Occasionally the concept will come up for discussion here in some topic or another, and be immediately dismissed as ignorant and naive. I gather that it is considered as utterly discredited as the theory of phlogiston or the luminiferous ether. Since arguably much of the founding political theory of the United States was guided by the concept of natural rights, when and how has it become discredited?
I think because it supposes facts not in evidence: to wit, the existence of an interventionist God, or some other preternatural agent capable of assigning such rights.
That’s my take. But I don’t know that the idea is ridiculed as being naive. Maybe by a few people around here, but there are quite a few who agree with the proposition of natural rights.
I don’t know how much ridicule I’ve seen. But, in a sense, discussing the whys and wherefores of natural rights is like debating the motives of the Roswell aliens: you’re assuming something you haven’t proven.
Well, it’s not as though it’s something of the sort for which one could gather empirical evidence or any such thing. It’s not a scientific theory which is either true or false; it’s a framework of discussion, and the scorn for it comes from people who have realized (or decided, if you like) that it is not generally a fruitful such framework (such people generally preferring a conceptual organization emphasizing, say, rights as determined by a mechanism of enforcement, these clearly having productive, practical use in analysis of the world).
Also, natural rights that are not championed or defended by nature (or God, if you prefer) are inherently impotent. And there’s no indication that nature or any god defends anyone’s supposedly natural rights.
Any force or utility the so-called ‘natural rights’ might have arises because they’re championed by people who convince other people to accomodate them. As often as not they present their case by claiming the rights to be natural or universal, and this is useful because people apparently agree with or accept the claim. But to some of us, it’s like a muscular man claiming that the glove he’s wearing is inherently strong, when we can plainly see that the glove is nothing without his muscle behind it.
God or no God, the value of “Natural Rights” only exists insofar as you can convince other people that you have them. An appeal to Natural Rights is necessarily an appeal to shared beliefs. In objective debate, it is a null concept.
More meaningfully, the rights you have are precisely those which you successfully defend.
“Natural Rights” may be “nonsense on stilts” as Jeremy Bentham famously said, but as a concept it has been a damn useful bit of “nonsense” that has, in the balance, done far more good than harm; applying a ultilitarian analysis to it, the theory of natural rights has been a positive good.
Well, at least here, I think it’s usually because of the context it tends to come up in. At least the times I’ve noticed the concept being mentioned, it’s been either as part of an atheism-bashing argument ( The claim that there’s no objective rights/morality/whatever without God, therefore a society without God will be one of murderous sociopaths ), or as an excuse for selfishness and/or ruthlessness. The “there’s no objective , natural set of rights, so I don’t owe anyone any help or consideration. Cut my taxes and bomb Iran !” sort of argument.
Well, there’s actually a natural explanation for why natural rights seem so plausible, and that is that we all do share a natural (ie, derived from our evolutionary past) sense of morality as social animals and can fairly easily agree on a set of “rights” like “don’t steal, don’t kill, etc.”. That those rights are given to us by God instead of just being part of human nature makes plenty of sense as long as you do believe in God. And 200 years ago, pretty much everybody did believe in some sort of God or Divine being.
Not just whatever instinctive morality we may have. It’s that being all of the same species, we all share certain needs, desires, weaknesses and so on. I can, for example, judge that a woman being raped is a seriously bad thing, even in a culture I know nothing about, because a woman is a human female with the nature of a human female, everywhere. That’s effectively universal, because all we are dealing with is humans. Some alien female ( or whatever ) might feel quite different, ranging from indifference to mild irritation to “he’s not a worthy mate if he’s can’t beat me !”; but we aren’t dealing with aliens, but humans, who in some ways are all the same or nearly so.
One of the problems with the whole argument over “Natural rights” or anything similar is many of it’s critics don’t seem to think that evolution or biology is “Natural” or fundamental enough. They want a version of “Natural Rights” that’s as basic as quantum physics or arithmetic. But as far as I’m concerned, “Freedom of speech is a natural right because most people want to speak their minds” is “natural” enough for me.
Not sure if you were disagreeing with me or just expanding on what I posted, but that’s exactly what I meant. We’re all the same species, we share the same evolutionary heritage and so, in a broad sense, we tend to agree on what is right and wrong.
One problem we encounter, though, is that our evolutionary history doesn’t much include living in a country with 300M people, especially people who sometimes don’t seem so similar to us. Racism, xenophobia, and a tendency to care more about people we know than people we don’t know are also part of our evolutionary heritage.
Expanding, mostly. I wanted to make it clear that it’s not just our instinctive “proto-morality” ( or whatever you want to call it ) that matters, but the fact that in some ways we are all roughly the same.
Given that humans went through most of their history without any concept of natural rights - with kings and dictators doing whatever they pleased, and the population either accepting it, or rebelling and installing another leader who did the same thing - it seems like a pretty recent invention. I think people are ultimately beasts, and have a pack mentality, where the alpha dogs dominate society.
And for all that time, they argued over the right and wrong of what they were doing, and spent an awful lot of time on justifications and excuses for what they did. Morality, justice, fairness weren’t concepts invented a century or or two ago. If you were right, no one would have bothered with such excuses or explanations as “He deserves to suffer because of a past life” or “women should submit to men because they are inferior”. No one would have bothered with excuses, or believed them if they were made; excuses imply that you know or suspect that you are doing something wrong. And, people back then still suffered, still felt oppressed, still wanted personally to be free and treated well; the fact that they didn’t know how do accomplish that, or didn’t realize that they probably couldn’t have it for themselves without giving it to others doesn’t change that.
Our society is closer to “natural morality” or whatever you want to call it, because it’s progressed morally just as it’s progressed in other ways. Not because people a thousand years ago were some sort of emotionless predators.
JM, DT has, like all of us, his annoying faults, but you might be surprised how often This Independent Observer sees you two reading off the same page.
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Most of our history maybe (history being the recorded past), but nowhere near most of our existence as a species. H. sapiens has been around for about 200k years, with only about 5k of that as (recorded) history. We might consider that period of kings doing whatever they pleased as an aberration.
I don’t think it necessarily supposes any such thing. If we have certain rights, by virtue of being human, as part of our human identity … then how does it follow that they were “assigned” to us? A God that can intervene to give us rights can also intervene to remove them. Natural rights are supposed to be inalienable.
How do we “have” rights by virtue of us being human?
None of the political philosophers that I know of did rely on God or any other supernatural agent. Rather, they argued that the existence of natural law proceeded logically from the observed state of the world.