Natural rights: Do they exist? Where do they come from? Are they relevant today?

The topic of natural rights came up recently on an off-topic twist on a thread in the religion forum. I think it deserves serious discussion and wasn’t getting it in the hot mess that thread had become. I hope maybe some intelligent HF viewers with time on their hands will be interested in joining in.

Most of us hear about natural or inalienable rights in civics, history ,or American government classes when we study the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson, the author, got his ideas from the English philosopher John Locke, whom he summarized pretty well in the Declaration of Independence, which reads: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—-That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Stirring words, and an important part of our heritage. But what is their practical significance today? Jefferson tells us that we are endowed with these rights by their Creator. We live in a skeptical age, when moral absolutes and even God Himself have been called into question. Can atheists and agnostics believe in natural rights? If not, is there an alternative foundation for them that secular folks can accept? Or has the whole basis for them become outmoded, relegating them to mere Fourth of July rhetoric. A guy in my community tried to defend a pot charge on grounds that the law was depriving him of his natural right of pursuit of happiness. Didn’t get him far. Some scholars think natural rights don’t exist. What do you think?

 

I think some definitions are in order. A legal right can be defined as simply " a claim recognizable and enforceable at law" [In re estate of FOLWELL, 68 N.J. Eq. 728, 731 (N.J. 1905); Atchison & NR Co.v. Baty, 6 Neb.40. We can distinguish rights from other legal relationships with which they are often confused. A privilege is an exemption or immunity granted to particular individuals from a duty; e.g., executive privilege exempting the chief executive from disclosing private communications with advisors, or the qualified immunity of police officers from being sued for acts committed in "good faith and reasonable belief". A power is official authority to do something within a given jurisdiction.--in the case of governments. Governments can also have rights--e.g., the right to enter into contracts and sue over them. These relationships can be summarized in Hohfeld's widely used schema:
Hohfeld, W.N., Fundamental legal conceptions applied in judicial reasoning, in
W.W. Cook, (ed.), Fundamental Legal Conceptions Applied in Judicial Reasoning and
Other Legal Essays, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923, pp. 23–64
The Hohfeld System of Fundamental Legal Concepts - Wikisource, the free online library
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335843409_Understanding_Hohfeld_and_Formalizing_Legal_Rights_The_Hohfeldian_Conceptions_and_Their_Conditional_Consequences#:~:text=Hohfeld’s analysis (Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in,fundamental theory in AI&Law and normative multi-agent systems.
So far, I'm sure this is all very boring and excessively technical, but believe it or not I've recently had heated arguments over it on HF, so I thought I'd better clarify my thinking early on.

"Natural rights are those that are not dependent on the laws or customs of any particular culture or government, and so are universal,fundamental, and inalienable (cannot be repealed by human laws).
Natural rights and legal rights - Wikipedia.
What Are Natural Rights? The Concept and Key Examples
Natural Rights

Where do these rights come from? Supposedly they come natural law i.e.,from God thru nature and/or from the requisites for effective functioning or flourishing, and are deduced by reason from looking at nature, including human nature. Natural law here refers to a set of moral principles governing human conduct and constraining human laws. For fundamentalist Christians unacquainted with Catholic theology, it's important to understand we're not talking about the Ten Commandments here. Those are revealed commands that fit nicely into what is called a legal positivist framework which sees all law as commands from a sovereign. Christians who believe in natural law think God communicates His will to us in two ways: revealed commandments in scripture (not natural law) and deductions from observing God's creation, nature: the birds and the bees, etc. It is only the latter that are regarded as natural law. For example, in Romans 1:19-29, Paul tells us that " ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God." Some (not all) theologians find in this Paul's "natural theology".

Natural law is a term most non-Catholics encounter in a different context with a different meaning: in science classes. A natural law, or law of science, is a law relating to observed regularities in natural phenomena: e.g., laws of motion, laws of thermodynamics, etc. This is, of course, a completely different meaning of the term. But it does serve to remind us that actions have consequences, and that life is real and earnest. If we expresses gravity metaphorically, we might have it say: "thou shalt not jump off the top of the Empire State Building, for if thou doest thou shalt make a big splash on Broadway." Humans need to be reminded that there are limits to what they can do with themselves, each other, or their institutions without experiencing adverse outcomes. This is also the point of moral natural law.

