Been getting “non matching quote blocks” in post.. which I’ve checked and are fine. Dunno what is up, so I removed them. Bear with me..
Your conceptions & objections are erroenous, I correct that with the relevant quotes - and you simply blatantly ignore it as if it means nothing. What a joke.
Ultima: Therefore I find the whole concept of “natural rights” absurd. Call them “common rights held by many humans”, or something fancier than that, but don’t tell me that they are in any way “natural”. The sun is natural, the air is natural, fire is natural, water is natural, gravity is natural… there is nothing “natural” about “natural rights”. At most they can be a system saying what “ought to be”, but that doesn’t necessarily follow from “what is”. You can try as hard as you like to convince me of that, but in the end it is just your opinion and by no means a fact.
Conza88:
"It is indeed puzzling that so many modern philosophers should sniff at the very term “nature” as an injection of mysticism and the supernatural. An apple, let fall, will drop to the ground; this we all observe and acknowledge to be in the nature of the apple (as well as the world in general). Two atoms of hydrogen combined with one of oxygen will yield one molecule of water – behavior that is uniquely in the nature of hydrogen, oxygen, and water. There is nothing arcane or mystical about such observations. Why then cavil at the concept of “nature”? The world, in fact, consists of a myriad number of observable things, or entities. This is surely an observable fact. Since the world does not consist of one homogenous thing or entity alone, it follows that each one of these different things possesses differing attributes; otherwise they would all be the same thing. But if A, B, C, etc., have different attributes, it follows immediately that they have different natures.[18][19] It also follows that when these various things meet and interact, a specifically delimitable and definable result will occur. In short, specific, delimitable causes will have specific delimitable effects.[20]
The observable behavior of each of these entities is the law of their natures, and this law includes what happens as a result of the interactions. The complex that we may build up of these laws may be termed the structure of natural law. What is “mystical” about that?[21]
In the field of purely physical laws, this concept will usually differ from modern positivistic terminology only on high philosophical levels; applied to man, however, the concept is far more controversial. And yet, if apples and stones and roses each have their specific natures, is man the only entity, the only being, that cannot have one? And if man does have a nature, why cannot it too be open to rational observation and reflection? If all things have natures, then surely man’s nature is open to inspection; the current brusque rejection of the concept of the nature of man is therefore arbitrary and a priori."
So does man have a nature or not? Aye?
Ultima: #1, #2: “Who has the burden of proof”? There is nothing to respond to here, it is your opinion.
Negative. There is something to respond to. You’ve just tried to continue and dodge it.
Conza88: Prove my yardstick is wrong. I’ve proven yours is and refuted your objections. The post is still waiting.
Ultima: The burden of proof’s on you to prove that yours is correct. Otherwise you’re just another evangelist. As I said, I don’t believe in an objective yardstick so I have nothing to prove.
Conza88: Wrong as usual. Ever going to address this? Or will we continue to see the usual pathetic wave of the hand dismissal?
http://libertariannation.org/a/f42l1.html#4.2
Who Has the Burden of Proof?
But first let me make a point about the burden of proof. Most critics of Natural Law assume that the burden of proof lies with the proponent of Natural Law — presumably because they see Natural Law as something bizarre and implausible, something one couldn’t sensibly believe unless there were a knock-down argument for it. But in fact, to believe in Natural Law is simply to believe that there are moral standards that transcend the practices and customs of any given community — that there are rational grounds for condemning the Nazi regime as immoral, that it is possible to be justified in so condemning it, even if we assume that what the Nazis did was perfectly in accordance with the values of Nazi culture. When we condemn Nazism, we don’t ordinarily take ourselves to be expressing a purely personal, subjective preference, like the preference for chocolate over vanilla; rather, our ordinary practices of praising and condemning seem to implicitly assume that there are objective moral standards, i.e., that there is a Natural Law to which manmade laws are answerable.
Now of course the fact that ordinary practices implicitly assume something is no guarantee that what they assume is true. But such a fact does seem to shift the burden of proof.
Consider: the fact that it seems to me that I am sitting in front of my computer typing these words doesn’t guarantee that I really am doing so; I might be dreaming, or hallucinating, or I might be trapped in an incredibly realistic virtual-reality program. Now a philosopher like Descartes would say that I have the burden of proving that I’m not dreaming, hallucinating, etc. — that I have to be able to rule those alternatives out before I can be justified in thinking I really am here, awake and typing.
But if Descartes were right — if we couldn’t be justified in believing anything unless we first ruled out all possibility of error — then we would never be justified in believing anything, since whatever evidence we pointed to in order to prove our starting beliefs reliable would in turn have to be justified by appeal to further evidence and so on ad infinitum. And if that were so, then we couldn’t be justified in holding the
belief that started us down this infinite regress in the first place — namely, the belief that in order to be justified in believing anything we must first rule out all possibility of error. So Cartesian skepticism ultimately undermines itself: if everything should be doubted, then the claim that everything should be doubted is itself one of the things that should be doubted — and once we go doubting that, we lose our original reason for doubting everything else.2
What that means is that we are, after all, justified in accepting the way things initially seem to us as a true picture of the world, despite the possibility that those beliefs are mistaken. Now that doesn’t mean we’re justified in clinging to our beliefs with blind faith, defying all evidence to the contrary. But it does mean that those who oppose these ordinary beliefs are the ones who have the burden of proof; we’re justified in accepting our initial beliefs as true until we find convincing evidence that they’re false. This must be so, because the contrary position, as we’ve seen, is rationally incoherent. So if our ordinary practice of moral judgment commits us to believing in Natural Law, then Natural Law is part of our picture of the world, and we’re justified in accepting it until someone gives us good reason to reject it. The burden of proof thus rests with the opponents of Natural Law.
That is not to say that I think there is no positive case to be made for Natural Law. On the contrary, much of my own philosophical research is devoted to making such a case, relying on the insights of the Aristotelean tradition combined with the philosophical discoveries of the last thirty years. My point is simply that the justifiability of accepting Natural Law as part of one’s picture of the universe does not require that the positive case for Natural Law be established first.
Now let’s turn to some of those common objections to Natural Law theory.
Ultima: I’ve already given you a specific definition on rights; here it is again: ““Rights” are really promises of action or abstention from certain actions that humans grant to each other, and that’s all that they are.” No matter what system or which philosopher you believe, it will always reduce down to that. That doesn’t mean I support “might makes right”, I’m just telling you what the reality is.
"No, it doesn’t. I objected; with this - and you haven’t exactly addressed it.
You make no distinction between “rights” and privileges?
You don’t make a distinct between negative rights and positive rights?
How on earth do you determine what “rights” society will be “expected to be respected and enforced.” - Vote?! You choose not reason to arrive at what constitutes rights, but the mob?
These appeals to “society” are growing tiresome.
“They don’t exist without force to back them up” - We have been over this already. Why are you muddying the waters between normative rights, and defacto / legal rights?"
Oh questions yeah not be answered.
Ultima: I do have a problem with that. I don’t like being robbed.
Personal preference. Personal morality. Meaningless & abritrary. It has nothing to do with political ethics. Fail to understand that, you actually fail to understand what you confess to “reject”. Most amusing. This is what it’s all about. You have no political ethical objections, correct? What you just professed is not one at all. You deny the charge, but then confirm it… haha.
