RE: About "rights" again

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Mon Jan 13 2003 - 19:27:14 MST


Mike explains

> > Ron writes
> > > 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.)
>
> The enlightenment philosophers who followed the Lockean tradition (and
> not that or Rousseau) were primarily deists, who while believing in a
> creator god, felt that this entity existed outside our deterministic
> universe and was therefore powerless to affect or afflict it while it
> was in operation.

Okay.

> This concept is little different from our own extropic concepts of
> sysops and the U-prime, Omega Point theory and our principles of
> spontaneous order. The idea we live in a simulation running on a
> quantum computer in some higher level universe is merely a modern
> rephrasing of the deist paradigm in a contemporary technological point
> of view.
>
> The deist view is essentially that Natural Law is Objective Truth,
> embedded in the structure and function of the universe, and exhibited
> in our daily lives by much more than gravity and relativistic effects,
> but also biological evolution and the development of intelligence and
> individualistic generalist organisms such as ourselves.

This is disquieting. Some of us, e.g. me, are great believers
in Objective Truth, and don't even mind the capitals once in a
while, like in a philosophical discussion.

Oh! It suddenly dawns on me that you are explaining what
natural laws are, as, for example, Newton's. Well, of course
they exist! They are objective constraints on what can happen
in our universe. They are patterns that were here before us
and (heaven forbid) will be there after us.

I don't think that that is what the "natural" in "natural
rights" is all about.

Now as *rights* (which I view only as "legal rights") have
very much to do with what laws a society enacts. So there
is a natural (sorry) confusion here.

What is the difference between *natural* as used in
"natural law" and "natural rights"?

> As such, there is not 'psychological necessity', Natural Law simply is.
> It's truth is evidenced by the preeminent development of modern
> technological societies such as the US, which is the closest physical
> embodiment of the enlightenment values of Locke.

Yes, of course. I was talking about there possibly being

(a) a political necessity for the U.S. founders to
    use the term "natural rights"
(b) a psychological necessity for them to have faith
    in something, and this, (b), could operate either
    consciously or unconsciously.

Mike Butler addressed these points nicely.

Lee



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