 

Now for a short history lesson on the origin, development of natural rights thinking before 1776.

Ancient and Medieval Roots. Natural Law. The idea of natural law can be traced to the Aristotle and the Greco-Roman Stoics. Aristotle assumed there was a proper function, purpose, or natural tendency for everything, and that it could be figured out by human reason. In the Rhetoric, he says there is a universal law of Nature" that provides the basis for natural justice. "For there really is, as every one to some extent divines, a natural justice and injustice that is binding on all men, even on those who have no association or covenant with each other." The Greco-Roman Stoics developed this notion farther. Some scholars attribute this to the rise of large empires, making universality an easier assumption. They tended to be pantheists, finding God everywhere in nature. During the late Middle Ages, Saint Thomas Aquinas developed a natural law theology combining biblical teachings with the wisdom of Aristotle--Aristotelian Thomism, they called it. By this mode of thinking people ought to know gay is not okay, and abortion and contraception are wrong, just by observing the birds and the bees and recognizing that the natural function of sex is to produce offspring. This became the official theology of the Catholic Church. It's the basis of their objection to contraception, abortions and (along with certain passages in scripture0 homosexual practice.
But the focus at that time was not on individual rights. Rights in the Middle Ages tended to be communal--based on customary law relating to a person's station in society: nobility, clergy, peasants, etc. Instead of individuals with rights to this and that, rights were though of as rights that people be able to perform their roles in society. And they carried responsibilities along with the rights. One of the most celebrated developments in rights, which became influential on the American revolutionaries, adoption of the Magna Carta in England in 1215. The Magna Carta expressed the demands of English barons on King John, and they were not based on natural rights of humanity, but rather on customary rights of Englishmen, especially the aristocracy.

The Enlightenment: Rise of Natural Rights and the Social Contract. The aftermath of the Crusades and the bubonic plague and new commercial opportunities saw the dissolution of feudal society and the advent of a new social order based on a rising commercial middle class, a new individualism, and the rise of nation-states under more centralized governments. Prevailing political theory took a new turn, leading to natural rights philosophy, based on social contract. Machiavelli shifted the focus from morality to the acquisition and exercise of power, and political philosophy took on a more secular tone. New scientific discoveries by Galileo and Newton made thinkers more aware of the regularities of nature, leading them to view God as a more hands-off figure who designed a mechanistic universe to run pretty much on its own without a lot of interference from Above. This new mood of (possibly irrational) rational exuberance ushered in the period known as The Enlightenment,in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--characterized by almost unbridled confidence in human reason and a new concern for the individual human being. Natural law thinking took a new turn:natural rights philosophy.

This new version emphasized the individual, and attached paramount importance to social contract as the vehicle by which individuals related to one another other and their governments. Natural rights were conceived of as something like personal possessions, and ones which could never legitimately be taken away or surrendered. One of the earliest influential examples of this turn was Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, written in 1651 at the end of the English Civil War. Hobbes thought that the basic human drive was self-preservation, and that in the State of Nature, a hypothetical situation antedating society and governent, existence was a "war of all against all", and life was "nasty, brutish, and short." Under these circumstances, humans decided to surrender their rights to an absolute monarch who could protect them from each other. They agreed to obey this sovereign so long as he could protect their natural right to life.

The social contract theorist who was most influential on the signers of the Declaration of Independence was not Hobbes but John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Government, which was published in 1689, the year following the so-called Glorious Revolution which replaced the last of the Stuart monarchs with William and Mary, and the same year in which Parliament passed the English Bill of Rights setting forth the conditions for the new monarchs to reign--making clear that monarchy was henceforth contingent on consent of the governed, represented by Parliament, and providing for many of the rights that later showed up in the U.S. Bill of Rights. I should make clear, though, that the English Bill of Rights was not natural law. Locke's social contract theory is.

