NOT CONFUSE GOD AND NATURAL LAW Shannon, No. That isn’t quite right. Natural rig

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/01/america-is-divided-positive-vs-natural-law.htmlLETS NOT CONFUSE GOD AND NATURAL LAW

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/01/america-is-divided-positive-vs-natural-law.html

Shannon,

No. That isn’t quite right.

Natural rights were conceived as NECESSARY rights governments must respect in order for humans to flourish.

A benevolent God would not create a world where flourishing was impossible, only a world where we must observe certain rules in order to flourish. But God did not give us the rules to obey, we discovered them by trial and error. If we fail to observe those rules that we have discovered, then we will not flourish.

A right must be possible, and it must be enforceable or it cannot exist. Natural rights are enforceable by uprising or revolution, and natural rights were enumerated to construct a moral license given to the population by the church to demand from their governments, and prohibitions placed upon the Spanish in particular for their abuses in the new world.

All rights are reducible to property rights, where property includes mind, body, kin, physical property, common property and norms we have sacrificed to create. All rights then are limited to prohibitions upon others – rights are positive statements of negative prohibitions: things we must NOT do to others, and others must not do unto us. Rights are stated positively so the injured can lay claim against violators. Duties (prohibitions) are stated negatively as prohibitive laws. But whether positively or negatively stated, all rights and duties that are necessary for human flourishing (cooperation produces flourishing through the division of knowledge and labor) can be, and have been expressed as property rights.

We have constructed positive demands upon one another using commands (legislative law) not natural law (property rights) – no positive duty can exist, only negative restrictions. This is because while we can all refrain from something we cannot all supply something – that is impossible. We cannot grant someone the right to that which individuals do not have to supply him. We can only state a preference that under conditions of possibility that we will exercise that preference.

So just as legislative commands masquerade as necessary law, positive rights masquerade as necessary rights.

The charter for human rights consists of all but (I think) three statements of property rights: prohibitions on government violations of individual’s natural rights. The last three ‘positive rights’ were added to mollify the communists at the time so that they would sign the charter. But positive rights are impossible. They are merely ambitions that all governments should strive for.

The difference between the american right and left is the difference between the absolute nuclear, and nuclear families, and the responsibility for self-sustaining life (prohibition on parasitism) and the traditional and pre-traditional families where parasitism is encouraged both inside the family and across families as a means of insurance.

The uncomfortable truth is that that difference is between the moral traditions of the productive eugenic nuclear family, and the dysgenic parasitic moral impulses of other forms of family – the majority being now the dramatically parasitic single parent family.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Lviv Ukraine