Natural Law
Posted on March 17th, 2009
I recently used the term “natural liberty” in a post, which generated a private email asking why is a “natural liberty” is so very important versus any other kind of liberty. That series of email exchanges, between myself and an ally to preserve home educators’ liberty, revealed how very little most people today understand the very foundations of the political philosophy upon which this country and most of western civilization is built. There is a fundamental lack of understanding in America today about natural law.
Natural rights are rights that do not depend on the laws, customs, or beliefs of a particular society or political system. In contrast, legal rights are rights given by the government (known as positive law), put in place by legislatures or kings, and depend upon local mores, customs, or beliefs especially when enacted by a democratic or republican form of governance.
Therefore, natural rights are thus necessarily universal, whereas legal rights (or positive law) are culturally and politically relative. Natural rights are therefore superior to legal rights, which is why I said that if I do not defend natural liberties, I have no logical justification to defend civil liberties.
Those who hold to natural law theory believe there exists of a rational and purposeful order to the universe and that a rational being may derive precepts for personal and civil governance from both inherent rational necessity to avoid self-contradiction and observations drawn from a rational study of the universe (nature). No where in this is the direct application of laws from the sacred documents of any religion, it is purely the application of man’s rational mind (however flawed) to discover those self-evident truths found in nature.
Under this view, all secular governments (the U.S.A. is a secular government) exists to protect natural rights based on natural law, and only to protect those natural rights. This is the view of the founding fathers, where a diverse group of Christians, deists, and atheists agreed upon the following words:
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them…
The first article of the Virginia Declaration of Rights adopted unanimously by the Virginia Convention of Delegates on June 12, 1776 and written by George Mason, is:
That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
Even the United Nations, for which there is much room for contempt, has in one of its foundational documents a clear appeal to natural law. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The first line of the preamble says:
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
While the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not without error due to obvious logical / rational inconsistencies [Note the contradiction between Articles 4 and 17 in contrast to Articles 22 and 25.], it does present a tremendous amount of truth about those precepts derived from natural law. The point of all this is to make clear that I am intentionally avoiding making a religious appeal to the right to home education. Found in the truths of the above document, secular from beginning to end, I want to point out Article 26 Part 3:
Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
With that, I have said all I intend to say about the topic of “home schooling”, however, that of “natural law” is a topic I can promise more articles on in the future.
Tags: political philosophy
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