Locke's theory is well-summarized, if not plagiarized, by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, quoted earlier. Individuals have rights by virtue of being human before they form governments or civil society. In addition to their human characteristics, they acquire property rights by mixing their labor with the land. The rights, as stated by Jefferson, were to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Locke placed more emphasis on property, which showed up in the U.S. Constitution's fifth amendment as "Life, liberty and property." But this state of nature has its drawbacks; the rights aren't secure, leading to disputes. So governments are instituted "to secure these rights". If government is no longer up to the job, or is actively interfering with the rights, people have a right to get rid of it and get a new one. It might be noted that revolution is the approved remedy. That would certainly be a radical theory if taken seriously. The Declaration of Independence has certainly been influential in our thinking about rights and government. However, the late Justice Scalia observed that the Declaration of Independence ... "is not a legal prescription conferring powers upon the courts". The document is an important part of our traditions and it shapes public attitudes about rights and the role of government. That isn't chopped liver. But the only practical r if themedy it offers if the government really gets out of hand is revolution. I should also mention that, contrary to some opinions I've recently encountered, the rights provided in the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to our Constitution, are not, by any means natural and inalienable rights. They are enforceable law, and can be amended like other parts of the constitution, although it seems unlikely they ever will be.

The Declaration of Independence preserved in the traditions of the new American republic a mode of thinking that was soon to go radically out of style. The French Revolution, with its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen , by the revolutionary French government in 1789, represents the culmination of natural rights thinking. It boldly proclaimed "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good." They have certain natural rights to property, to liberty to life, and other rights spelled out in twenty-seven articles and the role of government is to secure these rights. The excesses and atrocities of the Reign of Terror, however, brought Enlightenment under a cloud and contributed to the rapid demise of natural rights philosophy. In a sense, the U.S. Declaration of Independence is a relic of a bygone mentality. Reason gave way to romanticism and natural rights came under withering criticism. But in the U.S. it lingered on in the press and Fourth of July speeches. Professor David Ritchie of St. Andrews U.noted in 1894: "Though disclaimed by almost all our more careful writers on politics and ethics, it yet remains a commonplace of the newspaper and the platform, not only in the United States of America, where the theory may be said to form part of the national creed, but in this country (Britain), where it was assailed a century ago by both Burke and Bentham." Preface, Natural Rights: A Criticism of Some Political and Ethical Conceptions

Again, I apologize for what might seem a tedious rehashing of the past, but much of what I said is in response to confusion I encountered on a previous thread in the religion section.

 

CRITICS OF NATURAL RIGHTS

1. Edmond Burke. The first criticisms of natural rights theory emerged in England during the French Revolution. Edmond Burke, highly esteemed by conservatives today, attacked the excesses of natural rights ideology he saw in the French Revolution.
In Reflections on the Revolutions in France, he attacked the version of natural rights philosophy he saw at work there, the Social Contract theory of Rousseau--especially the escalating and extravagant claims being advanced by their self-styled champions. He attacked natural rights, or "abstract rights" as he called them, because he thought they were a prescription for anarchy. "Men," he said, “have no right to what is not reasonable, and to what is not for their benefit.” And "Indeed in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction. The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity: and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable to man’s nature, or to the quality of his affairs." Burke was a defender of the American Revolution , because he saw its claims based not on the natural rights of man but on the customary rights of Englishmen, expressed in the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.. Did Edmund Burke Support the American Revolution? ~ The Imaginative Conservative. "Burke believed that the only political or social structures that we could trust were the ones that were able to stand the test of time."https://www.foundershistoryclub.com/post/edmund-burke-and-the-american-revolution

