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Legal concepts that are derivative from the natural right to liberty, e.g. freedom of speech, are protected by the government, but that is not the same as them
by troyastorino 13y ago
Legal concepts that are derivative from the natural right to liberty, e.g. freedom of speech, are protected by the government, but that is not the same as them being created by the government. An individual certainly has liberty, and thus freedom of speech, in the context of a state of nature. He does not, however, have a guarantee that an organization with a monopoly on the use of force, i.e. a government, will protect that liberty.
- foobarbazqux 13y agoDo you have the freedom to profit from your ideas in the state of nature?
- a-priori 13y agoAssuming we're talking about the Hobbesian "state of nature" then yes, of course you do have that freedom. Along with every other freedom. But you only have a right to profit insofar as you can keep others from exercising their freedom to steal your ideas (or anything else).
- foobarbazqux 13y agoIf I have a natural right to profit from my ideas, isn't it reasonable that I might want a legal right?
- a-priori 13y agoIn a state of nature, there is no such thing as a "legal right", or law of any kind other than might-makes-right.
- foobarbazqux 13y agoBut legal rights are synonymous with might-makes-right. A natural or human right is something we would like to have but cannot guarantee until it is made into law. I am just asking whether laws about intellectual property correlate to natural rights in the same way that laws about physical property do, since the original claim was that they are 100% fabricated.
- a-priori 13y agoWhether they're synonymous is entirely a matter of your world view with respect to the origin of the state's monopoly on the legitimate use of force, which is the defining feature of a state. Do individuals delegate their right to the use of force to the state, in the process giving them a monopoly on it? Or do states impose said monopoly on the individual, in effect overriding their natural rights? To avoid committing a fallacy here: or is there a third option?
- foobarbazqux 13y agoThe fallacy is that the choice is presented as either/or instead of both/and. Some of my natural rights are embodied in law, some of them aren't, that's how it goes.
- baddox 13y agoDo you have the freedom to use violence to prevent others from profiting from your ideas?
- foobarbazqux 13y agoYou have the freedom to use violence prevent anything you bloody well like.
- baddox 13y agoWas your first question rhetorical?
- foobarbazqux 13y agoYes, sorry :/ Well, maybe I didn't realize it though since I don't spend much time thinking about my freedoms in the state of nature, and people were making all these arguments about physical property being a natural right.
- rayiner 13y agoI can't believe that there are so many people in a scientific, technical, industry like the software industry that believe in something as facially superstitious and handwavy as "natural rights."
- foobarbazqux 13y agoFrom what I can tell, the idea of natural rights is really popular with people who are into anarcho-capitalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_and_legal_rights#Contemporary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_and_legal_rights#Conte... > Contemporary political philosophies continuing the liberal tradition of natural rights include libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism and Objectivism, and include amongst their canon the works of authors such as Robert Nozick, Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard. As far as I'm concerned: legal rights : natural rights :: laws : morals
- rayiner 13y agoMy problem with "natural rights" is that they're a way to take one set of arbitrary priorities and elevate them to some sort of law of nature, without having to justify them on utilitarian grounds. You have a right to property but not a right to education. Why? Because the former is a "natural right." Its no different from resorting to "because the Bible says so." Its also used to undermine democratic consensus in the same way as resorting to theology. Oh, everyone thinks there is a right to education? Wrong! Because the Bible says so... Err... Because its not a natural right, just some creation of government.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- foobarbazqux 13y agoYeah, it often seems they're a disguise for moral absolutism. Some convenient rule system that you can latch on to and then use to decide if things are good or bad. Tax is the worst thing there is, for example. But, natural rights are in the same category as human rights, and there are many human rights that I value despite their nonexistence as laws. It seems to me that natural rights are often a covert argument for male supremacy over women and children. A man is stronger than a woman, therefore he has a natural right to dominate her. The same goes for children. A child has no right to anything from its parents, because if you must depend on someone else, you wouldn't be free to obtain it in the absence of other people. But dependence is how we are born into the world. Education is given to us while we are in a state of dependence. Is it really only that educators have the right to educate? Perhaps, if you really don't believe in assigning rights on the basis of need. In the libertarian mindset, it's almost as if the government represents one's parents, and the romanticized state of being alone in the wild represents freedom from one's parents. Actually I believe that it's next to impossible for anybody arguing for an extreme position like anarcho-capitalism in the typical cult-like manner that we see to be reasonable, because doing so would require making the connection from what they're proselytizing to their own lives and processing their own feelings about authority.
- kaonashi 13y agoThere are no legal rights in the state of nature. There is no liberty in the state of nature. These things don't exist as features of the land, they're concepts created by humans to curtail specific types of human behavior.