Is there such a thing as natural law? (General)

by clarity, Tuesday, January 26, 2010, 17:02 @ Senator

Wow. You still don't get it. What one should do is RELATIVE to what they WANT. If you want to live, then natural law requires that you eat because if you don't eat, you will not get what you want which is to live. If you want to DIE, then natural law requires you do other things.

Suppose what I want is sex, and so I rape the women that are attractive to me. This makes me happy. I am living in accord with natural law, am I not?

If that's what makes you happy, and happiness is your aim, then of course you are.

If there is a natural right that a person not be raped by another, then where does it come from? It can't come just from what you have said so far. There are going to have to be more conditions attached to it. For example, we might argue that by natural LAW a woman inhabits her own body, has her own wants and desires, and has the capacity to make her own decisions about whom to sleep with. We then can argue that IF everyone is to exercise these possibilities equally, then each must logically have a right to exclude others from forcefully intruding upon their bodies.

If a woman is happier not being raped, and she wants to be happy, then natural law requires a set of circumstances or conditions that bring about the absence of rape. Those conditions are naturally right. That is, they work in order to get what she wants. This is all a "natural right" means, properly understood. Natural rights are not something that exist devoid of taking any account of human desires (a la Kant). They are relative to to desired goals. If you want X, then it is naturally right, that is, nature requires that you do Y. That is, you have a natural right to do Y if you want X. Now X itself is outside the scope of what is right or wrong. What you choose as your goal is a pre-right/wrong decision. What is right, i.e. what you have a right to do, is just a matter of personal taste.

This describes what the right is and a source for it without saying that everyone ought to have that right.

I agree with Labyrinth that in your exposition (in your hands) natural law and natural rights are empty concepts when it comes to making any kind of a moral, ethical, or juridical statement. If your defense of these ideas is all there is, it is no defense at all.

I offered a possible line of defense that you ignored, which is "we might argue that by natural LAW a woman inhabits her own body, has her own wants and desires, and has the capacity to make her own decisions about whom to sleep with. We then can argue that IF everyone is to exercise these possibilities equally, then each must logically have a right to exclude others from forcefully intruding upon their bodies."

In other words, if we are to argue that a right is meaningful and not a variable that depends on your taste for rape or not, which is the dead end street that you are following, then we may argue that it is universally applicable, or that one person's exercise of it does not diminish another person's exercise of the equal right.

In order to get to a no-rape right, I have to make a value judgment: every woman should be able to exercise her inherent possibilities of choice over her own body WITHOUT infringing on the equal possibility of that exercise by other persons (which includes potential rapists.)