Natural Law and Human Rights

"Natural law" is a philosophical term when applied to the notion of "Human Rights". It does not refer to an actual law of nature but is a social construct and therefore can only be seen as a feature of society. A Human Rights Maxim as articulated in the American Declaration of Independence and more broadly accepted as a "Natural Law" birthright, is an aspiration that a compassionate, secular society tries to embrace.

“All human beings are born equal, with certain unalienable Rights, among them being Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

A problem with this is the word “unalienable”. It is not actually meaningful when put to the test. e.g. When someone commits an attack like an unprovoked violent crime, any person who believes in the above maxim would nevertheless, consider it reasonable that the perpetrator lose their liberty, at least for a time. So “Liberty” is not actually “unalienable”. If however the word is replaced with a more realistic “fundamental”, it is still valuable as a Natural Law or Social Birthright.

To be meaningful a maxim of this kind has to be considered in the knowledge that humans are social beings. It is in our evolved nature to form into a society. Being part of a society means that society itself gains fundamental rights, being the collective rights of all the individuals within that society. Collective rights, of which we are all entitled as a birthright, can often conflict with individual rights.

Individuals therefore have reciprocal obligations towards the society to which they belong. It is the society itself (the collective rights) that public servants serve. When an individual says to a public servant, "You work for me. You are my servant.", they are invalidly elevating themselves to the society as a whole. It is not the public servant (e.g. a police officer) with which they have a gripe, but the collective rights of everyone else (society).

This raises significant questions. To what extent can the rights of one individual impinge on the rights of another? To what extent can the rights of an individual impinge the collective rights of the society of which they are a member? To what extent can our collective rights impinge the rights of an individual? None of these are easy questions to answer, so enlightened societies must reach a compromise. How well that compromise works depends on many things. Personally I think Australia has done it better than most.

Since a Human Rights Maxim as stated above, is lacking the importance of obligation to collective rights, a fuller and more embracing version of this social construct is needed. Something like:

“All Humans are born equal, with certain Fundamental Rights and Obligations, among them the Right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, and the Obligation to accept the Collective Rights of the Society of which they are a member. A Society of individuals is born with certain Fundamental Rights and Obligations, among them the Right to Protect its members by the establishment and enforcement of laws, and the Obligation to ensure that individuals of the Society are treated with fairness and compassion and have an influential role in the running of the Society.”

This Human Rights Maxim is all embracing. Inclusive of both our individuals rights and obligations and our societies collective rights and obligations. It means that our individual rights, while important, cannot be held to the exclusion of our collective rights whenever they conflict.


When an overzealous public servant (e.g. certain police) resorts to violence and intimidation, they are abusing both our individual and collective rights. Such problems need to be addressed as part of society's obligations. The proper approach should be to gather evidence to prosecute those who abuse both the individual and the society. No-one is claiming it is easy or always effective, but what is less effective is to attack the constitutional democracy to which we belong or random public servants going about their business on behalf of our collective rights (society).

When considered in its entirety the Australian Constitutional Democracy as is framed in the Constitution and enacted in practice, is a pretty good fit to this expanded "Natural Law Maxim".

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Is Atheism a "Faith"

In a YouTube comment it was suggested that I required "great faith" to be an atheist. I thank the commenter for giving me the opportunity to correct this common misunderstanding held by many theists.

It does not take faith to be an atheist, let alone "great faith". “Faith” is the absolute “belief in” something. It is rare to find an atheist who claims to believe categorically in the non-existence of god/gods. I have only met one such atheist and I live in a rather atheistic country (Australia).

Like most atheists I take the default position of having no reason to to accept the proposition that there is a god or gods because there is no evidence based reason to believe it. I do not believe in fairies but it cannot be said that I “have faith in the non-existence of fairies". For all I know fairies, Zeus or some other god may exist - I just don't know. The same logic applies to all the thousands of proposed gods, fairies, trolls or imps. I don't “have faith in their non-existence". I simply have no reason to assume they exist. That makes me by definition an atheist (not-a-theist).

The religious often try to taint the atheist with their own shortcomings. When referring to their own faith, Christians place “faith” on a pedestal as the epitome of all that is wonderful about believing, as though believing for beliefs sake is special. When they are claiming atheists “have faith” they are using it as a brick to bash them, or as an insult. That is one thing I would agree on. Faith is an insult on human intelligence. Anything held and justified as faith, is an admission of the lack of intelligent inquiry.

The typical atheist like me, is an agnostic atheist. Now before you say an agnostic is different to atheist I should explain. It is often assumed (even by atheists) that an agnostic is midway between a theist and atheist; someone sitting on the fence. This is a misunderstanding of the meanings of the words as I will now explain.

Regarding religion there are two definite positions:
Theist: A believer in a god.
Atheist: A non-believer in gods.

Regarding knowledge there are two definite positions:
Gnostic: One who claims to know with certainty.
Agnostic: One who claim you cannot know with certainty. Also see Notes below.

Therefore we can have the following four combinations:
Gnostic Theist: One who claims certain knowledge of god’s existence (e.g. typical Christian.).
Agnostic Theist: One who says they don't know with certainty if god is real but believe anyway.
Gnostic Atheist: One who claims that they are certain that there are no gods.
Agnostic Atheist: One who says they cannot know if gods are real but have no reason to believe they are (e.g. typical atheist)

Conclusion: Typically, atheism in not a faith based philosophical position.

