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My individual natural rights come from Gnon. And are therefore inalienable.
Where do organizations, fictitious entities that don't exist in nature, derive their rights from?
The only coherent theory of rights that provides for organizations to have rights is one where those are privileges granted by the State, which are as revocable for corporations as they are for individuals.
I assume that by Gnon you mean god. But these are extremely bold assertions to make. The idea that there is a god, and that there is such a thing as rights in any sense other than that of a social contract, and that god gives you these rights... all these ideas should be justified by some kind of argument, I think, not just stated blankly. Because certainly not all of us here agree with any of these assertions. I personally agree with you about qualia. I think that in some sense of the word "god", there may be a god. The hard problem of consciousness is real. But I do not believe in a god who grants natural rights, unless by natural rights you mean something more like a striving for those rights that is inherent to being human.
My own opinion is that "rights" are a legal fiction. They are extremely important, but they have no existence outside the context of a society with its particular laws, habits, narratives, and power dynamics.
It's "Nature Or Nature's God" reversed, the Jeffersonian part of his attributes that doesn't require providence or miracles. I use that because the Liberal argument for rights ties itself specifically to that part of the idea and only requires an extremely limited form of Deism that's tantamount to Kantianism.
This I think defuses the rest of your argument. The existence of Nature and its game theoretic reality explicitly do not require belief in the supernatural. We are a certain way, which means that there is a category of rules that are good for us to follow to be good whatever-it-is-we-are, and that category is natural law, from which rights spring. God is a reification of this.
There are certainly patterns of behavior that are more adaptive for living in reality than other patterns of behavior are, but then to say that your individual natural rights come from those patterns is either extremely metaphorical or just inaccurate, depending on what you mean by "rights".
To have a "right" implies having a claim. And nature, from what I can tell, gives no-one any claims on itself. Why would any rights spring from a set of behavioral patterns that are adaptive for humans to follow?
How else do you understand the concept of Natural Law exactly?
A moral claim, yes. Not some receipt from power. Later reactions to Liberalism would end up opposed to this of course.
What is the aim of ethics? Flourishing. Eudaimonia.
You can attack the problem from a lot of angles, but be you Kant, Aristostle, Aquinas or Mill, you always end up requiring of humans that they be good at being human.
All logical approaches of ethics require then that the individual choose virtue consciously and from that stems various systems of political organization, Liberalism and its concept of natural rights being one of them.
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From the rights of the natural persons they are made up of.
Let's assume that rights are transferable or transitive, which they are not.
What then of organizations that only exist on paper as objects of ownership, that contain no people or people that have no rights? Are these rights revocable by the participants?
This is evidently not the source of such rights, corporations are treated as facsimile persons, and the rights they are granted are legal fictions that only exist by analogy and have no serious philosophical backing.
They may be agents of people who have rights, but they themselves possess no such thing.
Such an organization cannot do anything without a person being involved somehow. That includes corporations. If it does not do anything, the question of rights is moot.
The idea that if I make a film about how bad Hillary Clinton is, it's my right, but if I get together with a bunch of other people and make a better film about how bad Hillary Clinton is, that can be censored, makes no sense. And the no-rights frame makes it absolutely pernicious, because it means there's no reason the law cannot be such that organizations are forbidden from denigrating Hillary Clinton, but not from praising her.
There's a lot more to being a corporation than just working together. Incorporating provides considerable legal and financial protections which you wouldn't get on the basis of just working together with others. So in the proposed schema there's actually nothing stopping you from getting together with your collaborators and making the anti-HRC film of your dreams - but if you accidentally flood an entire town with sewage while recreating the tour bus moment you won't have the legal protections that a corporation would. If you're going to donate vast amounts of money to a political party/candidate or otherwise get seriously involved in politics, I don't think there's anything unreasonable about requiring you to give up the protections of corporate personhood to do so.
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How about you making that film on behalf of people who are not allowed to make such a film by themselves, such as Hillary Clinton and her agents?
The idea that you can launder bribes through this mechanism should be an argument against this being a coherent framing of the world rather than for it.
And that's regardless of whether you view bribing politicians as something that ultimately is a right or freedom.
I don't view it as that binary because to me the whole frame is wrong. Applying rights as a category to something that's not an individual is a category error that yields strange results as legal fictions always end up doing.
Hillary Clinton is certainly allowed to make a film about how bad she is, or how good she is.
Not beyond certain limits of funding she isn't. Isn't that the whole controversy?