2. Jeremy Bentham. Likewise, Jeremy Bentham criticized natural rights ("anarchical fallacies"), as he called them for their anarchical potential, since their vague, open-ended character provided infinite grounds for claims of grievance and revolt. He also called them "nonsense on stilts", because they were really intangible social constructs, mischievous fictions, figments of the human imagination. For Bentham, there can be no rights, no justice, and no law anterior to society without a legislature to define and maintain such things. In a state of nature,, if such a condition ever existed or could exist, no one would have a right to anything, and it would be simply one big free-for all. According to Bentham, "rights are “the fruits of the law, and of the law alone. There are no rights without law--no rights contrary to the law--no rights anterior to the law.” This position became known as "legal positivism', developed in excruciating detail by Bentham's friend and fellow utilitarian John Austin. Bentham did recognize the value of morality, not to be confused with the law. He developed the moral theory known as utilitarianism, grounded on a human natural instinct he could understand, hedonism, the pleasure principle: that which gives pleasure is good, that which give pain is bad, and government should promote the greatest happiness (i.e., pleasure) for the greatest number of its constituents. But morality was one thing, the law another. The only proper way to promote the public interest was to elect officials who would change the law to do so. As Bentham's associate John Austin charmingly put it: You may think this is a foolish law, an unjust law, and you may be right. But if you think it is not the law, we can prove you wrong by hanging you up by the neck."

3. Modern Critics. If natural rights are dead, there are certainly plenty of writers who continue to beat the dead horse.
John O/ Nelson (1989), "Are There Inalienable Rights?" Philosophy 64: 519-24.
https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/upload_documents/Valentini NYU Rights.pdf
Natural Rights Don't Exist | Brad Taylor
Human Rights Do Not Exist!
Natural Rights Don't Exist
James Coffin(2013). My Word: Inalieneable rights simply do not Exist" https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/os-xpm-2013-06-26-os-ed-inalienable-rights-myword-062513-20130625-story.html
Do Inalienable Rights Exist? Part 1
Do Inalienable Rights Exist? Part 2
I won't attempt to summarize these. They're there for your purusal. Suffice it to say that most of them see natural rights as based either on claims of divine origin or attributable to some other metaphysical source equally suspect to modern empirical minds. To scholars influenced by postwar logical positivism, natural rights are not empirically verifiable and are therefore nonsense. And to scholars influenced by later traditions of postmodernism and deconstructionism, claims of natural rights, like all values claims, are simply self-serving constructs vailid only within the intellectual circles in which they are used. That and concern about the mischief the doctrine of natural rights can have in the hands of demagogues and deluded or confused citizens. (For a sad example of the latter, see the What is religion? thread on this forum.)

Does the notion of natural inalienable rights have any redeeming social value? I think yes, but that will have to wait for a future post. Meanwhile, please feel free to jump in.

 

A right without the availability of remediation is not a right. Consequently, we have far fewer rights than we claim to have.

The concept of natural rights presupposes an afterlife or reincarnation and the existence of a just god or just gods. Government and the consent of the governed have never been able to offer or secure remediation following violation of natural rights, and they never will, not during one life cycle of mortal flesh.

Shared values are not the same as natural rights. Realistically, the most we can assert and the best we can hope for in this life and in this Earthly domain is a very limited set of shared values with extremely imprecise and ineffective means of remediation.

For those who believe in something more, natural rights are possible, but the court of relevant jurisdiction is not to be found in a building of wood, concrete, brick, stone, steel, or glass.

The notion of natural rights has value, but it's aspirational and outside our mortal grasp. In the same way, the concepts of peace, love, justice, and mercy are worthy objectives or guideposts, even if they'll never be fully realized in mortal existence.

 

Just as the French Revolution led to second thoughts about natural rights, so did the Nazi experience lead to second thoughts about their complete rejection. Lon Fuller of the Harvard Law School (The Morality of Law) argued that legal positivism conditioned generations of German lawyers to accept as law anything that came von höher ober with the right forms and signatures as law, no matter how unintelligible or unenforceable it might be. He argued that Nazi Germany was really a lawless society because, despite its fetish for "law and order" and the accompanying formalities, no one could feel safe at night that there wouldn't be a knock at the door by the Gestpo for some unknown reason. There were secret "laws", retroactive laws, and other monstrosities in the name of law which violated the basic function of law: regulating human conduct by rules.
That function has to be performed for any society to avoid chaos. Fuller argued that there were eight characteristics anything had to have to legitimately be considered to be a law--all of them relating to its ability to be considered a rule and to be effective in regulating human conduct. To the degree it failed to meet those criteria, it was less than legal, and if it failed to have any of them it was not a law at all. We should note that Fuller is not talking about the loftier moral principles of Liberty and Justice here, but simply the characteristics needed to perform a social function.

