a “select” militia of the kind the English condemned as little better than a standing army following the English Civil War.
Private ownership of property is a natural right. Any society that doesn’t recognize that is wrong.
This is essentially an appeal to numbers. I own a red car. If it developed that suddenly people felt that owning a red car was wrong, would I stop owning that car?
No. It’s conceivable an individual or small group of people could be in a situation where an assault rifle could be useful for self defense. I can’t really imagine a situation where somebody worried about home defense would need a nuclear device.
Plus, there a difference between the potential lethality of firearms and nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. A crazy person with a gun can cause a lot of carnage, but nothing comparable what the same person could do with weapons of mass destruction.
Hand guns /= mustard gas. It’s silly to assume so.
Besides, it’s not as if there aren’t already many regulations of weapons in the US. The choice before us isn’t regulation or no regulation. The choice is the current level of regulation and an even greater level of regulation.
Either there is no such thing as a “natural right” (my opinion) or else all rights are natural rights, including the right to murder anybody for any reason – because murder is a big part of the “state of nature.”
Seriously: how can one distinguish between “natural rights” and non-rights? How do you draw a meaningful boundary?
At very least the Golden Rule and the rule of “If it does no harm” produce boundaries and limitations to rights. How does “nature” delineate the acceptable and the unacceptable?
False dilemma.
People have been doing it for millennia.
The Golden Rule would be a good example. It’s essentially a pithy summation of the boundaries ethicists have agreed upon.
See, this doesn’t get us any further. To sustain your assertion that there is a natural right to keep and bear arms, you assert that there is a natural right to own property. If I am not compelled to accept your assertion of the first right, how am I compelled to accept your assertion of the second? If anything, you are further from your goal since, even if I do accept your assert of a right to property, a right to own any particular item of property (e.g. this handgun) or class of properties (e.g. handguns in general) does not follow.
The question is, how did you come to own the red car in the first place? Your claim to “own” it would have been meaningless if society did not assert that you owned it. There is no original ownership.
(And, yes, society can change its mind about whether particular things can be owned. Slaves, for example. Or public appointments. Or titles of nobility. Or tax-collecting rights. These were all things that at one time could be owned and freely sold by private holders, but not any more. If property is abolished in this way, the question arises as to whether owners should be paid compensation. Sometimes they are; sometimes not.)
Indeed. But if we can regard the damage that can be done by a crazy (or wicked, or irresponsible, or stupid) person with mustard gas as something that justifies us limiting private ownership of mustard gas, how can you assert that we cannot take the same view with respect to the damage done by crazy, etc, people with handguns?
I’m not assuming so. I’m just using mustard gas as just one of the countless possible examples that shows that the right of self-defence is not absolute. And, once we concede that the right to self defence doesn’t carry an automatic right to keep and bear anything someone might wish to use for self-defence purposes, we can’t blandly assert that it necessarily includes a right to keep and bear arms.
My point exactly.
You’re asserting a moral right to self defence, which sets a limit to how far the government should go in regulating the possession of arms. But that assertion, so far as it goes, is entirely consistent with the government making regulations which, e.g., bans the private possession of handguns. They are still acknowledging and respecting a right of self-defence, but delimiting the exercise of that right by reference to other rights and other legitimate interests of the community. You might disagree with the balance they are striking between competing rights and interests (so might I, for that matter, but from the other side) but neither of us can expect to be taken seriously if we argue that there is a natural, inherent right in all humans to keep and bear the arms that Waymore (or UDS) thinks they should be allowed to keep and bear, and only those.
The claim of a right to private property is unexceptional. It has a long history and broad acceptance.
From the Wikipedia page on the right to property (can’t get the link function to work) it shows that the right to property is protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and several other similar documents.
If a company made a red car and agreed to sale it to me, I own it. Society’s approval isn’t needed.
The fact that society changes its view as to what can be owned isn’t proof that there is no right of property. It only proves society changes its view.
It was always immoral to own other human beings.
Because mustard gas is much more dangerous than handguns. Plus, it’s very unlikely anybody would ever be in a situation where mustard gas would be the ideal weapon of self defense. People use handguns for self defense regularly.
The right to self defense is absolute. But nobody is realistically going to defend himself with mustard gas.
It’s not a bland assertion. The right to keep and bare arms is extremely sensible, hence its inclusion in the Bill of Rights.
You’re painting with way too big a brush. Arguing people shouldn’t be allowed to own any weapons is just as myopic as arguing people should be allowed to own everything including nuclear bombs.
I agree with you that there is a balance at play. But keeping people from owning weapons is a major impediment to both a right to property and a right to self defense.
I’m not arguing that I have some special insight that allows me to see what are and are not acceptable weapons. My contention is owning firearms, but not mustard gas or hydrogen bombs, is a sensible compromise. And it is, I suspect, a compromise that would be blindingly obvious to most if there weren’t political and cultural considerations that color the perception of the issue.
So do you believe that rights are granted by the United Nations? 
I agree that many people assert the existence of right to property. But if rights are not granted by governments, or by international organisations, are they granted by opinion polls or popularity contests?
We come back to the question of what it means to say that such-and-such a moral right exists. Does your assertion that it exists carry any more weight than my assertion that it does not? Is the validity of your assertion dependent on agreement by many other indviduals/by governments/by international organisations? If not, what gives your opinion a validity that mine lacks? Is the existence of a particular right a matter of objective reality, regardless of what either of us might think? Would the right exist even if we all agreed that it did not?
It certainly is. Your ownership is a nullity, a fiction, unless it is respected by society. If I can step into the car and drive it away, and nobody but you would attempt to to stop me, and nobody would regard you as having any right or entitlement to try and stop me, what does your ownership amount to? Property is absolutely a societal construct.
