Thread by @ElonBachman

@rocket_jenross @Benshooter @wolfejosh 1\ Even if you deny the existence of objective morality or a creator, pragmatism still demands a delineation of rights that leads to the best outcomes in the world we inhabit

A libertarian, "negative rights" approach argues that sovereignty of one's body and property is best...

@rocket_jenross @Benshooter @wolfejosh 2\ Locke got there a bit mystically, Rothbard a bit speciously, Hayek and Friedman (Jr.) with arguments about how benefits and costs must be vested in the individual to allow economically efficient outcomes

@rocket_jenross @Benshooter @wolfejosh 3\ For me it comes down to the practical consideration that positive rights are incompatible with negative rights, so if you want to avoid the coercion that so often leads to tyranny, you have to pare rights down to a minimal set

And that looks a lot like "natural rights"

@rocket_jenross @Benshooter @wolfejosh 4\ There's a line of thought that runs through Posner (and again through Friedman Jr.) that says that in looking to the Coasian bargains struck through commerce, the common law inadvertently enshrines something again very like Natural Rights

"Everything allowed except coercion"

@rocket_jenross @Benshooter @wolfejosh 5\ To give a concrete example: a "right to education" is a positive right that violates what some call natural rights, because the "right" implies that someone is being forced to teach at gunpoint, or being taxed to fund teachers, again at gunpoint

@rocket_jenross @Benshooter @wolfejosh 6\ Why do modern anarcho capitalists and Christians get to much the same place on rights? I dunno. I'd guess Christianity flourished b/c through memetic evolution it was the right bundle of memes to unlock efficient commerce in the late Iron Age

@rocket_jenross @Benshooter @wolfejosh 7\ Christian natural rights start to peel away from AnCap natural rights precisely where a modern economy starts to demand that the individual, rather than the family, be the basic economic unit

Which is a whole 'nother fascinating topic

@rocket_jenross @Benshooter @wolfejosh 8\ In all this, I think it's important to remember that what seems convenient and just to man is largely a reflection of biology. It's not hard to see that a very different set of "natural rights" would appeal to us had we evolved differently:

https://twitter.com/ElonBachman/status/1273444036452528129?s=20

@rocket_jenross @Benshooter @wolfejosh 9\ In fact, man's diploidy is already betrayed in the way that "natural rights" smear away from the individual to include--at increasing attenuation--the family, the tribe, the clan: