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I don't know how you can deny natural rights, yet sustain that you think workers deserve any rights at all. I'm certainly not insinuating that "my" view of natural rights are the same as everyone elses. Of course they're subjective, else we'd all be libertarians. Naturally, of course, what I deem to be natural rights do not lead to socialist outcome, but I understand that if one is to believe, as a socialist does, that men deserve equality, then by what virtue does this idea of "deserving" come from? If not by some natural born right, why do they "deserve" anything?

In my view, to deny natural rights is to deny socialism as much as capitalism.
Reply 21
DanGrover
I don't know how you can deny natural rights, yet sustain that you think workers deserve any rights at all. I'm certainly not insinuating that "my" view of natural rights are the same as everyone elses. Of course they're subjective, else we'd all be libertarians. Naturally, of course, what I deem to be natural rights do not lead to socialist outcome, but I understand that if one is to believe, as a socialist does, that men deserve equality, then by what virtue does this idea of "deserving" come from? If not by some natural born right, why do they "deserve" anything?

In my view, to deny natural rights is to deny socialism as much as capitalism.


If rights are subjective and political concepts then they can't be called 'natural', that's the whole point of criticising libertarians and their use of the term. Rights are constructed by human societies, they don't grow out of the earth.
Oswy
If rights are subjective and political concepts then they can't be called 'natural', that's the whole point of criticising libertarians and their use of the term. Rights are constructed by human societies, they don't grow out of the earth.


I don't see why they must be "solid" to be natural. All I mean by "natural" is that they are given by virtue of being born. You don't need to do anything to earn these things, they are a given, they are a part of being human, they are unerring and immovable and as such are "natural".
Reply 23
Oswy
Lots of political and social action has been sustained for centuries by ideas now rejected by modern thinkers.


You claimed it was 'intellectually unsustainable' - I demonstrated that it has and is intellectually sustained and indeed had huge influence in the past.

I do deny natural rights; it is species of is-ought fallacy. I don't deny moral concepts however; I merely deny their absolute and objective status.


I don't think even the most hardened legal positivist would be so quick to dismiss Natural Law.

The source of natural law rules is what you are opposing here, not the doctrine itself. Plenty of theories cannot possibly be said to fall foul of the 'is/ought "fallacy"' - take for example the Natural Law endorsed by the religious, or social contract theory. These are separate species within themselves and this argument does not affect the greater assertion that natural rights can exist.

What then is a moral concept to you?
Reply 24
Oswy
If rights are subjective and political concepts then they can't be called 'natural', that's the whole point of criticising libertarians and their use of the term. Rights are constructed by human societies, they don't grow out of the earth.


I still don't see why Libertarians are being singled out. Natural law can justify anything with the correct reasoning, and Libertarians can be of the non-natural law variety.

As far as I am concerned, to deny natural rights is to deny anything. What point then in any theory of justice, law, government? To satisfy individuals no matter how revolting their desires?
Reply 25
Libertin du Nord
I think you're missing several notable concessions made to the natural law side of things in modern thinking. To hint at any sort of natural law being dead and buried since the 60s is oversimplifying a little.

I'm very soft on the side of natural law; I certainly don't justify it as some sort of natural right to own property as Oswy suggested - although I may be inclined to argue that it flows from other restrictions on the state.


On the question of legal and political normativity, I hold a natural law position (though not the Enlightenment kind - more in line with Finnis, Fuller and Dworkin), suggesting that it's logically impossible for laws to be about themselves i.e. the content of law is not explainable by referring to law. But on the question of legal validity, I'm staunchly positivist - I say that a legal argument is valid from its sources alone. The sources and structure of a legal system are all you need to refer to, in order to apply it.
Reply 26
The big problem with speaking of natural rights in this way is that people are suggesting, by appealing to logic, that there are non-empirical things that are obviously part of us, that compel action. This is doubtful for several reasons. I'll treat the question begging premise of being "natural" first, and then the issue of rights second.

Natural things
First, because you can't posit normative facts by an appeal to logic (well you can in theory, but not here), as logic simply tells you how to describe the world exactly as it presents itself, through reflecting statements. Logic of course only talks about inferences that cannot not be the case. Natural rights, I suggest could well not be the case - it's possible to imagine this present world without them. It is therefore not the job of logic to posit them. I have a hard time seeing how it is that natural rights could be something the world would include as part of its internal structure, as the world probably has no idea we're here.

Second, this view of natural rights is suggesting a prescriptive quality is found in descriptive things - implying an obviousness in how the world presents itself for response (well, the world possibly has no idea we're here) e.g. if a person is drowning, there is nothing more that is obvious aboutthe situation than that they are drowning - anything else is a matter of personal reflection, not logical compulsion. In other words, even if somebody believed they had "natural rights", it says nothing more than that they believe they have natural rights. It says nothing about the world that I have to believe or act on.

Finally, a descriptive fact has no ability to compel an action e.g. that the sky is usually a shade of blue, therefore we must worship the god Woden doesn't follow. The sky is blue therefore it is blue. Nothing else. How we fit these things around our ordinary lives is another matter of course, but it is not a matter of logic, necessity or obviousness, and certainly not a precription of nature. If certain rights were prescribed by nature, we'd have no choice but to act upon them. A day in many African countries easily proves that it's possible to be otherwise. Therefore, "natural" is a bad adjective here. Logic therefore requires nothing more than for us to say only what we have no choice but to say. All else is interpretation, and we'll all agree that interpretation is useful but by no means such that have to see a thing that way.

Rights
Now I'll treat the question of rights themselves. A right is something you claim from somebody else, not something you're born with. This is the case for reasons shown above, and more precisely, because of an incosistency that results otherwise. A right is an legitimate expectation, or a given permission. Where a right is a legitimate expectation, it is expected because you have a reason to claim it.

Reasons as rights
Private rights
A reason is an evidential claim - it tells that, or why something is true. If what is true is a matter of logic, then, as explained above, what is true demands a very strict criteria of verifiability. As such a legitimate expectation here is where you have a reason for expecting a liberty or an action. A promise, for example, creates a right to expect fulfilment of the other side. A promise, being a verbal agreement, creates in the memory of the speaker, a piece of evidence of intention of the other side, and thus an expectation of a particular action, and thus a right.

Public rights
A legitimate expectation can, however, be created when an authority makes a promise or sets a limit to its competence. Permission, thus creates rights. The government's legislation puts into the public access, reasons for justifying certain freedoms they claim from eachother and from the government. This is what political and legal rights are. I cannot therefore agree that a political right needs the same origins as other rights

Moral rights
But I think that it is moral rights that are disturbing us most here. Morality, many will agree, is not all that clear to those who haven't the time that philosophers have to think about it in ideal settings. Therefore, I will stipulatively define morality as those considerations we take when measuring the human quality of a situation. Which says nothing more than how satsified I am from the outcome of actions that others have taken against me. Why can I expect not to be killed for my property at will? Well, because the person who does it to me would not have it done to them. They would, if I put them in my shoes, employ the same plea that I would. And it is this that creates what we'd think of as moral rights. However, moral rights are not propositions - they don't say things about the world, but about us, and so once more we have the problem I described in the opening. A proposition is an exact statement about a fact - it it cannot ot be true. So to say "murder is wrong" is not a proposition - as it doesn't say anything that's important to the definition of murder - it isn't a piece of the picture that I can add whenever I see it missing somewhere. In other words, there is no evidence I can use to claim that murder is wrong, except that I don't like it. But so what if I don't like it? It still says nothing that's descriptive of murder. There is therefore no "right" not to murder. having showed what it is not possible to say about moral rights, I will in the end say how itis possible to speak of them.

Rights without reason
One of my objections to natural rights in the Enlightenment way is that it speaks nonsense. It purports to say what it couldn't possibly say. If we take a right to be what I described above, it seems to be that they are descriptive of a situation or relationship. They're a piece of the situation. How can self-accredited things relate to anything other than the self? My name is Gilliwoo, it's a property of me. I have two legs, they're a property of me. I own a phone, it's not a property of me.

Moreover, how can statements about what I'm feeling inside, be descriptive of the world? When I say I have a right to an education, without a political or moral support for it, I am expecting something without any evidence that I have reason to expect it. I just feel it should be. This may therefore be nothing more than pompous godwottery about what I reflected on today. I'm simply describing my thoughts. But how does something that describes, make it that you should do things in response to it? They don't without a receiving ear. Because until somebody could threaten your right, you have nothing to claim exactly. As such it requires at least a mutual relationship (and this is one of my justifications for society as a valid concept). Natural rights are logically impossible things. They suggest that an action can be compelled before there is anybody to compel it upon. If you're born with something, it should be there if you were the only person in the universe. A right, being a claim, cannot exist without at least two people. Otherwise it's just a conversation with oneself.

A right not threatened is just a description of intent, and that has no substantive worth. It has no value because it has no scarcity. But something that I claim from somebody else (e.g. a natural right of free speech) needs justification. Appeals to "nature" don't justify anything at all - nature likely doesn't even know you're using it as evidence! And the other guy has no reason to believe you anyway, and rightly so, because the only authority justifying that right is you, which means I couldn't take it away from you if it became a burden on me. I won't let you have it, therefore, your right just once more becomes a declaration, not a reason. Speaking of a natural right is jumping out of your own skin. It's nowhere written that this emotion requires that response. Unless God put them there and told us what they were therefore, it's hard to even know where to start (even if God exists, the question is not settled whether God telling you things could make them true).

How morality remains possible
I constantly appeal to moral requirements in discussion here. How am I able to do this if I deny natural rights? Because I'm not tied to your mast. Moral rights are open ended. That is to say, while I can never say "I have a right to an education - end of", I can say "You've not yet given a good reason why I should not expect an education, and I've plenty of explanations why I should". In other words, moral claims are possible because they don't claim facts about the world, but facts about a situation. Situations are composed of physical objects, but we conceive them as abstractions. The way we think about the situation is thus more important in deciding how to behave, than what is actually there. e.g. a person plunging a knife into an innocent person is only that. But we receive this situation with various other pieces of knowlegde such as our knowledge of pain, our fear of death, our hatred of injustice. The moral quality of the situation is bigger than the sum of its parts. And because we understand situations abstractly - in relation to how we happen to feel and think and nothing more perfect - there is no logical reason to exclude these sensibilities in our reasoning about them. In other words, I flip the logic of natural rights: rather than saying there are logically necessary properties in the world that create rights, I say that there are no such things at all, but there is no reason not to include what we'd like to happen, in how a situation operates. It is THIS that creates claims, and implicit or explicit consensus that upgrades them to rights. When I claim to have a right to be heard fairly I'm claiming that there's no reason why I shouldn't be. When I'm saying that politics should include moral considerations, I'm claiming that there's no reason why it should be assumed that my feelings about the tax levied on me are somehow irrelevant to the situation - I live with it therefore it is something that has real meaning to me. It isn't, however, a necessary reason to care what I think about taxes. In other words, the fact that there's no reason not to consider facts with feelings, if feelings will be part of the end result, makes it impossible for logic to forbid me from considering those things (this is a bold statement, and I suspect Phawkins and Drunkhamster may have issue with it!)

