NATURAL LAW VS POSITIVE LAW (followup) Shannon, Thanks for the reply. I have a s

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/01/america-is-divided-positive-vs-natural-law.html#comment-170243ON NATURAL LAW VS POSITIVE LAW

(followup)

Shannon,

Thanks for the reply. I have a sort of job to do, and it is both easier and more educational to criticize those with whom we have small differences, than those whose ideas require vast effort to differentiate and render comparable. This means it is often more illustrative to criticize one’s allies on tertiary points than it is to make long wholesale arguments against direct opponents. So my apologies. But the end is that we must provide conservatives with the means to argue their ancient group evolutionary strategy in ratio-empirical terms, rather than the metaphorical and intuitionistic terms that they are stuck with – and which no conservative thinker has been able to use to elevate conservatism out of the subject of oft justifiable ridicule.

My objection was three fold – although obscured by my often-criticized philosophical density:

First, your article positions the choice between divinely ordained, and rationally chosen social contract. However, that I know of, there are three justificationary positions: divinely ordained (magical, authoritative and conservative), logically necessary for voluntary, peaceful, cooperation(scientific, voluntary and libertarian), and socially contractual(preferential, communal and equalitarian-socialist). (Jefferson was certainly not a Deist. Anything but.)

Second, that if we look at the data, the demographic correlations show that the origins of these different justifications reflect family structures, and family structures reflect agrarian social models (even crops), and that these persist even when immigrants migrate from the old world to the new. (See Emmanuel Todd).

Third, that the consistent thread throughout history, from the Stoics to the present, through various magian, rational and empirical expressions, does not position natural rights as equivalent to Moses’ tablets (albeit the ten commandments are translatable into an early list of property rights), but instead, that the there is an optimum natural order of things – a ‘divine order’ that we must adhere to as a defense against our hubris, and the hubris of those in power in particular if we are to flourish (cooperate peacefully) and govern beneficially. It so happens that we can capture these rules as property rights: life liberty and property. Or conversely: ‘impose no involuntary costs upon others’.

So whether we justify that optimum order as god’s will, justify it as rationally or empirically utilitarian, or abandon the prohibition on hubris with positive law (legislative commands), is largely a product of our heritage – a reproductive bias that suits our evolutionary strategy, and which quite possibly exists as a bias in our genes. And while there appears to be little chance of persuading others to change the justification they use for their arguing in favor of their preferences, the entire planet has adopted the language of science as the universal language of truthful speech. And if indeed the only difference between the allegorical and ratio-scientific arguments is the means of justification, then it is in our interests to argue using the universal language of truthful speech, and maintain metaphors for the pedagogy of our offspring for whom such language is inaccessible.

As such the debate is between the deist(ancient), scientific(modern), and 20th century (postmodern) strategy, and the deist and the scientific both retain the prohibition on hubris, while the postmodern (leftist) abandons it.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to use your post as an example. I hope you appreciate my good intentions.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Lviv Ukraine