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By Root 780 0

it violates the natural human urge to express oneself and communicate ideas to others. Confiscation of property is wrong because humans endeavor to produce things which enrich their lives or can be traded for other things which do so. Requiring accountability or imposing surveillance is wrong because humans desire privacy; i.e., to be left alone. When government interferes with the natural order of things, whether as innocently as planting corn in Siberia, or as atrociously as exterminating persons, there are always disastrous consequences. And even if flouting the natural law benefits a majority (as is typically the claim), there will always be someone who pays the price of having his human nature transgressed upon. Proponents of Positivism and the welfare state have not been able to demonstrate even one credible example to the contrary.

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Natural Rights

Natural Rights is a related but separate concept to the Natural Law. If each of us lived on an island by ourselves, we could live without fear of the Natural Law being transgressed. However, almost all of us live in complex societies where social interaction is the norm. The problem is that humans have a frightening tendency to impede the natural inclinations of other human beings, presenting a dilemma: Although humans must be able to mesh with one another, they need to do so in a manner which preserves the Natural Law. Therefore, there is a need for rights which establish rules respecting those interactions so as to reinforce the pursuit of our yearnings implicit in nature. Professor Randy Barnett defines them in the following manner:

Natural rights attempts to identify conceptually the space within which vulnerable people need to be free to make their own choices about the directions of their lives, which includes crucially the choices of how to acquire, use, and dispose of scarce physical resources.3

In other words, our natural rights protect our ability to pursue our natural inclinations free from government interference: To live, to love, to acquire property, to be productive, to be left alone. If a human or if a government transgresses those rights, then it is violating those rules of social interaction, and hence the Natural Law.

Stated simply, because natural rights protect our human nature and are based on the eternal law, they are described as self-evident and inalienable. By self-evident, it is meant that these rights do not require some scientific proof in order to explain their existence. Humans have a natural inclination to preserve their own lives: Although we can certainly try to understand precisely why it is that humans try to preserve their lives, it can stand by itself and needs no further explanation or rationalization. Although a legislature may order that the right to life will be disregarded, it can never take that right away or alter the fundamental human yearning to live, just as Khrushchev could never change the fact that corn cannot grow in Siberia.

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Natural rights are in contrast to political rights, which we do in fact acquire by virtue of the government. Thus, in addition to natural rights, we can possess whichever political rights the government guarantees. For example, most of the rights recognized in the Constitution are Natural Rights. However, some, such as the right to be indicted by a grand jury before prosecution, depend upon the Constitution, and not the Natural Law, for their existence. Is there a fundamental human yearning to compel government prosecutors to present a case to a grand jury, at which no judge or defense counsel is present, and the make-up of which is usually timid souls eager to please the prosecutors? Certainly not. Although it may sometimes work as a matter of policy as a check on the government, it has nothing to do with human inclinations and the Natural Law. Nonetheless, it is an additional right which we enjoy by virtue of being under the jurisdiction of the federal government (as opposed to simply being human). Therefore, unlike Natural Rights which can be called pre-political, there are indeed