Natural law and natural rights follow from the nature of man and the world. We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.
Natural law has objective, external existence. It follows from the ESS (evolutionary stable strategy) for the use of force that is natural for humans and similar animals. The ability to make moral judgments, the capacity to know good and evil, has immediate evolutionary benefits: just as the capacity to perceive three dimensionally tells me when I am standing on the edge of a cliff, so the capacity to know good and evil tells me if my companions are liable to cut my throat. It evolved in the same way, for the same straightforward and uncomplicated reasons, as our ability to throw rocks accurately.
ReplyDeleteNatural law is not some far away and long ago golden age myth imagined by Locke three hundred years ago, but a real and potent force in today's world, which still today forcibly constrains the lawless arrogance of government officials, as it did in Dade county very recently.
The opponents of natural rights often complain that the advocates of natural rights are not logically consistent, because we continually shift between inequivalent definitions of natural law. They gleefully manufacture long lists of “logical contradictions”. Indeed, the definitions we use are not logically equivalent, but because of the nature of man and the nature of the world, they are substantially equivalent in practice. These complaints by the opponents of natural rights are trivial hair splitting, and pointless legalistic logic chopping. It is easy to imagine in principle a world where these definitions were not equivalent. If humans were intelligent bees, rather than intelligent apes, these definitions would not be equivalent, and the concept of natural law would be trivial or meaningless, but we are what we are and the world is what it is, and these definitions, the definitions of natural law, are equivalent, not by some proof of pure reason, but by history, experience, economics, and observation.