Re: rights revisited
Posted: September 7th, 2018, 11:41 am
Steve3007:
As I understand it, one of the objections to moral and cultural relativism is that it supposedly reduces people's ability to claim that their view is the right one.
We are in agreement on this as well. What all forms of relativism have in common is a rejection of eternal, absolute, universal, invariant, apodictic moral standards. This does not mean we have to abandon notions of right and wrong, good and bad, but simply that we have no way of determining them objectively.
I think there must be some form of acknowledgement or agreement or consent that people deserve to be treated in a certain way. I have some reservations about describing this as giving people rights, but I think we are in agreement.I think that, in actual fact, natural rights are also given by humans - by the act of humans claiming that they're given by Nature.
Both Hobbes and Newton were part of the “scientific revolution”. Hobbes described a “mechanical philosophy” in Leviathan (1651). Newton’s Principia was published in (1687).I don't have in-depth knowledge of Hobbes. But I think it was this general notion of putting politics on the same footing as (classical "Newtonian") science that I was talking about before.
I think it was an influence, but the claim that it was the basis is overstating the point. Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and the Bible also influenced the founders, as did others. Adams and others thought the Bible was necessary not for the framing of the law but as a source of morality, a free people must behave.I've read that some scholars dispute the traditional view that Locke's emphasis on the right to life, liberty and property is the basis for the US Constitution. What do you think?
As I understand it, one of the objections to moral and cultural relativism is that it supposedly reduces people's ability to claim that their view is the right one.
We are in agreement on this as well. What all forms of relativism have in common is a rejection of eternal, absolute, universal, invariant, apodictic moral standards. This does not mean we have to abandon notions of right and wrong, good and bad, but simply that we have no way of determining them objectively.