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Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

> Rights do not come from the Government, they are innate and natural.

I don't understand this philosophy. Who decides these rights? Wouldn't whatever rights that you consider to be innate and natural be the ones important through your own cultural lens? Isn't it possible others disagree with what rights one should be granted?

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In general this development is synonymous with the development of orthodoxy and heresy in late antiquity - it's not enough to believe what you want to believe, but to insist that everyone else believe it too.

The template works like this, create a set of ideas, but cast them as having been part of the fabric of reality itself. This can happen intentionally or organically. Organic development is as simple as raising kiddos with the same belief. The way that socialization and mental development happens us that it makes these truths appear as normal and obvious as apples are red.

Are rights obvious and self evident? Congrats you've been born and socialized in the west. Is the mandate of heaven obvious and self evident? Congrats, you were born in China a millennia ago.

This is an innate aspect of philosophy. You’d have to go history diving to whoever came up with the idea first but it probably originated around the time of the renaissance or Greek or Roman philosophers.

Yeah, it's been considered for a long time, I think first suggested by the stoics, but that's still western culture.

The Arabs invented our number system. If it’s invented far enough back it spreads globally.

I don't know that's a great example given that many cultures don't share those numerals, so it can't be assumed these ideas propagate solely by the virtue of being old.

What culture that's developed enough to control a nation state doesn't use those numerals? Many cultures have alternative numerals that are in use, but usually only in informal usage.

China? They didn't adopt Arabic numerals until the 17th century after it was introduced by Europeans, and there's no way to argue they weren't a nation state before that.

You’re missing the entire point and it’s important because it was completely novel at the time and still is really. It has nothing to do with the particular rights that our founders believed to be natural. But the idea that they aren’t granted by a government. That government can only infringe on rights, not grant them and take them away, etc. like kings did forever or even today even in many western countries where the rights are limited.

What differentiates "rights" from the pure freedom to do anything we are physically/mentally/emotionally capable of? That seems like government (of any size, e.g. a tribal council) introducing law into chaos. I'm not sure how one differentiates a government preventing murder and inhibiting speech with that definition.

You’re over thinking it and also missing the point. Again it’s not about the output so much as the concept.

You’re making a vapid argument to try and confront a profound idea.

It's making demands of the natural world that the natural world doesn't have to obey. These natural rights are only that way because specific groups of people agree on them, making them unnatural, or, as I said previously, it implies that absolute freedom is your natural right. If that's not the case I'd ask you to explain where natural rights end and chaos begins.

Where people agree it’s self evident.

So neither innate or natural because it requires a culture to agree. We're on the same page.

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