And no, you are wrong - your right not be attacked is based on morality, you say "attacking someone is wrong" - there is no law in nature preventing this.
But you made no point for your argument - just stepping through mine with comments.
You are mixing morality with justice, which (in the modern world) is based on rights. "Attacking someone is wrong" is a moral statement, it puts the focus and the obligation of individuals to keep moral behavior. My right not to be attacked is not based on moral and not dependent on the morality or the beliefs of any other people, it is based on justice, a social contract that declare a set of a societal or universal rights granted to every individual.
The very first thing a group does when organized is to protect themselves from attack. They do this because it works. We've evolved that way, which makes it a law of nature for humans.
Communist rights, however, are not laws of nature because they do not work with humans. Humans are not beehives.
But the most compelling argument for "natural rights" is observing how well societies work that enforce them, and how well they work when other systems of rights are tried. The evidence is pretty clear.
Your first paragraph describes a group sharing a common will and organisation based on natural instinct (like a hive of bees), your second paragraph disputes this organisation as a group for humans, decide for one it can’t be both ways.
Oh, it can be both ways and is both ways. See my last sentence again, about the compelling evidence that humans thrive with their rights being protected, while a beehive thrives from being a perfect communist society.
Communism requires people to behave like bees in a beehive, and that will never work no matter how fervently one believes in communism and no matter how much coercion is used to force people to be good communists.
Your mashing togehter things without any coherent explanation what you mean. Also you fail to provide a simple example beyond "the evidence is clear" you don't even say what evidence you're refering to.
Communism works for bees, it does not work for humans, because humans have not evolved into a beehive.
We did not evolve with private property rights thus, by your reasoning, those are not "natural rights". I am at a loss in trying to understand what you are saying. It seem like you are trying to argue for capitalism but arguments that you give seem to favor socialism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_right... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_property
Natural or universal rights does not require theism. Robert Nozick is famous proponent of the secular based position that property is a natural right.
Nozick's position on the existence natural rights is simply not grounded. He appeals to intuition and to the reader's morality to appeal for their existence, but he doesn't (and cannot) actually deduce their existence once he forgoes theism. He makes a few appeals to Kant, but they obviously cannot be sufficient, Kant's conditions are merely necessary. I'm very confused by your reference to Nozick on a discussion about the grounding of natural rights when Nozick himself admits that he cannot justify them - he simply assumes Locke, which himself uses a theistic argument, in ASU. If you want, I can get the quote, but I don't have time to skim it until I'm home from work.
At the end of the day, secular natural rights is an intuitive and appealing but ungrounded position that cannot be logically justified, hence why it is threatened by theism. It is no wonder that positive rights and social right theory only really emerged after the Renaissance.
Hume's original text describing the is-ought problem is specifically targeting justification of ethics on god. Laws that no one is ought to abide by are no laws but nonsense.
Is murder immoral because god hate murder, or do god hate murder because it is immoral?
> At the end of the day, secular natural rights is an intuitive and appealing but ungrounded position that cannot be logically justified
Many will argue that no moral theory can be logically justified, and that the search for logical justification is category error
> Is murder immoral because god hate murder, or do god hate murder because it is immoral?
We agree here, but that isn't how religion solves the problem. Religious laws are also enforced by threats in the afterlife and violence in the present life, not merely by reason, so they do not need to solve the is-ought problem like secular laws do. Of course, religious law has other problems.
> Many will argue that no moral theory can be logically justified, and that the search for logical justification is category error
I agree completely, hence why it is impossible to derive rights that are logically justified without an appeal to God. The comment I was replying to claimed there were logically justified rights which have to follow from logically justified moral theories unless they are decreed from beyond reason, and since the latter is a category error, so is the former.
All attempts at changing human nature have failed, and it is human nature from whence rights are derived.
Parents with zero or one child believe that human nature is conferred from the parents. Those with 2+ children know that it is inherent.
You are mixing law with moral/ethics. Secular law doesn't have is-ought problem, it is enforced by the state law enforcement forces. Pressure to abide to the laws doesn't entail or justify their morality.
> I agree completely, hence why it is impossible to derive rights that are logically justified without an appeal to God. The comment I was replying to claimed there were logically justified rights which have to follow from logically justified moral theories unless they are decreed from beyond reason, and since the latter is a category error, so is the former.
It wasn't. It was arguing for inherent rights. The claim for inherent rights can be justified. It can't be justified by logic just like it cannot be proved mathematically. But it can be justified ethically using reason.
Yeah, we did. The concept of "mine" appears very early in children.
Attempts to raise children from birth as good communists have never worked. Nobody has ever managed to indoctrinate people into communal behavior. Even the die hard communists in the USSR still participated in the black market - this was tolerated because even the elites used it.
It turns out that human nature is not very malleable.
No we did not.
> The concept of "mine" appears very early in children.
The concept of "mine" also exists in socialism. How have you come to the conclusion that when a child says "mine" that it is referring to the capitalist notion of private property?
> Nobody has ever managed to indoctrinate people into communal behavior.
Are you denying the existence of families now? Humans evolved and spread in small familial groups which practiced communal behavior.
> Even the die hard communists in the USSR still participated in the black market - this was tolerated because even the elites used it.
What point are you trying to make whit this?
> It turns out that human nature is not very malleable.
If it wasn't malleable we wouldn't have capitalism as evidenced by early human history. While you at it why don't you tell us what human nature is, because there doesn't seem to be any consensus on it and you seem so confident in using it that you must have a ready definition of it.
Nope, even your shoes officially belong to the collective. I was told this by a former subject of the USSR.
> family
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, children are not fully formed humans, and have only a subset of adult rights. Families have evolved to deal with this issue. Extending the family to society does not work.
> why don't you tell us what human nature is
Two excellent books on the topic:
"The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley https://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/0...
"Noble Savages" by Napoleon Chagnon https://www.amazon.com/Noble-Savages-Dangerous-Yanomamo-Anth...
I can sum it up with human nature is our evolved behavior, rather than learned behavior.
The laws of nature do not include any rights, unless there's some new physics I'm not aware of.
> But the most compelling argument for "natural rights" is observing how well societies work that enforce them, and how well they work when other systems of rights are tried. The evidence is pretty clear.
This is an argument from morality. You start with the premise that a good societal outcome is morally good and then use that to justify the rights you advocate for.
You fundamentally cannot make an argument for what something should be like without resorting to morality. Without it, you can only make arguments on what things are.
I said how well societies work, and have also used words like "thrive" and "prosperous". We have evolved to be that way, it's our local optima just like beehives have evolved a different local optima.
> you can only make arguments on what things are.
And that's exactly what I did. Humans starve to death under communism - every time it has been tried. Nobody starves due to loose morals.