Well, no. Remember our distinction between legal rights and moral rights? I’m sure we both agree that there is a legal right to property in most or all societies. And no doubt we agree that the boundaries and limits of this right may vary from place to place, and in the same place from time to time when, as you put it, society changes it’s view. But none of this proves the existence of a moral right to property, does it?
So? One of the characteristics of rights is that they enable us to do things which may not be moral. For example, my right to free speech allows me to say thing that, morally, I absolutely ought not to say.
Because they can. If they were allowed to, they might use currently-banned methods of self defence. The fact that people regularly do something doesn’t prove that they have a moral right to do it.
I don’t accept that the right to self-defence is absolute, and most natural rights theorists agree that it is not - self-defence measures must be proportional, which is pretty much the opposite of absolute. As for nobody defending themselves with mustard gas, practically every state that has possessed and used mustard gas has justified it on the grounds of self-defence. If individuals don’t often, or ever, do that, it’s likely because they aren’t alllowed to, or because it’s simply not practical in most circumstances. But if you truly believe that the right to self-defence is “absolute”, then you must think that it an individual genuinely wants to use mustard gas to defend himself, he has a right to.
Well, I would point out that the rationale expressed in the Bill of Rights - which is for the security of the state - is radically different from the self-defence of the individudal that you are offering as a rationale. And we can’t note it’s inclusion in the US Bill of Rights without noting its omission from practically every other political or legal statement of rights of any note. Which would suggest, if nothing else, that the right to keep and bear arms is not a terribly obvious natural right.
I’m not arguing that people shouldn’t be allowed to bear any arms. I’m querying the validity or usefulness of analysing this question in terms of fundamental natural rights at all. The reality here is that what is going on here is a balancing by society of competing interests and values, and picking one of those interests and values out and saying that it’s a natural, inalienable, inherent, imprescriptible moral right is neither an accurate reflection of what is actually happening or a logically defensible position.
Apparently not, since lots of societies manage to keep people from owning weapons while respecting private property and suffering lower rates of assault and homicide than the US.
It may or may not be a sensible compromise. Other compromises might be equally or more sensible. But if you have moved from “natural, inherent right” to “sensible compromise”, you’ve already come a long way!
You do realize that the Constitution exists to empower the government not the people? The Bill of Rights is redundant. The people could dissolve the government and start a new one by holding a new constitutional convention.
And to address a point of yours in a different post, noone can prove any moral right. They derive from moral axioms which are not universally accepted.
No. I maintain that rights aren’t granted at all, they exist in and of themselves. The role of the government, rightly understood, is to protect those rights.
Yes, rights have an objective existence.
Property is respected by society, but it is prior to society.
You argue that nothing is really owned unless society says so. Would you agree that the inverse is true, that something is really owned if society says so?
Neither proves nor disproves the moral right to property, that’s why I object to its use.
You’re making a distinction without a difference. Rights are moral. Nobody ever had the right to own other humans, which is to say it wasn’t moral to own other humans.
People use handguns because they can and because it works. There’s no law against people defending themselves with a Twinkie. Yet the practice is non-existent because you can’t realistically defend yourself with a Twinkie.
People can’t defend themselves with mustard gas. But unlike a Twinkie, mustard gas can be used to killed a very large number of people, so private ownership is banned.
To put it succinctly, mustard gas is deadly and not practical for self defense, so it’s rightly banned.
Besides, you say people routinely defend themselves with handguns because they can. Do you have no qualms about taking that ability away from others?
Just because there’s a need for proportionality in self defense doesn’t imply that the right isn’t absolute. You and every other human being has the absolutely right to defend yourself up to the point necessary to neutralize the threat.
Your grouping the individual, who has no realistic need for mustard gas, with the state, which may have a realistic need.
You just made exactly my point. Mustard gas isn’t a practical means of self defense and can easily kill thousands. Handguns are practical for self defense and far less dangerous.
Not really.
I disagree that self defense is radically different from security from a tyrannical government. The latter is simply a subset of the former.
Since we’re talking about abolishing the 2nd amendment, I think it’s germane to mention its inclusion in the US Bill of Rights.
What right am I excluding by claiming self defense and property are natural rights?
Making an entire category of property illegal, you are indeed infringing on the right to property.
The lower rates of homicide and assault elsewhere isn’t simply reducible to the ownership of guns. Some data suggest that crime is lower when more people are armed.
I think we’re just fleshing out each others opinions without the snide comments that often derail this kind of debate before anybody has the chance to get into details. Thanks for being a worthy yet respectful debater.
The basic problem with repealing the 2nd amendment is that at its core it is the right to self defense. If we establish that there is no such right, then that implies a duty to protect on the part of the state.
The 2nd amendment was written for militias, but also as a bulwark against tyranny, but finally it was also a recognition that the authorities can’t be everywhere. Nothing about that has changed since the 18th century, when gun rights were necessary to protect far off settlements from the natives, or from marauding wildlife. You can still get pulled into a dark alley, and millions of people still live hours away from a credible police response to a serious situation. So the alternative to no right to bear arms is that the state must be able to protect every human being in the country from every possible circumstance that would require a firearm. Wolves attacking your sheep? Cops better be out there before the first sheep’s blood hits the ground.
That’s what a militia is for, right? Nothing to do with foreign invaders or domestic insurrections.
Repealing the Second would not outlaw self defense. You do know that, right?
Overturning Roe v. Wade wouldn’t outlaw abortion either. But there is a huge legal difference between a right and something the government allows you to do.
Show me a country with strong gun control laws that doesn’t also attack the right to self defense by banning pepper spray and stunners.
Japan?