The question of "natural" rights

Economics Political Theory
1

I’ve been pondering the question of where human rights come from, and how they may be justified. Before the financial crash of 2008 and before reading up about the Austrian school and libertarianism, rights seemed like something that were “owed” to us by society. After reading up on libertarianism, I came to the belief that the three natural rights of a human were the right to life, liberty, and property, and that all of our other rights could be derived from these three, and should not violate these three.

Now, I’m not so sure. One issue that I have with the idea of any right being “natural” or “inherent” is that if this were true, then there would be a natural and inherent consequence to violating these rights. Something like karma, or God, would strike down at us each time we violated these rights; if the right was truly a property of the universe, then it shouldn’t be possible for us to violate the right in the first place. It appears that the only rights that a person has are the ones that he’s capable of acquiring for himself and the ones that are granted to him by other people.

For example, if a person lives alone on a desert island, he may believe he has the right to life, liberty, and property, or he may believe that he’s a naturalist who only has the right to take from the island what he needs to survive. Whatever the case may be, the only true rights he has are those he is able to physically enforce. His rights are entirely subjective on his opinion and his capabilities.

If you now add more people to the island, the rights this individual has becomes limited to the degree he can exert his opinion and influence over the other individuals on the island. The “rights” that everyone ends up having will not necessarily be the same from person to person. If this group of people decides that “life, liberty, and property are our rights”, this rests entirely on the ability and will of the group to enforce it.

Based on this, I can only conclude two things: Rights and values are entirely dependent on your subjective view of the world, and therefore you cannot say that one set of rights & values is better or worse than another, unless you have a basis to compare them by. Even then, this basis will have a different value in the eyes of different people. Second, there is no such thing as a natural or inherent right unless it is naturally or inherently enforced. If you believe in God, aliens, etc… this dilemma may be solved, but unless such external influences can be proven, the situation collapses into the case of the rights being derived subjectively by men.

So, when it comes to property rights, animal rights, children’s rights, etc… I don’t think there is an objective “right or wrong” that exists. To define right or wrong, first you need a way to compare different sets of rights and values, and then you need a yardstick to measure them by. Even then, people will place a different valuation on the method of comparison, so the conclusion remains subjective. I believe that rights truly exist only as an intersection of your worldview & influence and everyone else’s.

Let’s discuss; I’d like to hear your opinions.

Libertarianism without natural rights?
Sovereignty... for one species only.
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Moral values are indeed subjective. But they are not based on a “view of the world”. They are based on moral impulses natural in man and common to almost all men. They are subjective, but they can be objectively recognized as natural. Natural rights are rules derived from these natural moral impulses concerning what should not be done with regard to individuals. I discuss this at length here. Here’s a relevant excerpt.

True human morality consists of moral urges. Moral urges are human ends, and like all human ends they are a product of the passions. Hume made the case for this position in hisTreatise of Human Nature:

Take any action allow’d to be vicious: Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn your reflexion into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action. Here is a matter of fact; but ’tis the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object. So that when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it.

When we assign names to things it is from seeing them as distinct. So what makes morals distinct from other feelings and other human ends? What most distinguishes morals is that they are urges which are hardwired into us for the sake of the material well-being of otherindividuals, even to the detriment of the material well-being of the moral person in question. […]

Morality may not be the product of the top-down order present in human reason. But it is not chaotic. I believe it is the product of the emergent order present in natural selection. There is a burgeoning school of thought in evolutionary biology and the cognitive sciences (led by Marc Hauser and Steven Pinker) which contends that morality is not just cultural artifice, but that it is an intrinsic feature of the human mind which evolved over the countless millennia of humans living together. As I concurred with Rothbard, loosely speaking there ARE factual needs for flourishing which are common to man. There is an overwhelming general need in the human species for self-restraint and fellow-feeling if it is to flourish. It only makes sense that this overwhelming general need would mean that familial groups who tend to have certain highly-functional moral feelings would end up prospering and propagating their genes, while familial groups made up of individuals who were constantly killing and plundering each other would have died out.

Economic science teaches us that the MOST highly-functional moral feelings are those concerning ownership (both of one’s bodily self and of external objects). I believe it is no coincidence that we find in experience and in history that these same moral feelings concerning property are, of all moral feelings, the most timeless and universal. When we take up some unused thing and begin to use it, we automatically think of it as our “ours”. We take reflexive affront when our person or our property is aggressed against by others. We feel involuntary outrage when we see the person or property of others aggressed against. And we spontaneously feel guilt when, or at least after, we aggress against the person or property of others. Of course there are exceptions (as with those suffering from Aspberger’s), but these facts are true for the overwhelming preponderance of humanity. We don’t need to be taught to feel revulsion toward murder, plunder, and enslavement; it has been stamped on our hearts by nature. THAT is what I mean by “natural law”: not moral precepts which can be deduced from an understanding of nature, but moral precepts which have arisen out of nature. And chief among these precepts are the property rights implicit in our natural revulsion toward murder, plunder, and enslavement. I would go so far as to say that anyone who says they don’t feel such revulsion are either impaired or lying. And the fact that a great many people every day override that revulsion and go ahead and murder, plunder, and enslave anyway is owing to two causes. First of all, frailty is just as much a part of human nature as morality is. Moral urges are one kind of urge among many, and sometimes they lose the tug of war over human action. The second cause is that institution that fosters and feeds upon human frailty: the state.

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I wouldn’t be so sure of that…

…but yeah, I agree with you for the most part.

4

This debate gets very… passionate…

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But that does away with the concept of rights entirely. If you don’t have the right to not be raped, tortured, or murdered so long as somebody else is capable of doing these things to you, you have no rights at all.

If you don’t have the right to not be raped, tortured, or murdered so long as somebody else thinks it’s okay to do so, you have no rights at all.

6

its like this Ultima, you dont think you have rights, so you dont. hope it works out for you.

I have a right to my private property, for it not to be aggressed. you can hardly make a moral argument against my position.

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The natural rights crowd can never prove why natural rights exist, all that they have done is show that the state of the world with “natural” rights is preferable to one without them.

8

sick.

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for me the whole semantics of the topic is bogus. people talking about whether morality exists,
well, heres a question, does existence exist. what does the word mean, when used in this context. is it an appropriate word?

perhaps, ‘existence is not a predicate’..?

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If morality does not exist then the entire natural rights theory dies along with objective ethics.

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what do you mean by ‘ethics do not exist’?

are you looking for an object? a ‘statue’ of ethics?

12

Sigh, I meant morality, typo.

13

same question then with ethics swapped out for morality.

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What is the measurment of morality? Does an objective ruler exist or is it merely a subjective valuation?

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the measurement of morality is right and wrong.

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Right, and wrong mean different things for different individuals based on their culture, so it is anything but an objective measurment for morality.

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‘good experiment’ and ‘bad experiment’ mean different things to an unschooled 8 year old in his first science lesson than nobel winning chemists…
you suppose there is no objective measurement for ‘good experimentation’ vis-a-vis acquiring scientific knowledge?

in other words. because there is disagreement on something does not necessarilly mean that the subject over which the disagreement occurs can not have truth.

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And can that be logically deduced, or are we in a utilitarian world of ethics here?

19

well, im not sure how you mean deduced. I say it can be discovered, analgously to how scientific knowledge can be discovered.

it does not come out pure a priori (only logically deduced) or pure a posteriori; there are necessarily elements of both.

20

So then: why is killing wrong, why is theft wrong? Is there an objective reason, like social utility or preference of a world without such acitivity?