By James A. Donald
Natural law and natural rights follow from the nature of man and the world. We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.
Natural law has objective, external existence. It follows from the ESS (evolutionary stable strategy) for the use of force that is natural for humans and similar animals. The ability to make moral judgments, the capacity to know good and evil, has immediate evolutionary benefits: just as the capacity to perceive three dimensionally tells me when I am standing on the edge of a cliff, so the capacity to know good and evil tells me if my companions are liable to cut my throat. It evolved in the same way, for the same straightforward and uncomplicated reasons, as our ability to throw rocks accurately.
Natural law is not some far away and long ago golden age myth imagined by Locke three hundred years ago, but a real and potent force in today's world, which still today forcibly constrains the lawless arrogance of government officials, as it did in Dade county very recently.
The opponents of natural rights often complain that the advocates of natural rights are not logically consistent, because we continually shift between inequivalent definitions of natural law. They gleefully manufacture long lists of “logical contradictions”. Indeed, the definitions we use are not logically equivalent, but because of the nature of man and the nature of the world, they are substantially equivalent in practice.
These complaints by the opponents of natural rights are trivial hair splitting, and pointless legalistic logic chopping. It is easy to imagine in principle a world where these definitions were not equivalent. If humans were intelligent bees, rather than intelligent apes, these definitions would not be equivalent, and the concept of natural law would be trivial or meaningless, but we are what we are and the world is what it is, and these definitions, the definitions of natural law, are equivalent, not by some proof of pure reason, but by history, experience, economics, and observation.
Hobbes Criticism of natural law
The existence and force of natural law has been continually disputed by those who claim that the state should exercise limitless power over individuals.
Early in the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes argued that the nature of man was not such that one could deduce natural law from it, or rather he argued that the natural law so deduced placed no important limits on the power of the ruler to do as he pleased, to remake society as he wished, that social order was purely a creation of state power.
Hobbes claimed that in a state of nature, it is a war of all against all, and life is “poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short”. This of course is a direct contradiction of the usual natural law argument that man is a social animal, adapted by nature to live mostly peaceably with his fellow men, and do business with them quietly.
Therefore, Hobbes argued, the state is entitled to unlimited power, and right is whatever the state, through its laws, says is right, and wrong whatever the state says is wrong. An “unjust law” is a contradiction in terms because the will of the state is itself the standard of justice, thus the ruler can do no wrong. The ruler is answerable to God, but everyone else is answerable only to the ruler.
Hobbes saw rights as a creation of state power: Therefore, in order that we might have more and better rights, state power should be as absolute and total as possible. The state should pervade and dominate every relationship in order to provide everyone with justice and rights, and suppress any form of association that it does not create and control, and the state should silence any criticism of its absolute power (so that we might be more free).
“Another infirmity of a Commonwealth is the immoderate greatness of a town, [...] also the great number of corporations, which are as it were many lesser Commonwealths in the bowels of a greater, like worms in the entrails of a natural man. To which may be added, liberty of disputing against absolute power by pretenders to political prudence; which though bred for the most part in the lees of the people, yet animated by false doctrines are perpetually meddling with the fundamental laws, to the molestation of the Commonwealth, like the little worms which physicians call ascarides.”
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