Re: About "rights" again

From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Tue Jan 14 2003 - 17:42:53 MST


> The notation "Natural rights" is very *inconvenient* for many
> reason. First, people do not mean the same thing by it at all.
> Many religious people mean something *quite* different from what
> ordinary materialists could possibly mean. Second, it gets very
> confused with "natural law" as this thread amply demonstrates.

I won't disagree with that. But the fact that a term is used
in ambiguous ways doesn't mean it can't also be used more
rigorously by people who agree on a foundation. I think the
libertarian/anarchocapitalist/individualist interpretation of
"natural rights" is reasonably consistent and useful, even if
some of those who use it probably go too far.

> Third, semantically it would seem to allude to something that
> exists in the *same* sense that laws of physics exist, e.g.,
> constraints on what is possible. But human anthropology,
> much advanced over what it was in Jefferson's day, exposes
> this as a complete fallacy: we now know that insofar as
> anything like individual rights are concerned, the cultural
> variance is incredible.

Yes, but cultural universals are pretty impressive too, and
there are good reasons for them.

> So what then? Are we to follow your reasoning and suppose
> that human sacrifice is a part of natural law? Moreover,
> I guess that you've got the ultimate argument that we can
> use to dispose of the socialists: "You see," we tell them,
> "Capitalism is just a part of natural law, resistance is
> futile".

If sacrifice succeeded more than other cultures of the time
(which I don't concede for a moment, but I do concede that it
might be possible), then that only shows that some particular
complex collection of cultural memes with a certain feature
out-competed some other complex collection without that feature.
That says little about the individual feature unless you are
able to study a very large number of cultures over a long time
and draw good conclusions. I suspect that if the correlation
you posit really existed, it would just be a statistical
artifact. On the other hand, something like "supply and
demand" is more likely to show up as a real "law" of human
behavior that's universal and exists in exactly the same sense
that laws of physics exist, even prior to their discovery.

I will also concede that "natural rights" is a term inherently
two steps removed from reality in the sense that it implies
both that there are natural laws of human behavior, and further
that many of them are expressible in terms of "rights", which
are restraints of secondary action. I.e., when we say that one
has a "right" to action X, what we mean is that we think it's
wrong for person B to restrain or punish person A for X, which
is a cicuitous way of saying that the action of such restraint
or punishment leads to bad outcomes. It is probably true that
there are universals in this form: a culture that restrains or
punishes political speech is probably doomed to failure, so
expressing this universal in terms of a "right to free speech"
is perfectly reasonable. But there may be other such laws
that aren't expressible that way, and indeed for which such an
expression gets in the way of seeing the underlying truth.

-- 
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


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