What a retard could possibly believe that nature somehow magically grants individuals with certain rights? And that it somehow sets certain laws?
Does nature magically create a giant reactionary mud monster who smashes any reform in the natural law according to these people? Do they suffer from a mental disorder?
I think it comes from the fact that man is NATURALLY born with free will. And maybe chill out with the term “retard.” it doesn’t help your case at all.
Straw… man?
"Rights in the sense of “inalienable rights” refers to “things people SHOULD be allowed to do.”
Is that what you say?
austro-libertarians disagree:-
One common, flip criticism by opponents of natural law is: who is to establish the alleged truths about man? The answer is not who but what: man’s reason. Man’s reason is objective, i.e., it can be employed by all men to yield truths about the world.
a natural right, to them, is something that is objectively good and moral.
The way you presented it it sounded like Mother Nature herself comes down and gives us her 10 commandments and that is what natural rights are. I don’t think modern libertarians agree with that (though you will see that in the writings of Bastiat and some other earlier proto-libertarians.)
Rights are a social construction not a construction of reality minus man in society.
Rights can only be conceived as resolving conflict over use of scarce means.
Rights result in “legitimate use claims”, and are enforced through social action.
There are two types of use, direct and indirect. Direct use is controlled directly via the mind, and indirect use is through the direct use of the body. The physical body in that it can’t be controlled by another human mind through direct use, but can only be used by another mind through indirect use, is inalienable from the inhabiting mind. One human mind cannot currently (or perhaps ever) gain direct use control of another human body.
This is the basis for the concept of self-ownership. In terms of efficiency I can get more from you in terms of achieving my own ends, by interacting with you socially (meaning imputing to you the cateogries of human action). And even more from you by treating you cooperatively instead of adversarially. Rights come from social norms and laws of a social group. They define acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior and by doing so lower the costs of acceptable behavior and raise the costs of unacceptable behavior.
That’s the pragmatic and “necessary cause” chain for rights. Doesn’t make them absolutely “Right” it makes them rights.
Natural Property Rights are the evolutionarily produced fair standard that has lead to the highest level of technological innovation, economic wealth, physical living conditions, and political freedom in man’s history.
Feel free to offer something better if you’ve got it. Grant me the right to remain skeptical that you can do so.
And yes, I view this as a legitimate response to the question “Why are Natural Rights the Right Rights?” By acknowledging that if man is subjective there is no external authority, there is only the cold hard reality that judges the consequences of the actions man chooses, the effects he creates, the knowledge that informs him about the world, and the technological solutions he embraces to solve the problems he encounters in attempting to do whatever it is he tries to do.
They aren’t Absolutely Right, else they wouldn’t have evolved over time from one thing into another thing. But there are underlying principles which change the battlefield and help provide the proper negative feedback loops such that man can continually move forward and upward, instead of devolving and self-destructing.
You cannot escape the Economic and Political side effects of the Rights you choose.
So you agree that there’s nothing natural about them, they’re simply what you’d personally like to be implemented.
Doesn’t your act of argumentation imply that you recognize both your own self ownership and my self ownership. Otherwise, why are you trying to convince me? This proves the natural right of self ownership.
I am sure others make this case better than I.
@OP: Cool your jets… and welcome to the forums
No Austrian, not even Rothbard and Hoppe, espouses the scholastic conception of natural rights, unmodified
Rothbard/Hoppe/et. al. derive natural law, not natural rights*, and infer ethics from these natural laws. I disagree with Rothbard/et. al. on whether we can derive the contents of natural law from a priori reflection alone but I am in agreement with the overarching conception that a generic sense of “ought” can be derived from purely value-free facts of human nature. Even though that makes me a retard, according to you, I welcome a debate with you which should be an easy win for you since I’m so retarded.
Some of the contents of natural law can be derived from evolutionary psychology, that is, from the facts of human nature that evolutionary psychology uncovers. While this is not even close to a complete set of laws sufficient to construct even a basic ethical stance, it points the way toward a general methodology for grounding ethics in rational, scientific investigation rather than mere opinion (however, it is my view that opinion is an inescapable component of any complete ethical stance).
Most Austrians do not subscribe to natural law theory, even in the Rothbardian/Hoppean conception. There is a wide variety of ethical stances in Austrian circles though I suspect the majority of Austrian economists simply refrain from speaking to ethics altogether since it’s not their area of expertise.
