For people to have natural rights, there must be some entity granting those rights. Since the ways of God are at best kind of mysterious, I'm not willing to say that rights are God granted.
People by their nature have the tendency to prefer free choice. People also have the tendency to exploit, enslave and kill their fellow human beings. We band together to form government to protect ourselves from externalities. Thus rights become a legal issue and are sometimes controversial as to what constitutes a right. I prefer to stick to the Constitution because I think that the Founders had a pretty good thing going.
We could say that natural rights derive from the fact that we own our own bodies. I don't disagree, but this seems limited to me because most of the things we do involve interaction with other people. Somebody might think that they have a right to my property, and only a legal system protects that. In order to protect rights, the community has to have a set of core beliefs that they share.
Somebody had to decide to form a town where I live, on land that was probably conquered, and that my land could be privately owned and sold.
On Fri, May 6, 2022 at 1:17 PM Larry wrote:
Then I read this amazing 1992 article by Bork explaining why he did not...
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