Notes:
There is a tradition of "Christian agnosticism". For more on it, search Google.
An alternate definition for agnosticism is used by those who suspend belief in god/gods.

You may also be interested in:
How I realised I didn't believe in god:
A distorted view of atheists:
How it feels to view the world as an atheist:

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No God: Just Qualia

Qualia: Plural of Quale. Things that do not exist as objective realities in nature, but are "emergent properties" of consciousness. e.g. the sensation of colour. Most of us know what is meant by "green", but green (or any colour) does not exist. Sure there are wavelengths of light that we interpret as green, but the sensation of “greenness” does not correspond to an actual greenness out there in the real world. Pain also has no objective reality. Stamping on my toes and saying, “Now deny pain is real”, does not prove pain is real in the sense of an objective thing. Only that the quale of pain emerges because of conscious awareness. 

While it is “only” the processing of electrical signals by the brain, we don't react by thinking, oh, there are some signals indicating injury coming in from our foot. Instead it's “Ouch, that hurt” as we subjectively experience the quale of pain. Conscious awareness itself is a quale; an emergent property of the complexity of the brain. Feelings of love; the agony of mourning; the smell of a flower. All feel very “real” to those experiencing these qualia. Although qualia are not real in an objective sense, they can be scientifically studied. Who says that science is only materialistic? And what was that about science not inspiring the qualia of “awe and wonder”?

See also:
Special Days
...
A View of the World from the Mind of an Atheist
...

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A Distorted View of Atheists: Theistic Malevolence

Many religious people have distorted views regarding the attitudes and moral values of atheists unable to see them as ethical beings. Some even promote false ideas about atheists, seemingly unable to cope with the fact that there are people who simply find god beliefs empty. Some try to re-define atheism to exclude life changing emotional feelings. e.g. When confronted with an atheist who spoke of her feelings of awe, Oprah Winfrey remarked “Well I don’t call you an atheist then…” going on to redefine atheism in her terms, in effect redefining the Christian God so as to suit her personal distaste for atheists. Well I have news for you Oprah Winfrey; You don't get to decide what is or isn't counted when describing an atheist.

Time Magazine Claims “It is hard to view the Grand Canyon and be an atheist”, also claiming “awe = religion”. Suddenly awe becomes religion when it suits the religious disposition of Time Magazine editors - yet another mischievous redefinition. 

Atheism says nothing about how a person feels or about their ethics, only about their non-belief in gods. The high incidence of atheists in science, parallels their oft-experienced feelings of awe and wonder, commonly being the motivating force for their scientific careers. Awe is not religion, it is a quale. An emergent property, born of the complexity of the natural world and the emergence in it, of conscious awareness.

See these also:
A View of the World From the Mind of an Atheist 
Special Days

If God then Poor Designer

According to Ken Ham, with his spectacles perched prominently on his nose, “the eye is a perfect design by a perfect creator”. The nerves of the human eye are directly attached to the front of the retina. They have evolved to be mostly transparent to minimise blurring of the image. Brain software cleans up the image as best it can, so that we have a somewhat acceptable image to interpret. In order to get the image to the brain, a hole in the retina allows the nerves through. That area is blind and ignored so that we don't see a black area. This poor design is also prone to retinal detachment. So much for a perfect eye by a perfect designer. 

Of course the octopus got the good design. The nerves are attached at the back on the retina. No blind spot. No obstruction of the incoming image. Luck of the draw gave us the bad design. Just what you would expect in an evolutionary system. Not what you would expect from a perfect creator unless that creator made the octopus in her own image.

When we connect the cords behind our TV sets, PVRs and sound systems, we always end up with cords caught inconveniently around other parts. This phenomenon also happens in nature. In the early organisms and modern fish, the laryngeal nerve was quite directly connected. As evolution  produced a divergence of types with necks, the nerve was caught behind the aorta. As necks lengthened the nerve from brain to larynx (Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve) had no option but to lengthen. In giraffes it can be 4.6 metres long. This would be poor design if indeed it had been designed, but just the sort of thing that arises in an evolutionary system.

Image: Recurrent Layngeal Nerve

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Girls will be Boys: Men are Modified Females

The biblical story has it wrong. In Genesis, woman is made from a man's rib. The upshot of this is that women would be modified males, but in reality it is the other way round. Genetics and the process of evolution does not care for human stories, and it turns out that men are modified females. 

The default program for human embryos is female, towards which they develop unless receiving alternate instructions. Sometimes this default development towards female continues until puberty. In a small town in the Dominican Republic 1 in 90 of the boys in the area are born as females. Then at puberty when testosterone kick in, their bodies realise that they have instructions to become males. They then transition into normally developed males. So sometimes Girls will be Boys.

“Everyone comes from a common genetic and developmental framework that is tweaked by sex hormones,” says Richard Bribiescas, Ph.D., director of the Yale Reproductive Ecology Laboratory. "We all start as a generic embryo. You have a set of male or female sex chromosomes, but the distinction doesn’t kick in until your hormones enter the picture, he explains. Without hormones like testosterone, you would stay on the path to womanhood. And your body already started developing by the time this decision was made—which means your lady parts were already starting to form.”

I for one am as proud of my female bits as my male bits.

Reference:
Three Signs You Started as a Girl

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