Natural Rights - MacDonald

Rachel asks a lot of interesting questions that have also been bothering me, or making me uneasy, for the past few weeks – mainly how do we know we have natural rights? One of the answers is that these rights are a standard as set by nature. But, ‘set by nature’ is an ambiguous phrase. For example, MacDonald refers to arguments about natural rights being conceived as a fact. At the risk of sounding like a five year old, I have to ask – but why? One of my favorite quotes from this piece is, “This standard [that is, that every man has rights] was not determined by men, but by nature, or, sometimes, by God. It was fact and not fancy” (24). This initially made sense to me because I had a feeling, although not a clear way of articulating it, that rights precede laws, and only through our development as human beings in societies have we realized those rights that we have had all along and attempted to capture them in more concrete laws governing societies. So, to say that these rights have existed and we have only over time been able to recognize them, could in a sense be seen as this conception of natural rights as granted to us by some source.

But one could still question natural rights as being set by nature, or by God. What exactly does it mean that something is determined by nature? When I think of things being determined by nature I think of physics and laws of relativity and such, which we view as facts. Also, including the word ‘God’ in our dialogue can be problematic because it does not account for atheists. MacDonald clarifies these conceptions of natural rights by taking a stance and saying that “Assertions about natural rights then are assertions of what ought to be as the result of human choice” (34). But this is also problematic, as MacDonald points out, because values cannot be proven, they are not facts, but rather judgments. In this way, laws and the conception of rights changes with the values of society. This, I think, answers Mike’s question about the fluidity of rights. I think that rights are fluid, in the sense that as society changes and as values change, we make different decisions about which rights we ought to have. And Ryan, I do not think that you are off in relating this to the proliferation of rights. As we decide or realize different rights, it makes sense that we would want a legal backing to such rights or even a moral backing, because it grants us a justification or purpose on which to rest our claims.

As a bit of a side note, I couldn’t help but notice MacDonald’s use of the word “man” repeatedly in her piece, as well as the word “negro.” Both were startling to me, not because I am unaware that rights rhetoric has generally focused on the term “man,” but because I cannot decipher whether MacDonald is using it in that sense to convey that that’s how rights have been conceptualized by society for many years, or if she is using it for other purposes? Clearly, saying that men have rights is not the same as saying that human beings have rights. In the same regard, the word “negro” struck me because of obvious reasons. Here, also, I could not decide whether MacDonald used that particular word to convey a social status, similar to the “artificial status” of being a slave, that she discusses in her piece, which has been constructed by society because laws are imperfect, or if she was using it for another effect?