From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Thu Nov 21 2002 - 21:08:38 MST
gts writes
> I count myself among those who believe in "natural rights."
> Our rights as humans derive from the law of the jungle, so
> to speak.
Thanks for this and any (short) efforts to explain it.
Frankly, the whole idea sounds quite suspect.
> The most obvious of these is the right of self-defense.
> Who can object to the notion that a person has a natural
> right to defend his own life?
And if someone does, what are you going to do about it?
> To those who would argue that rights exist only in a
> legal sense, I ask, "Did blacks in America have an
> intrinsic right to be free before their emancipation?
No, because there is no such thing.
> Is slavery not wrong even countries where it is still
> legal?"
I disapprove of slavery. Anything stronger that I have
been able to think of along those lines leads me into
bad metaphysics.
If you are going to use that word "wrong", you'll
have to explain how it means more than "you disapprove".
> To my way of thinking, slavery was wrong even before we understood it as
> such and before we modified our laws to prohibit it. The Abolitionists
> helped us "discover" the truth about slavery. Natural rights are always
> discovered in this way. They are not merely fabricated. We discover
> rights as we become more enlightened as a species.
Yes, and if the Germans had won world war II, then as
a species we would have discovered the right to cleanse
our gene pool of undesirable races. It would have seemed
not only antiseptic, but also our duty (just as now we
see the liquidation of certain "undesirable" viruses
as our "right").
But thankfully (so says L. Corbin) the Germans did not
win, and the humans' habits evolved in the way that
L. Corbin approves of.
Lee
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:58:18 MST