Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issuewith any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:
What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutabilityis one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover,I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determinewhether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games.Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all youhave to do is commit to a criterion for testing.It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-mindedenough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
Every so often, when I'm feeling quixotic, I go to a site like Pharyngula.com, find a discussion thread on gay marriage or health care, and ask people to prove that gay marriage or health care are rights. Because on a site run by a scientist and patronized by people who profess to be rationalists, you can be sure that people welcome the chance to examine the logical underpinnings of their ideas.
Har! Your naivitudinousness is most touching. Kindly to be sending me your credit card and bank account numbers that I may sending you the sum of $25 million dollars. It would augment the bodaciousness utmostly if you also are sending me a photo of your front door key, a list of your valuables and the nights you plan not to be home, as a gesture of good faith.
No, what I actually got was replies like this:
xxxxx
The basic problem in debates over things like gay marriage or health care is that nobody ever really attempts to define what a right is, what determines whether or not something is a right, and how we can decide. Instead we get:
Actually there is a ton of literature on the theory of rights. It's just that almost everybody jumps in to discussions of rights without bothering to read any of it.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. These are often invoked in defense of alleged rights. So people have the right to medical care because it preserves the right to life, or gay marriage because it preserves the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
There are several problems with this formulation. For openers, it's not in the Constitution. It's in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration does try to define a basis for its claims:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
In other words, the rights don't need proof. They are axioms, things so elementary and validated by experience that they can't be broken down into anything more basic. An example of an axiom in geometry is that when two lines cross, opposite angles are equal. Or if two things are equal to a third thing, they are equal to each other (If A=B and C=B then A=C.)
This is a rhetorical device to claim the moral high ground, because the claim that all men are created equal is far from self evident. I doubt if Jefferson himself fully believed it as applied to blacks, and even today, probably a majority of people reject it. A large part of the world certainly rejects the notion that women are equal to men, that lower social classes are equal to higher classes, or that other races and ethnic groups are equal to their own. And people are certainly not born equal in physical or mental abilities.
The rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are also anything but self-evident. I doubt if many people in 1776 debated the idea that a murderer loses his right to life or a criminal loses his right to liberty, and pursuit of happiness would hardly have been invoked to justify licentiousness. Viewed against the mores of the time, Jefferson probably meant that people had an equal right to freedom from arbitrary restrictions, and that liberties extended as far as they did not interfere with someone else's.
There's one last problem with Jefferson's formulation. It places the basis of rights in a Creator. So it violates separation of church and state and is unconstitutional.
These are all the occurrences of the word "right" in the Constitution.
"Rights" and "freedoms" in the Constitution fall into several recognizable classes:
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Created 08 September 2009; Last Update 24 May, 2020
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