Conclusion
Some people may have lost patience with y long post by now, and wonder why I must "intellectualise" the issue. I don't believe I've done this. i've only shown that you can't think the things you know you believe, and believe this also. I have shown fairly reasonably, that if we accept the actual "axioms" of existence - logic and the world around us - we are forced, to downgrade "natural rights" to things that we care about, and are part of the situation just as much as the facts are. But that they are equivalent to facts, is not true. They don't describe anything, they're just how we want things to be. And that is no bad thing to consider.
Kant allegedly deduces Natural Rights, or something like them, from logic alone. Does anyone know how he manages this, and whether it still stands up to criticism?
Reply 28
Agent Smith
Kant allegedly deduces Natural Rights, or something like them, from logic alone. Does anyone know how he manages this, and whether it still stands up to criticism?

I addressed it above. He basically says if you expect what I expect then don't behave like I don't expect it.
Gilliwoo, I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about Hoppe's "argumentation ethics" where he purportedly has an a priori justification of the libertarian axiom of self-ownership. here is a link to the best article I can find on it at the moment.
Reply 30
DrunkHamster
Gilliwoo, I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about Hoppe's "argumentation ethics" where he purportedly has an a priori justification of the libertarian axiom of self-ownership. here is a link to the best article I can find on it at the moment.

Remembering that I sought to reject "natural" rights not the libertarian tenets per se, and that I'm not an economist (though I doubt the article needs economic knowledge to be appreciated), give me a few hours for response. But this looks extremely interesting.
Reply 31
DanGrover
I don't know how you can deny natural rights, yet sustain that you think workers deserve any rights at all. I'm certainly not insinuating that "my" view of natural rights are the same as everyone elses. Of course they're subjective, else we'd all be libertarians. Naturally, of course, what I deem to be natural rights do not lead to socialist outcome, but I understand that if one is to believe, as a socialist does, that men deserve equality, then by what virtue does this idea of "deserving" come from? If not by some natural born right, why do they "deserve" anything?

In my view, to deny natural rights is to deny socialism as much as capitalism.


You don't know because you're not very bright. Rights are real as far as I'm concerned, but I don't regard them as 'natural' if by this is meant they are inherent in the fabric of physical reality. If you accept that rights are subjective then you can't continue to call them 'natural'; this term suggest that they have an existence and form outside of human societal production. You're simply getting confused with 'rights' and 'natural rights' as I see it. While the former is justified the latter is suggestive of an absolute status which cannot be.
Reply 32
DanGrover
I don't see why they must be "solid" to be natural. All I mean by "natural" is that they are given by virtue of being born. You don't need to do anything to earn these things, they are a given, they are a part of being human, they are unerring and immovable and as such are "natural".


[sigh]

But you don't have rights by virtue of being born, you are subject to whatever societal norms, values and laws that particular society have established. In some past societies some children were sacrificed to the gods because it was deemed as beneficial to society as a whole. This is why 'natural' is an inappropriate prefix to 'rights'.
Oswy
[sigh]

But you don't have rights by virtue of being born, you are subject to whatever societal norms, values and laws that particular society have established. In some past societies some children were sacrificed to the gods because it was deemed as beneficial to society as a whole. This is why 'natural' is an inappropriate prefix to 'rights'.


This is exactly it, you've cut right to the point: unless you believe in natural rights of some sort you have no justification whatsoever for saying that the Aztecs sacrificing children or the Germans gassing Jews was wrong. All you can say is that it's wrong-as-interpreted-by-modern-western-standards. Are you really willing to accept that in their own context the Aztecs and the Nazis were acting morally?

You're also conflating the two issues of whether natural rights exist as a matter of practice and whether they exist. I believe that the Aztec children and the Jews in the concentration camps did have rights - the right not to be murdered, for example - which were of course infringed. Which is why I feel I can say that the Aztecs and the Nazis carrying out these deeds were acting immorally. Can you, as someone who doesn't believe in natural rights, say that?
Oswy
[sigh]

But you don't have rights by virtue of being born, you are subject to whatever societal norms, values and laws that particular society have established. In some past societies some children were sacrificed to the gods because it was deemed as beneficial to society as a whole. This is why 'natural' is an inappropriate prefix to 'rights'.
Well, call me stupid (and it appears you have no qualms about doing so :p:), but surely one gains the rights of any given society by virtue of being born into that society. Global "Natural laws", encoded somehow into the very fabric of the Universe, are a ludicrous idea, but this more local approach seems less so.

