summary: i believe in natural rights by way of Goodwin-Kropotkin, that rights are arrived at through progressive social processes through the assertion of autonomy by individuals and groups, so Right is developed through social history, it is connected to Value in both moral and economic sense and has a strong basis in biology, and a universal system of human rights can be deduced from this evolutionary framework.
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Right and Wrong evolved as a meta-ethical and legal faculty in human societies, an adaptation as part of natural selection, like morality is a capacity of humans being cognitively that is informed by custom and reinforced by law,
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while right emerges from this natural process ( the evolution of humans biological, and societies/cultures ) it has no inherent substance or quality, right is purely phantasmagoric and is tightly coupled with the human capacity for meaning to both construct meaningful material -> art language literature etc. but also project meaning into everything, we cannot escape meaning as it is subjective experience itself, but from an emperical-material point of view, we cannot assume meaning is inherent, it is, according to all scientific observation the meaning humans asigned to thing. Truths, moral or otherwise have no origin besides the human mind, and have a tentative relationship to reality at best. Emperical truth, tho limited, must logically have some degree of correspondance with maerial reality, but Moral Truth exists in a separate domain of knowledge altogether.
Note: If one believes that right comes from God and there are eternal moral principles, I do not think this necessarily contradicts, natural rights since divine Creator(s) must necessarily act through material means, but the existence of the devine is outside of emperical observation and not subject to rational argumentation. Still, that civilization almost always basis both it's morality and law in some divine origin, this must also be considered in a historical/evolutionary lense.
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So Right is necessary always at least a little bit Wrong, arbitrary, inconsistant. There can be no universal eternal set of moral laws, or at least there's no abstract way to arrive at them, they are arrived at through Language, speculative reflection, or defended with logical augmentation, but usually moral beliefs ingrained (indoctrinated) in childhood, though one's moral beliefs and behaviors tend to evolve across the lifecycle, for example, youth ( under 25) tend to commit more crimes because of impulsivity and not thinking about consequences. Morality is inherently extra-rational, affective, emotive, , but I think 'moral phenoma" is scarcely understood. Much can be gained from behavioral/cognitive investigation of the social and physiological operation of morlity -- which may contradict many of our assumptions here, but the deferring to actually existing natural morals presupposes a natural rights approach, any ethical discussion always defers back to pre-existing moral sensabilities and sentiments, but these are not static and shaped by rational as well as irrational forces - discourse, social conflict etc.
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i'm partial to the functionalist logic that ideas that are conducive to the perpetuate towards the maintainance of a particular system tends to win out, basic the values of the ruling class are everyone's values, and these intersect with everything, even cosmological
5 Logical methods of deducing the morality of ones actions, whethering innducing the axioms fo sacret texts, or formulae around utility like consequentialism or utilitarianism, are then understood as simply rationale, justification for values largely inherited, historically constructed, and any basic critique will reveal that they are loaded with implicit value judgements that can be traced back to religious beliefs or the economic interests of one class or another ( the right of private property, sexual taboos, racist preferences etc. ) Much of Ethics as a discipline, much like Economics, is simple moral lawyering, psuedo scientific exuses for the ruling class to keep on doing what it's doing. Utilitarianism fails because it's not up front about it's moral values, and so it can be used to rationalize things that in most societies would be deeply unethical, for example eugenics or culling the old and weak could be justified on utilitarian grounds, assuming one is a horrible bigot who has renounced all connection to the outgroup.
The difference between the natural vs utilitarian can be compared to Marxist Value theory vs Marginal Utility, as the latter is contained in the later. Economists are Utilitarians in that they do not question the historicity of value as a social force and the economic relations that give rise to it.
- The task of any Ethical System is to explicitly state it's values, so that they could be critiqued, and the danger of traditional natural rights is it takes Right to be inherent and pre-existing, this approach takes morality as a 'given' while recognizing moral beliefs have no inherent substance, because they are historical they can be studied and compared, but the reality is that values of different cultures, or even within certain cultures sharply conflict, and one must necessarily take a side. I make the choice to value autonomy and egalitarian social relationships, both because I believe them to be beneficial to all, or that nearly every culture values mutual aide and solidarity, and opposes the violation of autonomy, and because that's what I want. I am not unbiased, I am seeking confirmation in reality for my values that I have constructed largely arbitrarily. I seek to manifest this morality. Many ethicists do not admit their interests and desires, but ethics is nominal it is always about a potential should be rather than what is. We have a clear bias, that we identify with the interests of human beings as a species in general, and the oppressed classes in particular, we want what's best for them, rather than an abstraction like "Nation" etc.
This is approach is pragmatic as the preferred possible informed by the emperical as is, it does not assume the transhistorical existence fo rights, but they are actively constructive, and that the formal rationalization is down stream from culture and cognition.
- All that being said, it is my belief that if you begin with the human individual, located in a society, and you value autonomy, in reducing harm, the biological similarities of human beings, and the more or less commiserate social do's and don'ts between the value systems of the world creates a potential for a universal ethics based on human needs following very general principles, like freedom, equqality and justice, the golden rule, the hypocratic oath, the golden mean, and other long established principles.
So one can easily enumerate an ethics and politics following from a universal recognition of autonomy, if you believe humans deserve equal freedom and access to the good life: we can and should all be living the best life possible, everyone needs food, housing, education, a community full of art and culture, these things should just be given out for free, we should not have private property or the state which inflict incredible violence and devastation to benefit the few against the many --> one can arrive at this conclusion from a utilitarian perspective also, but there is also a strong case in the evolutionary basis for socialism, that, as far as rights go, what could be called communism or anarchy would follow naturally from these rights if you rooted them in human history and biology.
So for all intents and purposes, Human's naturally want to be free, which simply means they do not want obstacles to their desires and needs, humans also naturally desire equality --> equal access to dignity, resources, opportunities etc. not to mention how there is no inherent superiority and inferiority ( re: no inherent value ) There's plenty of evidence humans have better quality of life in a free and eqalitarian society.
It's also "natural" to resist oppression and death, to distrust liars, to seek social sanction against injustice, the reality of this, like what sanction is appropriate, this is a field of jurisprudance outside the scope here, but I think this naturalistic / autonomist approach provides a sophisticated fromework for judging particular situations and guarding against the dangers of retributionism.
nb4 'naturalistic fallacy' yes it is in fact tautalogical, it is 'natural' for humans to have morals, as in , this is a universal feature of our species, it is a phenomena that emerges from material social and biological processes, humans are inclined to have morals, and certain generalizations can be made based on emperical observation, this is the sense we mean 'natural' only that is is existent, follows necessarily and unfolds without following any rigid scheme ( a lot taoist naturalism ) What would make a naturalistic fallacy would be saying something is good because it's natural, or that it is inevitable because it's natural, i have refuted both those points at length. But this is still within the 'natural rights' framework, because just like Lock I recognize that the right follows from nature ala reality of a living person, so a person has a right to self defense, or to eat. simply be being a human that wants to live or it, my difference is i reject deism ( as unnecessary ) and view rights are historically constructed phantasms that are none the less socially useful.
