RoR: Forum

Post 0

Wednesday, April 3, 2013 - 11:51am

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Excellent article, Professor Machan. I'd like to see much more writing on this topic.

It's empowering to see so many of the attacks on those basic concepts of morality and justice exposed as the diversions and obfuscations they are. In this sense it is very different from most of the arguments in other sciences - those who favor one form of tyranny or another aren't always using honest arguments and thus engage in some kind of intellectual dishonesty or another.

One dishonest form of attacks on individual rights and Capitalism involves creating complex intellectual structures to explain why arguments in favor of Capitalism aren't valid. That is, they create an entire system, like Marx's class struggles and his revision of history, and then use it, as if it were sound, as the standard for showing Capitalism creates problems that in fact it doesn't.

Or, a favorite trick of the Progressives is to create a political Trojan horse, like their approach to environmentalism - as in 'climate change,' to sneak in control and confiscation. Another Trojan horse is their use of "Democracy" where they take the concept of self-government and use it to smuggle new laws and regulations that effectively reduce the "self" part.

p.s., There is a typo in the second to last sentence you might want to fix before publishing elsewhere.

Post 1

Thursday, April 4, 2013 - 2:40pm

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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.It seems that the Founders had not gotten entirely clear on what basic rights were. If they still did not include women and slaves as among those having those same rights, they seem to have been saying an ideal that was not to be taken so literally as we take it. Their concept of justice seems to have been still partly as among the Greeks, the full basic-rights concept absent, the justice of slavery being based on the notion of rightness in fulfilling the function of your (unequal) place. That is not said in the Declaration, but seems to have been still part of their conception of justice, given their continuance of the legality of slavery.

I wonder if invention is not more apt in characterizing the positive law protecting basic rights and the institution enforcing such law. How to make something is also a discovery, but invention would seem there to be the characterization first to mind.

Thank you for the introduction to this book, Tibor.

Post 2

Thursday, April 4, 2013 - 3:36pm

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Individual rights don't change over time since they arise from human nature. Slavery was as much a violation of individual rights 300 years ago as it would be now. But our understanding of what individual rights are can improve, and the laws we craft to protect them can evolve. We can keep inventing better and better laws, but we can't invent individual rights.

I'd say that specific law is "invented" - while individual rights are "discovered." Individual rights exist even if they are unknown, or ignored in a given time and place - they arise from our nature, and await discovery, like gravity. Man's job is acquire the best understanding of what individual rights are, and to craft the most accurate description of them.

The constitution is about laws and is intended as the foundation, the direction and the limitation on all laws to follow. Ideally, it would be the best possible bridge between the understanding of individual rights and the kinds of laws, and constitutional amendments, that would secure those rights.

Under the metaphysical, epistemological and ethical understanding of individual rights we wouldn't find something like "due process" waiting to be discovered. It is the invention of a rule for limiting governmental power such as to best protect those individual rights that have been discovered. Individual rights are about the relations between men in society - with or without government, whereas laws are about government and may or may not arise from individual rights.

Here on RoR, and in nearly all academic settings, we seek the ideal, or the most accurate of understandings. But when a law is invented, it must also be "passed" to become a law, and that is nearly always a joint effort between people with different understandings. There were founding fathers that would have liked to eliminate slavery and those who did not. To get the constitution ratified by enough states, what would have been the best approach? I think that for the long run, it was to use the stated ideal in hopes that the new nation would evolve in that direction - which for Blacks and women, it did.