From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Jan 16 2003 - 20:51:52 MST
--- Lee Corbin <lcorbin@tsoft.com> wrote:
> Samantha writes in "What is the meaning of this?">
> > 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.
>
> 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.
> 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.
These legal liberties are rules in which darwinian and lamarckian
evolutionary agents (of which both types operate deterministically
according to the embedded laws of physics) interact. It's not just our
DNA, its our memes as well, our accumulated knowledge.
The purported 'historical situation' human beings find themselves in is
also dependent upon the characteristics of physics, but it is also
merely a selection effect, much like it is a selection effect that life
found it easier to evolve on the surface of a terrestrial planet like
Earth rather than others like Venus or Mars, or Jovian worlds like
Jupiter and Saturn.
You are making a massive epistemological error of imputing the cause to
these boundary condition selection effects rather than the more
operative underlying rules which govern behavior no matter what point
in history a human being finds 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.
Doesn't matter. The air exists for us to breath, so it's existence is
taken as assumed. You don't need to recite such basic concepts and
rules in order to build upon their validity (though apparently for some
readers, it seems one must).
I'll note that you seem to be cherry picking your books. For example, a
more important work of Hayek is "The Road to Serfdom", in which he does
endorse concepts of natural rights.
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