markfiend wrote:markfiend wrote:I don't know.
Then again, I'm not alone in my abdication on this point. "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." isn't exactly a fully-reasoned defence of the rights of man.
It's a pithy summary of Locke's
Second Treatise, which is a "fully reasoned defence of the rights of man." Jefferson even borrows language directly from the chapter on revolution. And he
does make a reasonable argument.
A claim of self-evidence isn't identical to mere assertion, nor is it identical to stating that something is obvious. Aquinas puts it nicely (Q2, A1 of the
Summa) when he says that self-evidence means simply that the predicate is contained in the subject. "All bachelors are unmarried men" is a self-evident truth. Provided we know what the terms mean, it is self-evident. We do not need to seek out empirical verification.
That the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180° is also a self-evident truth. But it's a bit more complicated than the previous example: once one possesses an adequate conception of what a triangle is, then it becomes self-evident that the interior angles of the triangle must add up to 180°. Again, as Aquinas puts it: some things are self-evident in themselves, though not to us (the example he gives: incorporeal substances are not in space is self-evident in itself, though not to most of us).
Jefferson's claim is that equality and natural rights are self-evident, not that they are obvious. This is simply to say that an adequate philosophical anthropology reveals the truth of equality and rights as a) grounded in nature and b) applicable to all men (i.e., all human beings, always and everywhere. Hence both Locke and Jefferson, as well as most other important American Founders, recognized slavery as a moral evil and a violation of the natural law. The "positive good" school of pre-Civil War politicians like John C. Calhoun actually represents a radical break with the principles of the American founding because he and his followers reject the principles of the Declaration of Independence).
Jefferson (I almost wrote Locke, certainly a Freudian slip!) begins the Declaration by invoking "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." He is casting a wide rhetorical net. Jefferson's claim is that a consideration of nature (i.e., what things are in their natures, not a consideration of all that happens in nature)--or, more specifically, a consideration of
human nature--reveals certain morally relevant truths. For the record, I don't think that the Lockean argument requires God; I don't think the Jeffersonian summary of it requires God either--but while the philosophic aspects of the Declaration might not need God, the rhetorical aspect might.
Equality, according Jefferson, is a fundamental fact: human beings are reasonable, and, because reasonable, they are equal. Again, he is cribbing this straight from Locke's
Second Treatise--for a fuller discussion of equality and the limits upon it, I would refer you especially to chapters 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8.
From this foundational claim of equality stem certain other claims: we have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit (not the attainment) of happiness. The right to life stems from equality: no one human being has a natural right to take the life of any other (but see Locke,
Second Treatise chapters 2 and 3: the limit on this is the law of nature. When someone violates the law of nature, then they may be punished, and depending on the violation such punishments may include death). Liberty follows from equality as well, for much the same reason--there is no natural right of anyone to rule over anyone else (see Locke,
Second Treatise chapter 4 on slavery and chapter 6 on paternal power as well). Equality, incidentally, is why government must be based on consent of the governed for both Locke and Jefferson: there is no other legitimate claim to authority. The right to the pursuit of happiness is Jefferson's poetic rendering of Locke's more prosaic right to property (see Locke,
Second Treatise, chapter 5). Jefferson also argues for a natural right and positive moral duty toward revolution in the case of a "long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce" the people "under absolute Despotism." This language (and more) is borrowed from Locke's
Second Treatise, chapter 19.
As Jefferson and Locke both make clear, these rights are all
natural, which is to say that they exist prior to the institution of any civil government, and the are discovered by rational consideration of human nature (Hobbes, incidentally, says something similar: the laws of nature are convenient articles of peace discovered by reason as it considers the best way to satisfy the passion for comfortable self-preservation; cf.
Leviathan XIII.14) Legitimate government must protect these rights, and it must be based on the consent of the people. If it does not meet these two criteria, it is illegitimate. Locke and Jefferson argue for a moral standard outside the bounds of government and society by which government and society can be judged. Jefferson and Locke both have grounds for calling certain regimes "unjust," and they can both provide answers to a question such as "what is justice"? through natural rights theory.
For the record, post-Hegelian political theory rejects all of this.
at the last part before I start... but ok. Love? Love is a human emotional response (or relationship) that is entirely explicable in terms of psychology, human biology, etc. Maybe you might argue that this kind of reductionism robs the human condition of its romance, but I can still think that love is an entirely wonderful and beautiful experience while arguing that it is completely (in principle) explicable. Humour is a similar human experience. Why we find one joke funny and another not is largely a matter of personal preference, but again, in principle at least, humour is amenable to empirical analysis. Why not?
), it's just a question that we're not able to answer. Doesn't stop it being interesting and no, an unanswerable question isn't meaningless. It's arguably more meaningful because human nature is inquisitive. We don't like not knowing the answer. Of course it's entirely possible that we've invented a question that didn't need to be answered in the first place but after thousands of years and uncountable religions, the human race at large seems to have decided that it's a question worth asking. As have all the people contributing to this thread otherwise why are we discussing it at all? And, of course, if some of the theists happen to be right then it's definitely not meaningless, to badly paraphrase Descartes.
