Originally Posted by
law dawg
What is Natural Law (upper case)? How is it different than natural law?
Please re-read my explanation (re: Natural Law vs.
law of the jungle) and/or check
wikipedia's or
SEP's entries if the distinctions still aren't clear.
It is a human concept. We made it up.
Repeating yourself does not sufficiently refute my point about discovery vs. creating. Ex.: Gravity. Was this a phenomenon discovered by men, or is it a concept we just "made up?"
My point is you pretend these "rights" are somehow independent of human understanding. They are not.
Pretending is saying things you don't mean or believing in things you don't really understand. There's no pretending on my part.
You said animals have no rights because they cannot conceptualize them. Before you said children have rights even though they could not conceptualize them... Which is it?
You are equivocating about the sense of animal --
genus vs.
differentia -- as well as dropping context about each statement.
For the sake of clarity, I'll make myself explicit: All humans are animals, but not all animals are humans.
As for children and the
basis for rights considerations:
Originally Posted by
essxjay
Liberty is a property of man, and exists independently of one's ability to conceptualize it. Otherwise, the mentally infirm, children and those temporarily incapacitated would not have the same basis for rights considerations that normal human adults do.
Originally Posted by law_dawg
My point is we made the whole thing up.
Names and labels and symbols and language, of course, are made up by men, but facts of nature are not. Perhaps you think I'm conflating the two when I speak about "rights" but I've been as precise in my writing as I'm capable of. Your claim that rights are just a social construct does not square with my understanding of man's nature.
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<@:-)> We should probably take this offline unless Cholula or VPescado want to bother with detaching our (very off-topic) exchange for dispatch to OMNIville. I'm happy to continue this via PM. <\@:-)>