Whether they were used for a purpose we all like or not, like trying Nazi's for fresh-minted crimes, the concept of natural rights are incoherent gibberish.
I think these two snippets from the Wikipedia pages from "natural rights" and "rights" respectively are a good starting point in understanding why I say that:
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Some philosophers and political scientists make a distinction between natural and legal rights. Natural rights (also called moral rights or inalienable rights) are rights which are not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs or a particular society or polity.
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Rights are legal or moral entitlements or permissions.
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Natural rights are moral entitlements "which are not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs or a particular society or polity", basically.
i.e. They are inherent entitlements.
Now the first thing you should be asking yourself (if you're not yguy, who's answer is automatically "because God sed so"), is WTF does "inherent entitlement" actually
mean. Does it mean anything at all?
How can an "entitlement" be "inherent". Inherent usually means "a quality of" and "entitlement" implies that you
ought to receive something, be it freedom or some form of treatment by man and beast.
So where, oh where, in the human body, do we see the quality of "other people ought to"-ness. How do we measure it? How do we even percieve it. The short answer is, we don't. There is no quality of oughtness that we can taste, touch, smell or hear.
Ought only comes into existence when people tell other people "you ought to" and it only carries a force equivalent to the respect or the fear that you hold for the person telling you that you ought to. Any philosopher with even the vaguest respect for actual, empirical
evidence will admit that.
So if ought is entirely a product of respect or fear for or of others, the things you ought to do cannot be the same for all people in all times, since the people you respect or fear and the things they might think you ought are different across the span of humanity, throughout history.
Thus they are self evidently
not inherent entitlements at all, they are social contracts - and since
natural rights are "not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs or a particular society or polity",
there can be no natural rights.
Of course, this has been recognised as simple common sense to a great many philosophers stretching back to the ancient world, so by way of trying to "fix" something that was never really broken (I mean, come on, its just another theory in search of evidence) countless people have wasted countless hours trying, somehow, to show that this deontological
ought logically follows from what
is (what has happened in the past).
The most notable critic of this metaphysical wankery in recent times was the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume. Wikipedia again
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Hume noted that many writers talk about what ought to be on the basis of statements about what is (is-ought problem). (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed. / with text rev. and variant readings by P. H. Nidditch. (Oxford : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1978), book III, part I, section I,469.)[citation needed] But there seems to be a big difference between descriptive statements (what is) and prescriptive statements (what ought to be). Hume calls for writers to be on their guard against changing the subject in this way without giving an explanation of how the ought-statements are supposed to follow from the is-statements. But how exactly can you derive an "ought" from an "is"? That question, prompted by Hume's small paragraph, has become one of the central questions of ethical theory, and Hume is usually assigned the position that such a derivation is impossible. (Others interpret Hume as saying not that one cannot go from a factual statement to an ethical statement, but that one cannot do so without going through human nature, that is, without paying attention to human sentiments.) Hume is probably one of the first writers to make the distinction between normative (what ought to be) and positive (what is) statements, which is so prevalent in social science and moral philosophy. G. E. Moore defended a similar position with his "open question argument", intending to refute any identification of moral properties with natural properties ("naturalistic fallacy").
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And since Humes time,
no-one has actually shown such a logical derivation.
Which brings us to Rand. Conscious of her need to bridge this gap before she could confidently claim some kind of objective, ultimately
true morality, Rand engaged in a bunch of contortions laden with unwarranted
a priori premises which she seemingly conjured out of thin air:
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Rand's ethical egoism is her most well-known position. She advocated "rational selfishness." In The Virtue of Selfishness she gave an original validation of her moral code, claiming to have bridged the infamous gap between "Is" and "Ought"—or between facts and values. She begins by asking "What are values? Why does man need them?" She argues that the concept of "value" depends upon the concept of an "alternative" in the face of which one must act. "Where no alternatives exist, no goals and no values are possible." [27] The next point in her derivation is to argue that "there is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action....It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death....It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible."[28]
All living organisms, she held, act to gain values—i.e., the items their survival requires. An organism's own life is its ultimate value. But man enters the sphere of moral values because man has free will: one does not automatically hold his own life as his ultimate value. Whether he acts to promote and fulfill his own life or not is up to him, not hard-wired into his physiology. "Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history."[29] The purpose of a moral code, Rand held, is to provide a standard of value and a code of virtues by reference to which man can achieve the values his survival requires and which enhance his life. Her standard of value is: "Man's life qua rational being," and rationality is the primary virtue of this code. The derivative virtues of her Objectivist morality are: independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, and pride—each of which she explains in some detail in "The Objectivist Ethics."
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Then declared herself winner, in much the same manner that many Internet trolls do. This is why so many Randroids automatically sound like trolls when spouting Rand.
Of course Rand's analysis can be shredded on half a dozen points, but it doesn't stop Randroids from confidently declaring her teh winner of that particular thread in philosophy, over and over again.
Here's just one, gaping hole in her argument: That the ultimate value of humans is their own self-preservation. She takes that as a given, because, you know, their life is what
gives them values. I mean that's
obvious right?
Wrong. Because "value" is just another way of saying "that which you
ought to hold dear". See it? She's slipped the conclusion into her premises. Circular argument. EPIC FAIL.
In conclusion, "natural rights", like "free will" is a term entirely without coherent meaning, a confection, a puff of contradictory smoke. It is simply a term used to assert the entitlements and obligations desired by those who presently wield power (or those seeking to sway those who wield power), without the burdonsome task of having to justify such entitlements and obligations.
The concept of
human rights as espoused by, say, the UN, may often come burdened with this same language of metaphysical fluff ("inalienable" etc) but they also carry the force of
law in the form of treaties and the consequent enforcement of those treaties in law in various countries, as well as constitutions. So the use of meaningless metaphysical phrases to preface those treaties, constitutions and laws isn't what validates those rights. Military forces and policemen with guns do. They are
social contracts, drawn up between various people and imposed on their descendants.
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