Candidates can spend as much as they want on their own campaigns.
But their campaigns are not allowed to accept donations higher than a set ceiling from specific contributors, which is why PACs exist in the first place.
Can you please stop weaseling and discuss the substance of the issue. We both know how post Citizens United political campaigns are structured.
Is your view that such limits are not constitutional as well? Because if they are in effect impossible to enforce, it's all a very silly.
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Of course individual rights are alienable. What "right" to life does a murder victim or conscripted soldier have? What "right" to free speech does a nativist Britbong have? Etc. etc. Even the founders admitted that rights only exist where people demand them and are willing to back up those demands with force if someone tries to take them away.
Hypercooperation and the formation of organizations is hard-coded into us.
At the very least, the organization would have the same rights as its constituent individuals, no?
Well there's two ways you can take the line of objection you're pointing at to Liberal theory.
One is Fascism and related radical syndicalist ideas whereby individuals are actually not real and the true protagonists of history and real persons are groups and nations and corporations, etc. I think this is more sound than most people like to admit. O'Brien makes a good point. But I still believe it's ultimately disproven by qualia and individual consciousness. If God wanted us to be ants, he'd make us ants.
The other is a less radical but no less incompatible with Liberalism form of Traditionalism. Either of the perrennial or integralist variety. This I think is less clearly invalidated, but it still as incomplete an account of the human condition as the Liberal one.
The Liberal concept of rights isn't quite as revocable as you're making it out to be because it's not pointing at something that always is instantiated and can't be violated. But at natural law and the game theory thereof. It's trying to build a metaphysical understanding of the individual experience of the world and then points at it to justify a morality that would have us be good whatever-it-is-that-we-are because to not do that is tyranny and bad government, which is the same thing.
(In this sense at least, Objectivists are a a truer continuation of Liberal philosophy than a lot of other things, despite Rand's animosity towards Kant.)
The modernist puts man as a cog in a machine. The traditionalist puts him as the organ of a living thing. But both deny something real about the individual experience this coercion begets. "Everywhere he is in chains" did not come out of nowhere. And yet, we live in the ruins of the radical liberation trying to destroy his bonds with others.
I don't have a neat post-liberal answer, but completely abandoning the liberal conception of rights doesn't seem wise to me, because the things that Hobbes and Locke gesture at true in some sense. They're just not a complete account.
I should hope there's a lot more than just two! Humanity is very adaptable!
Individuals are absolutely real. Group dynamics are also real. It's not an either-or proposition - humans are social individuals. As I originally said, trying to regulate groups but not individuals is ridiculous because the group is the individuals.
I don't know what you mean by "disproven" here, but this also just goes to show how trying to distinguish between "groups" or "organizations" and "individuals" is a lot harder than you'd think. Founder-effects and path-dependency are very real forces that impact individuals and their development and outlook! So is heritability, which gives rise to the subtle, yet substantial differences between populations that we observe all over the world! So is the Overton Window! Group dynamics affect everybody, even if they're not formally affiliated in an "organization," and likeminded people are going to find ways to cooperate and work together no matter how you try to prevent them.
What? Which and whose traditionalism? I'm confused what this has to do with restricting organizational behavior but not individuals.
Then they shouldn't have used the word "inalienable," which means "can't be taken or given away."
Who's abandoning rights? I'm not. I very much like the rights I have as an American, and am frequently rather obnoxiously patriotic about it with my friends. I just don't think that those "rights" are anything other than fragile current social consensuses that need to be handled with care - like beautiful Faberge eggs - in order to keep them around and pass them along, more-or-less-intact, to future generations.
Everyone's.
But they can't be given or taken away, only violated. Locke is very explicit about this. The man who is trampled by the tyrant still has his right. Because the right itself is a metaphysical construct of logic.
Fascism is so radical in its claims of the primacy of the State (which to a fascist is a metaphysical entity, not an administrative government) that the mere observation of one's individual will suffices to disprove it in my opinion. The Fascist has to dismiss such a conception as mental illness or renounce the more radical parts of his doctrine, which are the parts that interest us in this conversation anyway.
Then you don't believe in rights. You believe in traditions. Which is as I expected but has its own specific shortcomings which I point out. You are missing the metaphysical point that Liberalism has against such traditions which allowed it to destroy them so effectively.
We can very well defend the Liberal conception of Rights as a tradition instead of a metaphysical doctrine, indeed that is how they originated, as the traditions of Englishmen. But those are fit only for Englishman not for Man.
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