Liberals also say and do stupid shit

Roe V Wade.

I know it’s hard to believe that I’m writing this, but I agree with @Timex here.

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West Wing had this debate already.

In fact, there are so many issues that we talk about today that have been talked about on the West Wing, a show over a decade old.

@Timex is describing laws and power, not rights. You can as easily argue that there is no such thing as right or wrong, only law, but you’d be wrong.

If we want to continue that conversation it’ll have to be from a treadmill desk, though, or maybe voice typing.

Oh, you think there’s an absolute right and wrong, defined objectively?

This perhaps merits a separate thread, as it could be an interesting discussion outside the normal constraints of political partisanship, and it has nothing to do with liberal or conservative views.

My only reply to that would be that one administration on congress can undo the laws that the previous one has done. That isn’t true with constitutional “rights”. True a court can modify or change them based on some kind of legislation or argument, but that is a much more difficult process than just changing a law.

We’re going to do the ethical framework philosophy thing again, aren’t we? I suppose it has been a while.

Heh, I studied it for years in college, so I always find it interesting.

I think that’s the wrong question, really, in particular the defined objectively part. That said, I do think some things are right and some wrong, and I think the notions are founded in our heritage as social creatures, and enlightened by a few thousand years of thinking about societies.

By way of illustration, the Nuremberg laws were surely laws, and the government of the time clearly had the power to enforce them; but that didn’t stop the whole thing from being a violation of some people’s rights, even though those putative rights didn’t exist in law. Do you agree or disagree with that statement?

You can easily argue that right and wrong exist, yet there is no such thing as an inherent “right”. In fact the notion of “natural rights” is a relative novelty in the 2000+ year history of moral philosophy.

I don’t think that’s right. People wrote about natural rights as far back as e.g. Cicero. They may not have used the term ‘natural right’, but no one really disputes that that’s what they were talking about.

(Blatantly stolen from Wikipedia)

The idea that certain rights are natural or inalienable also has a history dating back at least to the Stoics of late Antiquity and Catholic law of the early Middle Ages, and descending through the Protestant Reformation and the Age of Enlightenment to today.[ citation needed ]

The existence of natural rights has been asserted by different individuals on different premises, such as a priori philosophical reasoning or religious principles. For example, Immanuel Kant claimed to derive natural rights through reason alone. The United States Declaration of Independence, meanwhile, is based upon the “self-evident” truth that “all men are … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”.[7]

Likewise, different philosophers and statesmen have designed different lists of what they believe to be natural rights; almost all include the right to life and liberty as the two highest priorities. H. L. A. Hart argued that if there are any rights at all, there must be the right to liberty, for all the others would depend upon this. T. H. Green argued that “if there are such things as rights at all, then, there must be a right to life and liberty, or, to put it more properly to free life.”[8] John Locke emphasized “life, liberty and property” as primary. However, despite Locke’s influential defense of the right of revolution, Thomas Jefferson substituted “pursuit of happiness” in place of “property” in the United States Declaration of Independence.

I’ll make a new thread for this, and we can have the discussion there.

Cicero wrote about natural law, which is not the same thing as natural rights. The former looks for a universal foundation for law, the latter is explicitly about limiting the reach of government.

Natural rights became popular at about the same time that capitalism became popular, which should come as no surprise since “natural right to property” is the one that is written about most.

I think he wrote about both. For example, we are born for Justice, and that right is based, not upon opinions, but upon Nature, is a statement about natural rights.

There are a lot of “laws” that make no logical sense. Conversely, there are a lot of common sense things which are not legal things.

As popehat says “your feelings are not the law”. Paraphrasing, if common sense were the law, then twitter would be the Supreme Court.

My speculation is that given it contradicts any reasonable interpretation of Article V, and no constitutional law scholar has ever made the type of suggestion as he made, that the SCOTUS would agree unanimously that his suggested course of action is unconstitutional.

To find otherwise would be to suggest that:

  1. Article V goes to the trouble of explicitly prohibiting an action which is accomplished through dramatically more simple means.
  2. The end result is that you can have a federal statute which directly contradicts the text of the US constitution, which effectively negates the notion of Judicial Review.

Those two things do not seem to be likely positions for any supreme court justice to take.

That is of course only my opinion.