From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Wed Jan 15 2003 - 16:15:59 MST
Lee Corbin wrote:
>>Speaking of "natural laws" of human behavior is no different,
>>really. Human brains are connected in ways we can observe, and
>>high-level behaviors have high-level consequences we can observe,
>>and we can generalize which of those behaviors lead to results we
>>favor. "Natural rights" is just a convenient notation, and is
>>no more (and no less) "fictional" than lift or boiling points.
>
>
> 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.
>
Not necessarily. They may attribute such natural rights to
different ultimate sources but that hardly means they disagree
about what those rights are.
> Second, it gets very confused with "natural law" as this thread
> amply demonstrates.
>
I don't see what the beef is here.
> 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.
>
This argument is empty. Of course it is possible to violate
someone's natural rights since the context is human interaction
and humans have enough freedom of choice to act in such negative
ways when the wish to. The question is whether such actions are
consistent with the naturally derivable conditions under which
human beings flourish. Jefferson never ever implied otherwise
and your implication that he did is completely fallacious.
Cultural variance does not in the least effect what is and is
not a "natural right" of human beings. It can only effect
how/if they are recognized and upheld.
> As you wrote
>
>
>>Human brains are connected in ways we can observe, and
>>high-level behaviors have high-level consequences we
>>can observe, and we can generalize which of those
>>behaviors lead to results we favor.
>
>
> It all depends on time, culture, and technical sophistication.
> It now appears to me that the extremely wide prevalence of
> human sacrifice in almost all early societies---the Druids,
> the Babylonians, the Maya, the Aztec, and, God knows, the
> early Hebrews, suggests that human sacrifice might have been
> a positive thing for early societies, at least in the sense
> that it enabled them to prosper (more than their neighbors).
>
Irrelevant. At no time was human sacrifice congruent with
natural rights. You are confusing what was just untangled, the
difference between natural rights and cultural norms or legal
rights.
> 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".
>
This is silly and unworthy of your intelligence.
- samantha
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