> Rights are a fundamental consequence of human nature.
What does that mean? If someone stronger forces you to do work for them and beats you if you refuse, that seems like a “fundamental consequence of human nature” a lot more than saying that they shouldn’t.
To me, the “natural state” is for that you can do whatever you can get away with. Any limitation we place on that is our attempt to impose our conception of humanity on nature.
To put it another way, what about the state of nature would imply that we have ANY of the fundamental rights people speak of as being such? The natural rights I see are what animals have; the right to try to survive as best you can, by doing whatever you can.
Now, I am in no way arguing for anarchy or anything, just that there is nothing ‘natural’ about our concepts of rights.
As soon as people get together, they tend to form rules, a leader, and a means for dealing with someone who breaks those rules.
How we find out what the rules should be is by observation of the results. A very large number of societies have been created, with every set of rules imaginable, multiple times.
By correlating rules with success or failure of the societies, we can begin to tease out what the best set of rules are. Clearly, some sets of rules work a lot better than others.
The best outcomes come from rules that guarantee a set of rights, best excemplified by the Declaration of Independence, the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and later by the Bill of Rights.
Some rules work out very badly, like Marxism. No amount of wishing Marxism would work made it work, and no amount of coercion made it work, either.
This strongly implies that rights are natural, innate characteristics of being human.
> By correlating rules with success or failure of the societies, we can begin to tease out what the best set of rules are
This is not how we decide what should be considered fundamental human rights. Plenty of rules work out fine (i.e. effectively maintain social order and persist for long stretches of time) for “society” while being disastrous for the disempowered living under them.
> best outcomes come from rules that guarantee a set of rights, best excemplified by the Declaration of Independence
This is entirely circular reasoning. You have pre-determined that outcomes similar to your personal experience should be considered “good”, and then are declaring your society to be best because it led to your experience as an outcome. But you have neither clearly articulated what you mean by “best outcomes”, nor considered the outcomes for the less fortunate in your society. The argument more or less boils down to “Life worked out for me personally, and if it didn’t work out for you in my society, tough luck. If it didn’t work out for you in a different society, well mine is better.”
For example, I might for the sake of argument point out that Cuba clearly provides dramatically better healthcare and education outcomes than America (an astounding accomplishment considering its limited resources), and therefore conclude that Cuban society must be better structured and do a better job guaranteeing basic rights than American society.
> I might for the sake of argument point out that Cuba clearly provides dramatically better healthcare and education outcomes than America
How many Cubans want to leave and come to America? How many Americans want to live in Cuba? Venezuela? N. Korea?
Therein lies the answer to your argument.
It's interesting you chose to compare health care and education. Public education in the US is a gigantic socialist system. So is health care. You're not comparing a socialist system with a market based system. You're comparing a socialist system with a socialist system - which says nothing about what market system could do.
And lastly, who collects those astounding statistics on Cuba? The Soviet Union was famous for celebrating astounding statistics on food production, while the people starved. Why should we believe statistics collected by another communist, totalitarian outfit?
Their argument wasn't the specifics of the hypothetical. You're actually supposed to believe that Cuba isn't unilaterally better than America for the example to work.
You're in the middle of a discussion about Rights, why would you think this is suddenly a debate about Cuba?
> By correlating rules with success or failure of the societies, we can begin to tease out what the best set of rules are. Clearly, some sets of rules work a lot better than others.
How do you measure success or failure? Whoever lasts the longest is the most successful? Because by that measure, the longest lived societies were empires ruled by monarchs.. they did not guarantee rights.
Here's one way. Does a country build walls to keep people in, or keep people out?
How about that terrible video of people clinging to a jet leaving Afghanistan and falling off of it to their deaths? Were they fleeing a Taliban golden age in Afghanistan?
I personally know several people who fled the USSR. Ask them about the golden age they risked their lives to leave.
> Here's one way. Does a country build walls to keep people in, or keep people out?
Ok, so this basically amounts to using average life satisfaction as your measurement for success of a country. You could easily use any other measure, though, if you have a different goal... for example, my first thought was that "continued existence" was the measure of success, and whichever nation lasted the longest would be considered the most successful (a sort of Darwinian measure)...
Look, I personally agree with your measure of success. I am a child of the enlightenment, and I do believe that state authority rests with the will of the people. However, that is not an a priori fact... not everyone agrees with that as the criteria you judge a civilization, and it is not some natural fact that everyone is equal and deserves liberty, etc. Natural law is "whoever survives survives".
I guess the if we ask the people who built those walls they'll give us whatever answers they think are convenient for their propaganda purposes in the moment.
What does that mean? If someone stronger forces you to do work for them and beats you if you refuse, that seems like a “fundamental consequence of human nature” a lot more than saying that they shouldn’t.
To me, the “natural state” is for that you can do whatever you can get away with. Any limitation we place on that is our attempt to impose our conception of humanity on nature.
To put it another way, what about the state of nature would imply that we have ANY of the fundamental rights people speak of as being such? The natural rights I see are what animals have; the right to try to survive as best you can, by doing whatever you can.
Now, I am in no way arguing for anarchy or anything, just that there is nothing ‘natural’ about our concepts of rights.