He argues that distinct individual liberties do exist, but that they derive, not from some abstract right to liberty as such, but from the right to equal concern and respect itself. He thus denies that liberty and equality are conflicting ideals.

Similarly, other writers reconsidered utilitarianism. The greatest happiness for the greatest number was fine, but what about minorities. Could they be robbed or abused or sent to gas chambers for the satisfaction of the greatest number? This led John Rawls (A Theory of Social Justice) to return to that antique seventeenth century device of the State of Nature to figure out what kinds of ground rules people would opt for as a condition for being members of a society, not knowing what position they would actually . He did not, as some of the natural rights theorists may have, believe that there ever was such a State of Nature in the real world. It's only a metaphor to get at the concept of what would be fair. He thought that under such conditions, people would agree to two principles: (1).Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others; and (2).Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both –

• To the greatest benefit of the least advantaged.
• Attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.

W.G. Runciman, (Relative Deprivation and Social Justice) using the same methodology, thought they would also agree that nobody could be wiped out economically, so he added a social safety net.

Then we have Ronald Dworin, Taking Rights Seriously. After criticizing the legal positivists' theory of legal rights, he advances a theory based on Rawls' approach, arguing that the most fundamental political right is the right of each individual to equal respect and concern from those governing him. He acknowledges that
individual liberties do exist, but that they derive, not from some abstract right to liberty, but from the right to equal concern and respect .

I tend to agree with these more limited renderings of natural rights theory, as an alternative to those relying on metaphysics and hot air.

 

Wow! Somebody actually responded to my ramblings! I don't think that the limited "natural rights" I just mentioned while you were posting this require an afterlife, reincarnation, gods, or metaphysics. But they do require that people take them seriously. The rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence---life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--can't be taken to court for enforcement. That raises the question how they can be considered rights, since as Hobbes put it "contracts without the sword are breath." If belief in them is widely shared in a society, they are part of the political culture in which governments operate, and part of the expectations we have of our government. And there are certainly outer limits beyond which a government or society can't go without risking collapse. Iran and Communist China recently got a taste of what happens when people are pushed to their limit. And I think that the idea of inalienable human rights based on the conditions for human flourishing provides grounding for the rights recognized in the Declaration of Human Rights. Otherwise, they provide inspiring Fourth of July rhetoric, and ammunition for politicians and true believers.

 

Do they exist?
Of course they exist, a better more appropriate question is 'Are they being protected'

Where do they come from?
The fact we are alive.
They preexist any government.

Are they relevant today?
Yes of course unless you believe someone can kill you with impunity?

What makes you think they dont exist?

 

Natural Rights: By natural rights we mean those rights which were enjoyed by the people
even before the origin of the state. These rights were enjoyed by the people in the state of
nature. Such as,

1. Rights of life: From the ancient age people are living as a social being. The origin of
state was not invaded then. Keep his life it is the number one right of all. Not only
human being but also all the livings have this right. We should ensure this right to all.

2. Rights to property: One can have property & he has this right to secure his property.
Ensure the security of ones property is one of the major duties of the state.

3. Rights to freedom, etc. these rights people enjoyed before the origin of state, for this
these are the natural rights.


https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/upload_documents/Valentini NYU Rights.pdf



Im not sure how you could get to a point to claim that they do not exist?

Governments are created to 'protect' those rights that you seem to think are imaginary.

Care to explain?

 

I have gone through great leangths to explain this to you complete with citations!

Natural law refers to laws of morality ascertainable through human reason. Moral philosophers have posited that such laws are antecedent and independent of positive, man-made law. The understanding of natural law is varied and complex, dependent upon the role morality plays in determining the authority of legal norms and rules. The relationship between natural law and the First Amendment is equally complex. In general, natural law, as a “higher” law, forms the foundation on which the First Amendment rests.

Natural law is the foundation for legal traditions

The medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas was among those who concluded that a man-made law is valid only insofar as its content conforms to the content of the natural law. An unjust law is therefore not really a law. This gives individuals who believe that laws are unjust a way to oppose them. Religious beliefs have long been cited as justification for disobeying laws.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. invoked natural law in opposing racial segregation. (Public domain)


Natural Law By Dale Mineshema-Lowe

 

Like I already explained no law is legitimate in the US unless first it conforms and is 'subject to' to natural law, in other words natural law has a higher standing than any other law created by the government.

