From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Jan 12 2003 - 14:06:32 MST
Ron writes
> [mailto:owner-extropians@extropy.org]On Behalf Of Dehede011@aol.com
> Sent: Friday, January 10, 2003 2:15 PM
>
> [Charles wrote]
> > Rights cannot, per se, be relied on. And it doesn't matter how
> > righteously you personally have acted. Rights are a social
> > contract, and only exist in the context of that contract.
Very true.
> > When the balance of power shifts drastically, expect that the
> > social contract will be re-written by the party with a new and
> > more dominant role."
I hope you are wrong, because times are a changin'.
Ron responds
> For centuries this was true. Then one day along came a group of
> men that threw out the local ruler. These men felt that their
> rights were from nature and nature's God. These rights were the
> possession of the individual and were not received from the state.
The meme "rights of Englishmen" was already in common use,
and it strongly affected the kind of society that they
wished to set up.
> In fact they felt they had to have a government but that at the
> same time government was the greatest threat to their safety and
> welfare. So they formed a new government under a constitution
> and decided what powers they wished the central government to have.
Yes.
> To maintain ultimate power over the society in their own hands they
> wrote into the constitution certain guarantees of their power --
> among these are the right to speak freely and the right to bear arms.
> And so this "social contract" has lasted far longer than the
> competing "social contracts" of the day.
Also to receive a great deal of the credit was the basic
culture of the American colonies, puritan work-ethic and
so on.
What I want to know is whether you are correct in your
inferences about
> These men felt that their rights were from nature and nature's God.
Was that a psychological necessity for them? If instead they
had abandoned belief in natural rights and a Divine Approval,
would they have been able to pull it off? (You see, I believe
natural rights to be fictitious entities, and suppose instead
that only legal rights actually exist, and that these exist
only in a social contract---as Charles was saying.)
Lee
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:35:51 MST