Clayton -
Natural rights follow from natural law but the distinction is important because natural law is a broader concept than natural rights.
edit, forgive the lowercase:
i, personally, recognise your self ownership only arbitrarily, not by virtue of supposed natural rights i don’t think exist. i might arbitrarily not recognise it under different circumstances (such as having been born into a slave society)
if the rights commonly accepted at any one time (“evolutionarily produced”) happened to include a right to own another person, as in slave and feudal societies, there might not be a right to self ownership, or it might be restricted by birth etc. hence for natural rights to be truly natural, emanating from man’s reason as rothbard said in the above book, they can’t stem from what is commonly accepted to be rights.
since we can’t derive an ought from an is (hume’s guillotine), “natural rights” can’t contain any moral imperatives. questions of “should” go out of the window and we are left only with predictions of human behaviour, which unfortunately is not what a “right” actually means in common parlance. praxeology ultimately has no applicability to actual human existance (which we could have predicted given that it took, in programming terms, a static class rather than an object, which can’t be interacted with directly, only instantiated)
From Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Economic Science and the Austrian Method.
Mises not only recognizes that epistemology indirectly rests on our reflective knowledge of action and can thereby claim to state something a priori true about reality but that economics does so too and does so in a much more direct way. Economic propositions flow directly from our reflectively gained knowledge of action; and the status of these propositions as a priori true statements about something real is derived from our understanding of what Mises terms “the axiom of action.”
This axiom, the proposition that humans act, fulfills the requirements precisely for a true synthetic a priori proposition. It cannot be denied that this proposition is true, since the denial would have to be categorized as an action—and so the truth of the statement literally cannot be undone. And the axiom is also not derived from observation—there are only bodily movements to be observed but no such things as actions—but stems instead from reflective understanding.
Sorry, but that statement does not address the point in the OP or even the issue of natural law.
Good job, you have realised that there is a subjective element inherent to human thought.
so in other words, laws of physics arent actual written laws that particles refrain from violating, they are just ways of describing what particles appear to do from the perspective of an observer.
One common, flip criticism by opponents of natural law is: who is to establish the alleged truths about man? The answer is not who but what: man’s reason. Man’s reason is objective, i.e., it can be employed by all men to yield truths about the world.
A natural right, to Mises.org economists, is something that is objectively good and moral. Any other opinion is a statist one.
Maybe my last post was tangential. This is more apt and refers to my first (and hertofore ignored) post.
Argumentation ethics, Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s “Argumentation Ethics” (1988) is a foundational defense of libertarian rights. Argumentation Ethics relies on the work of philosophers Jürgen Habermasand Karl-Otto Apel’s concept of Discourse Ethics, and further on the deontological ethics of economistMurry Rothbard. Hoppe asserts that since verbal argumentation aims to resolve conflicts in a non-violent way, only the Non-aggression principle is consistent with that aim and therefore only it can be justified without contradiction. Hoppe’s approach is a praxeological examination of the act of discourse.
OK, let’s slow down with the guillotine. While it is true that we can’t derive ought from is - flatly stated - the matter deserves more careful consideration. Is there really nothing that “what is” tells us about what we ought to do? Clearly, what is informs what we ought to do once we have fixed an end. For example if your end is to land a man on the moon, then you ought to study rocket science. The difficulty with a flatly stated ought is that it neglects the “if”, that is, it does not account for individual valuation and ends.
But to say that there is no correlation between is and ought is the same thing as to say that humans have no nature, that is, no propensity to have these rather than those ends. This is simply false. There is such a thing as human nature - versus dog nature or bird nature - and one consequence of this is that there are human ends. Hence, we can say things like “if you are a human being, then you ought to _______” because there are statements which satisfy this conditional!
Clayton -
the existence of a human nature is a question either based on empiricism (and i know austro-libertarianism rejects that) or on an assumption (stemming from the action axiom). if you’re making the assumption human nature exists, someone else can equally validly make the assumption that they’re the only human and have a right to own the rest of us automatons as slaves.
“someone else can equally validly make the assumption that they’re the only human and have a right to own the rest of us automatons as slaves.”
But that does not invalidate the axiom that “humans act”.
that doesn’t address my point