Thanks for writing this! I've always been puzzled by natural rights, so this helps explain why some liberals think they're important. Seems like they're supposed to ground the justification for political institutions and the political rights they confer. But if that's all, they're definitely not the only option, and they introduce several unnecessary theoretical costs.
First, they just seem like the wrong concept to make sense of our pre-theoretical intuition that we have obligations to people who aren't members of our political institutions. Contractualists who ground political rights in facts about the constraints of practical reasoning seem like they've got a much better story here. Liberal political institutions and their political rights are grounded in the obligations we have to one another in virtue of the our shared nature as rational agents.
Second, natural rights just seem kind of metaphysically mysterious? Like how do we come to discover that we bear them? Why do we have some rather than others? What keeps us from arbitrarily multiplying them to suit our contingent whims? And do they end up crowding out or confusing the work that political rights are supposed to do?
Would appreciate any perspective here, genuinely curious how natural/human rights people think about this stuff.
Burke said rights are simply inherited from our ancestors. They are certain bundles of privileges, liberties, and duties, transmitted through specific traditions, institutions, and customs. They emerged in the mists of time, and evolved throughout history according to latent wisdom of the community. They are not inherent in the human soul, like some mysterious metaphysical property, and any attempt to make them universal at gunpoint is disastrous, as it was during the French Revolution. I think he is more right than wrong.
I've very curious to see how you elaborate on this. It's an interesting post, I appreciate seeing you build up the framework but I wasn't always clear how that would be applied.
Reading it I couldn't always tell if my reaction would be, "yes, and . . . " or "yes, but . . ."
Mostly related to the question of how one balances rights with other concerns. I agree that it makes sense to think of rights as a category distinct from preferences or desires, and I think it makes sense to see core applications of rights as non-negotiable and yet, in practice, many cases in which rights are in play are note core to the right and do involve some element of weighing multiple applicable principles. . .
Thanks for writing this! I've always been puzzled by natural rights, so this helps explain why some liberals think they're important. Seems like they're supposed to ground the justification for political institutions and the political rights they confer. But if that's all, they're definitely not the only option, and they introduce several unnecessary theoretical costs.
First, they just seem like the wrong concept to make sense of our pre-theoretical intuition that we have obligations to people who aren't members of our political institutions. Contractualists who ground political rights in facts about the constraints of practical reasoning seem like they've got a much better story here. Liberal political institutions and their political rights are grounded in the obligations we have to one another in virtue of the our shared nature as rational agents.
Second, natural rights just seem kind of metaphysically mysterious? Like how do we come to discover that we bear them? Why do we have some rather than others? What keeps us from arbitrarily multiplying them to suit our contingent whims? And do they end up crowding out or confusing the work that political rights are supposed to do?
Would appreciate any perspective here, genuinely curious how natural/human rights people think about this stuff.
Burke said rights are simply inherited from our ancestors. They are certain bundles of privileges, liberties, and duties, transmitted through specific traditions, institutions, and customs. They emerged in the mists of time, and evolved throughout history according to latent wisdom of the community. They are not inherent in the human soul, like some mysterious metaphysical property, and any attempt to make them universal at gunpoint is disastrous, as it was during the French Revolution. I think he is more right than wrong.
I've very curious to see how you elaborate on this. It's an interesting post, I appreciate seeing you build up the framework but I wasn't always clear how that would be applied.
Reading it I couldn't always tell if my reaction would be, "yes, and . . . " or "yes, but . . ."
Mostly related to the question of how one balances rights with other concerns. I agree that it makes sense to think of rights as a category distinct from preferences or desires, and I think it makes sense to see core applications of rights as non-negotiable and yet, in practice, many cases in which rights are in play are note core to the right and do involve some element of weighing multiple applicable principles. . .