RE: Human rights, marriage and the importance of understanding natural law

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Human rights, marriage and the importance of understanding natural law

in philosophy •  8 years ago  (edited)

The whole premise of natural law is flawed. People do not act rationally. We do not protect others even when basic empathy dictates to do so.

Anarchism is not viable because humans do not tend towards good. Even when intentions are good, we can be mistaken about the correct means to achieve these ends.

Moreover, paradoxically, a government offers increased liberty over a simple anarchy model. It is a fundamental mischaracterisation of the objection to anarchy that it is "but then we have no rights". It is more nuanced, it is that there is nothing to enforce the rights, and hence no effective rights at all.

We are not born with rights. A basic understanding of world history, in particular pre-medieval history will make this more "self-evident" than the rights you claim will ever be. Rights only exist when they are enforced.

Some rights, also, we are obviously not born with. For example, the right to own property. This is spoken of as a right, yet we are not born with it. However, without a government, militias will take your land; very quickly indeed. Other capital will be seized. This obviously decreases economic efficiency.

Also, we create rights all the time. As earlier cited, the right to broadband. Did this right always exist? No, clearly not in th 2nd century, nor in the late 20th century, when internet connections were expensive. These cannot be considered human rights violations.

Once again, to imply there is any set, fixed set of natural laws is misguided. Society has made arbitrary rulings, for example in the form of the UN, to arbitrarily dictate arbitarary human rights. They are only rights because they are widely recognised as such. If the UN were to turn around tomorrow and say that living in Vatican City is a basic human right, would it be? If not, why not? Is it because the UN were "wrong"? How do we know they are not wrong about other things then? The truth is that all human rights are arbitrarily dictated and are not the result of some "natural law" influencing our decisions.

This can be moved past. The two options are to embrace a religious code, or to accept that rights are arbitarary and in fact morality needn't exist. A rudimentary understanding of ethics dictates that this pair is exhaustive.

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