Natual law was created before the existence of any government!

Natural law is not created by checking a statute first, a statute is created by checking a the natural laws first.

The natural laws are above the constitution and above the government itself.

This is where I think you run into trouble:






How Natural Law Informs Our Understanding of the Constitution

Topics: Federalism & Separation of Powers
Sponsors: Federalism & Separation of Powers Practice Group

Natural law is the foundation upon which the spirit of the Constitution is built.

Many of the ideas and terms of art used in the Constitution cannot truly be understood without a deep understanding of the natural law philosophy the Founders held.

It wasn’t until the “New Deal” era in the early 20th century that many lawyers and politicians abandoned these ideas.

In many ways, the common law and the natural law are entwined, but they are not the same. The common law was explained by judges over many generations creating a well-known “common” set of rules. The judges of that era intended to use the natural law to determine what those common law rules were. The common law is explained by judges, but the natural law is the nature of people rather than whatever any judge says.

A core part of the natural law are “natural rights.” Natural rights do not comprise all of the natural law, but perhaps they are the most important part. Natural rights specify what acts one person cannot morally do to another. [which is where this ties into religion] They do not specify what a person should do. The invocation in the Declaration of Independence of the right to “life, liberty and the pursuant of happiness” is one way of expressing these natural rights. Another is the rights of “life, liberty and property” in the Fifth Amendment. [emphasis added]

These natural rights are rights which everyone has (“all men are created equal”) and do not overlap with other people’s rights. No person has a right to harm another as that means one person’s right interferes with another person’s right. That would not be equal. Nor do they guarantee any specific instance of property or service; rather, they guarantee the right to purchase property or services. If two people had the right to the same piece of property, then their rights would interfere with each other, and that never occurs in natural rights. Likewise, a right to a specific service would interfere with the provider of that service’s control over their own work.

While we can speak of natural rights at a high level of generality, like the right to liberty, there are derivative rights that are included within that. The right to freedom of speech, for instance, is a subset of the broader right to liberty. The right to choose when to go to bed or what clothes to wear are all rights within the broader right to liberty. This is true for the other natural rights as well. For instance, the right to property includes the subset rights to possession, sell, subdivide, lease, mortgage, to exclude others, among others.

It is with this understanding that we can start to see what the Ninth Amendment was designed to do. The Founders knew that there were an infinite number of subset rights within the broader right to liberty and many of the other natural rights. The right to freedom of speech is one of them, but so is the right to jump up and down or to sing a song. It would have been impossible to list all of a person’s natural rights, the best we can do is speak in broad generalities like the right to “liberty” in the Fifth Amendment.

The Ninth Amendment recognizes that there are rights “retained by the people.” The Ninth Amendment doesn’t create these rights, they are natural rights which pre-exist government. But the Founders wanted to provide explicit protections for at least some of these natural rights (like the freedom of speech), out of extra caution that a tyrannical government could improperly ignore these very important natural rights.

The Ninth Amendment says that enumerating certain rights in the Constitution, like the right to freedom of speech, does not mean the other natural rights are not just as protected as they were before freedom of speech was specifically spelled out. Not only can the existence of these other rights not be “denied” because they were not specifically mentioned; they cannot even be disparaged. The prohibition on disparaging these rights means they cannot be given a lower level of protection just because they were not specifically mentioned. Judges cannot, for instance, strongly protect the freedom of speech because it is mentioned in the Bill of Rights, but give very weak protection to the right to sing because it wasn’t mentioned.

That doesn’t mean that everything someone could call a “right” is protected by the Ninth Amendment. Only those rights “retained by the people” which referred to the natural rights were recognized as protected rights.

These ideas around natural law and natural rights are critically important to properly understanding the meaning of the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights.

The Bill of Rights is a great example of natural rights in action.

The natural rights section of the Bill of Rights creates no rights what so ever!
It memorializes the our rights created since the beginning of mankind as a covenant between the people and the government.
You seem to have the strange idea that natural rights and positive law are the same thing, they are not.

