From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Thu Jan 16 2003 - 03:02:31 MST
Samantha writes in "What is the meaning of this?"
> So is there any basis to a claim that the rights recognized by
> "a Western nation" are better than the ones recognized (or not)
> by other nations?
Yes.
> Do you believe that claimed is based on other than your
> preference? [Yes] If so, then what is that basis?
Well, as I've mentioned, our modern Western nations
are able to confer greater benefits on their citizens,
and not from stealing from other countries, but rather
through greater capacity for organized production and
distribution. Then, as many authors I've cited, e.g.
William Easterly and Mancur Olson explain, it also
happens that the ability to be so provident relies
directly upon the legal rights the citizens enjoy.
Okay, so a rather small fraction of human beings has
been able the last few centuries to advance culturally
to the point that the protection of these legal rights
becomes possible. Okay, the even smaller fraction
of those countries that consistently protect private
property, enforce contracts, and safeguard individual
legal rights continue to outperform those countries
which do not. And somehow all this is taken as a
discovery of "natural rights" that had been there
all along?
Here is what "natural rights" are to Mike Lorrey:
> Natural Rights are those legal liberties which the evolutionary history
> of human culture has demonstrated provide superior selection, survival,
> of both the individual and the society in which the individual resides.
Lee Daniel Crocker didn't give such a concise characterization
(so far as I can find) but did say
> 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.
and Samantha (above) who says (paraphrased)
> A natural right is a property of the sentient being concerned
> due to its specific nature and the needs implied by that nature
> in social groupings.
Perhaps many would agree with Mike's, so please observe
that he's quite wrong: human culture has *not* demon-
strated that these legal liberties provide superior
selection, survival, and so on (except quite recently,
and for just a few people). These legal liberties
are a property of our civilization, not our DNA. It's
still a massive epistemological error, IMO, to keep
imputing these "properties" of sentient beings as
being in any way independent of the historical
situation in which the human beings find themselves.
When, lastly, I wrote on this subject, I mentioned six
books I've read or re-studied recently that deal with
what I think are the relevant themes. They were
Knowledge and Decisions, by Thomas Sowell
The Origins of Virtue, by Matt Ridley
The Fatal Conceit, by F.A. Hayek
Power and Prosperity, by Mancur Olsen
The Mystery of Capital, by Hernando De Soto
Carnage and Culture, by Victor Davis Hanson
I now find that I could name another half dozen
seemingly relevant works that also fail to contain
"natural rights" or "natural law" in the index.
Even David Friedman is rather dismissive of the
concept in the chapter "Problems" of The
Machinery of Freedom (though I have not
read all that book), and he doesn't consider
it worthwhile to put either concept in the
index either. And, from google, "David Friedman's
latest book, Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday
Life, argues for freedom on purely economic, rather
than moral or natural-law grounds..."
IF they are so great, so indispensable, then
please also tell me in which of the fifty (!)
books on the extropian reading list
http://www.extropy.org/shop/index.html
these important concepts, natural law, and
natural rights, are discussed!
As I wrote yesterday:
So what is going on? Must one look back into
dusty books written by 19th century historians,
or highly theoretical works by way-out libertarians?
None of the most modern and pressing expositions
appear to give any credence to this concept.
No one answered.
Lee
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