RE: What is the meaning of this?

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Jan 14 2003 - 15:55:27 MST


gts writes

> Lee Corbin asks:
>
> > What is a natural right? Who issued it? From whence does
> > it come, or emanate?
>
> I think of natural law as an emergent property of biological evolution.
>
> All creatures have a natural right to struggle to better their own
> existence, because that is what it *means* to be a living creature.

This is a little circular, of course ;-)

> This does not however mean that all living creatures should expect their
> natural rights never to be violated. The world is inherently unjust.

Stuart Kauffman has a very exciting "Prolegomenon" (i.e. preface)
to his book "Investigations". He starts with an intriguing definition
"an autonomous agent is a physical system, such as a bacterium, that
can act on its own behalf in an environment."

He is totally aware, by the way, of the salience of the concept
"its own behalf" that he has invoked here, and how crucial it is.

> If you are lost and hungry in the desert then you have a natural right
> kill and eat rattlesnakes. But don't be fooled into thinking
> rattlesnakes don't also have a natural right to defend themselves.

Then why doesn't everything we do---since we are biological
organisms---fall under this rubric? E.g., Adolph Hitler had
a natural right to feed upon all his countless victims. We
are, after all, speaking scientifically here.

> > For example, it's not been found in our DNA
>
> On the contrary, it is the very essence of our DNA.

Would you therefore expect that the next robot I design,
which flees from lights and moving objects and feeds upon
unguarded electricity outlets to have its own "natural
right" to that electricity? (Just as I have a natural
right to hunt my critter down and turn it back into spare
parts?)

So then we can find in my computer code that natural right
just as we find in DNA our natural right? Preposterous.

Lee



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