Why a Bill of Rights?

 

Of course they exist? There seems to be a difference of opinion on that, making "of course" inappropriate. why you think they exist? An assertion isn't good enough.

As you say, that's a fact. But how does it translate into a right? Are you committing the naturalistic fallacy, making in "is" into an "ought"?Naturalistic fallacy - Wikipedia

Oh? Evidence?

I don't believe someone can kill me with impunity, because we have laws against homicide in every state and the District of Columbia. These are criminal statutes, not natural law. I don't think the Declaration of Independence will do me much good in that regard.

I actually think they do exist, but not in the absolute form you do. See the last section of my post. [/QUOTE]

 

the civil war proves beyond a shadow of doubt that the government usurped the right of the people to abolish it!
If if had not we would have US south and US north!

 

All law, as in ALL LAW was expected to be created UNDER natural law, as a subset 'under' natural law.
ALL LAW that is not a subset of natural law is an abomination and repugnant to the constitution.

 

Yeah, but I wasn't convinced. What you've given us is partisan propaganda by the outfit that gave us the three perjurers on the Supreme Court. Some of it is factual, but I won't waste my time trying to sort fact from fiction.

 

Ah, save your Confedrate dollars. South is gonna rise again!

 

What a remarkable statement! You're living in the past, at least as early as the late eighteenth century. Time has passed you by. When you can learn to provide rational arguments supported by evidence instead of Delphic pronouncements, you might be more persuasive.

 

Fact of the matter is they stole your natural rights from you?

Thats a fact!

Equity law is derived from old English common law, when courts used their discretion to apply justice in accordance with natural law. Equity law supersedes common law and statute law when there is a conflict between the two and neither can appropriately bring the correct verdict.

Equity Law Explained - Free Legal Resource on UpCounsel
https://www.upcounsel.com › equity-law
As you can see natural law is adjudicated in equity NOT law!

Equity has been abolished, natual law has been stolen from the people and they are none the wiser!


Is there equity law in USA?

The federal courts got rid of law/equity separation with the adoption of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938. Today, only three states still have separate courts for law and equity. Delaware still obtains a Court of Chancery and is a main reason for the incorporation practices there.

Equity Law Explained - Free Legal Resource on UpCounsel
https://www.upcounsel.com › equity-law

Few people understand the law as it was intended to be and how it actually is.

So far all I have seen you post is what the corrupt justice system has become, not its intent.

There used to be both equity courts for natural law disputes which trumped civil law, and that has been abolished, so not your natural rights no longer exist under the corrupt system.

Did they exist? ABSOLUTELY!


More:

Is equity natural law?

NATURAL EQUITY. That which is founded in natural justice, in honesty and right, and which arises ex aequo et bono. It corresponds precisely with the definition of justice or natural law, which is a constant and perpetual. will to give to every man what is his.

Natural equity - Legal Dictionary
https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com › Natural+e...

What is the purpose of equity in law?

Creation of the equity as a system of law was to serve as a means through which a legal system could strike the balance between the rule-making process and the need to achieve fair results in individual and separate circumstances (Megha K., 2008).Sep 21, 2021

Reasons for the Creation of Equity and its Common Law Differences
https://www.lawteacher.net › free-law-essays › equity-law


What is an example of natural law?





A well-accepted example of natural law in our society is that it is wrong for one person to kill another person.

Natural Law in Ethics - Investopedia
https://www.investopedia.com › terms › natural-law


Why is equity important in government?


Equity is one interpretation of fairness or justice. “Equity” means people should be treated uniquely by public policy to compensate for different circumstances and consequent need for help from government. Equity is commonly associated with equality in outcomes.

Equity - Government Finance Officers Association
https://www.gfoa.org › equity

 

yes legal corruption has passed me by!

Logically: If natural law does not exist then the USA cant exist since its built on it!

 

"Natural law is a theory in ethics and philosophy that says that human beings possess intrinsic values that govern their reasoning and behavior."

Morals IOW 'Religion'!

Remember? Durkheim? From my "What is Religion" thread?