I haven't thought it through fully yet, but it suggests that if (say) you're born into 21st-century Scandinavian society, you get, automatically and without having to earn them, a whole hell of a lot of rights; if you're born into 20th-century British society, you get a different set, and if you're born into 19th-century Ottoman society you get a different set again.
DrunkHamster
You're also conflating the two issues of whether natural rights exist as a matter of practice and whether they exist. I believe that the Aztec children and the Jews in the concentration camps did have rights - the right not to be murdered, for example - which were of course infringed. Which is why I feel I can say that the Aztecs and the Nazis carrying out these deeds were acting immorally. Can you, as someone who doesn't believe in natural rights, say that?
Go Go Gadget Social Contract? That's one answer, at least.
I don't understand how a social contract helps the position here. Care to elaborate?
DrunkHamster
I don't understand how a social contract helps the position here. Care to elaborate?
Surely the contract of rights doesn't function (in the sense of helping society run smoothly) if one party is running round killing people?
Reply 38
DrunkHamster
This is exactly it, you've cut right to the point: unless you believe in natural rights of some sort you have no justification whatsoever for saying that the Aztecs sacrificing children or the Germans gassing Jews was wrong. All you can say is that it's wrong-as-interpreted-by-modern-western-standards. Are you really willing to accept that in their own context the Aztecs and the Nazis were acting morally?

You're also conflating the two issues of whether natural rights exist as a matter of practice and whether they exist. I believe that the Aztec children and the Jews in the concentration camps did have rights - the right not to be murdered, for example - which were of course infringed. Which is why I feel I can say that the Aztecs and the Nazis carrying out these deeds were acting immorally. Can you, as someone who doesn't believe in natural rights, say that?


If I read your words correctly, and I'm doing my best, you appear to be defending the use of 'natural' in 'natural rights' on the basis that the alternative leaves the issue of morality subjective. If this is what you're doing it is no different from believing in God because you want to get to heaven, not because you have any good empirical or theoretical reason for believing. If human 'rights' are a product of the society humans find themselves in then we have to deal with that fact, not run away and pretend that there is some hidden force in nature which not only has an interest in human rights but actually defines them! Maybe you believe in Santa just to ensure you get some pressies every year?

It's all very well claiming 'natural' rights because they seem morally convenient in the face of the subjectivity of human morals, but you can't point to anything which makes such rights 'natural' (that is to say, established by some force other than societal). The best you seem able to do is claim that humans somehow by virtue of their very existence have these rights bestowed upon them - surely the student of philosophy has a right to be sceptical?
Reply 39
Agent Smith
Well, call me stupid (and it appears you have no qualms about doing so :p:), but surely one gains the rights of any given society by virtue of being born into that society. Global "Natural laws", encoded somehow into the very fabric of the Universe, are a ludicrous idea, but this more local approach seems less so.

I haven't thought it through fully yet, but it suggests that if (say) you're born into 21st-century Scandinavian society, you get, automatically and without having to earn them, a whole hell of a lot of rights; if you're born into 20th-century British society, you get a different set, and if you're born into 19th-century Ottoman society you get a different set again.


I can accept this up to a point, save that societal 'rights' also often depend on the circumstances of your birth - the colour of your skin, your sex, your sexual orientation, the religion you're born into or perhaps even the social status you have in the context of your parentage. It's also the case that societal rights change with time, further demonstrating the subjectivity of the phenomenon. I'm all for human rights, don't get me wrong, but I cannot pretend that they are 'natural' unless the word 'natural' is utterly bent and corrupted so as to lose its value.