of course not, blenders and lamp ownership is not recognized as a natural right by the constitution. and leftwing control freaks don't try to ban those things because liberals tend to own as many lamps and blenders as do those of us who support freedom
of course not, blenders and lamp ownership is not recognized as a natural right by the constitution.
A "natural right"? By that do you mean this: Life, Liberty and Property. There are certain rights that NO government can override. A natural right to life, liberty and property. The right to property is a natural right because it is Pre-Political. The only constraint in nature is that we cannot give up our natural rights. Nor can we take them from somebody else. Is that the argument? This is from John Locke, and Locke was a heavy influence on the thinking of our founders. I get that. Locke says, “For men, being all the workmanship of one omnipotent maker, they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one anothers pleasure. You can’t give up your own rights, because they aren’t actually yours. You’re a creature of God, and they don’t belong to you. Gods property right exists a priori to yours.
“The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it which obliges everyone: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind , who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions. “ John Locke.
How can there be a right to private property even before there is a government?
Locke says, “Everyman has a property in his own person. This, nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are property his.” Sounds pretty Libertarian. Since you subscribe to Natural Law theory,you would be a naturalist, and naturalists are people who think that understanding nature and understanding human nature is the key to political theorizing. I mean, you are using "natural law" as the basis for your argument so you must agree with it.
Locke also says, No legitimate government can violate our natural rights. However…what counts as life and liberty and respect for property…is defined by government. That there be property, that there be respect for life and liberty is what limits government, but what counts as respecting my life or my property…that is for government to decide and define." I'm sure that you must accept this as true, since you are using the 2nd Amendment, which was defined by...government to begin with. You are using the governments own definition of the 2nd amendment to make your case.
Locke was a theologian, and his thinking is deeply rooted in theology. Locke was a Thomist. The problem that Locke had with his Natural Law theory was this: "Can God change natural law?" If you said no, that would suggest that God is not omnipotent, but if you said yes, that would suggest that natural law is not a system of timeless universals, because if God could change natural law maybe he'll choose to change it tomorrow. Locke had been concerned about this theological problem with natural law that if you say it's a timeless universal that seems to undermine the idea of God's omnipotence because God can't be an all-powerful figure. But if on the other hand you say, well, God can change natural law then that undermines its possible universality. If God cannot change natural law, than natural law exists outside of God. In fact it had to exist prior to God so who put it there before God? OR...God says what natural law is, and because he is omnipotent, could change it, which makes it arbitrary and open to change.
And Locke struggled with this. If you become expert on the seventeenth century and you go back and read his essays on the law of nature written in the 1660s you'll see him really torturing himself as to how to resolve this. He never really resolved it, but in the end he came down on what we call the command theory, the workmanship theory, the well-based theory that — he said, "We have to say that God is omnipotent and let the chips fall where they may for the timelessness of natural law."
And so it's God's will that's the basis of natural law in God's case, and God's knowledge of his creation is traced back to this idea of the workmanship ideal, maker's knowledge. So God has maker's knowledge of his creation.
Lockes theory requires us to accept a concept of God as a pre-condition to make his theory work.
That requires us to suspend all scepticism and simply accept that theory as its own basis. A theory cannot use itself to prove itself. If you're the least bit familiar with logic, then you know this is an exercise in Circular reasoning and it's a logical fallacy. So Lockes theory falls apart right there. His concept of God and Natural Law has a built in contradition that isn't resolved.
According to Aristotle, first philosophy, or metaphysics, deals with ontology and first principles, of which the principle (or law) of non-contradiction is the firmest. Aristotle says that without the principle of non-contradiction we could not know anything that we do know. Presumably, we could not demarcate the subject matter of any of the special sciences, for example, biology or mathematics, and we would not be able to distinguish between what something is, for example a human being or a rabbit, and what it is like, for example pale or white. Aristotle's own distinction between essence and accident would be impossible to draw, and the inability to draw distinctions in general would make rational discussion impossible. According to Aristotle, the principle of non-contradiction is a principle of scientific inquiry, reasoning and communication that we cannot do without. It is impossible for the same thing to belong and not to belong at the same time to the same thing and in the same respect. If you can't accept the Law of Non-contradiction, then you're simply out of touch with reality, and theres no further need for any discussion. That would make you a hopeless ideologue from some alternative universe. It also undermines any possible argument you could make.
So...if you're going to make a case for "natural rights" and those rights are based on "natural law" then you probably want to look for something else to support your argument. The assumptions you make about human nature are taken from the society you want to justify, and then you present them as though they were features of pre-social, if you like, human nature.
What we now know from 200 years of anthropology is that actually Aristotle was right. There never was a pre-social condition. Human beings are naturally social creatures and you can't analyze them apart from their social and cultural environment. You just can't do it. Anything you try to do in that general direction will obscure more than it reveals. You'll end up with tendentious assumptions about human nature that will allow you to derive the conclusions that you want, but at the end of the day this is only going to persuade the people who agreed with you before you began and it's not going to convince the skeptics, so what's the point?
How can you generate a natural law theory when most people don't accept the idea of natural law?
Now, undoubtedly (I'm assuming here) you'll say that this is all a bunch of crap. But you'll need to do more then just say that, and as a Yalie, I would expect you to have a logical and rational explanation as to why you think it's crap. That kind of response wouldn't get you admitted to Yale, so why would I expect anything less from someone that graduated from that fine institution.
I may be wrong, and you may be right...and together we might actually get closer to the truth, and Truth is what matters. Lux et Veritas. Light and Truth. It's your AM's Motto.
