🚀 go-pugleaf

Brian Yoder writes:

>No.  Rights exist prior to law...laws may recognize a right or may delimit
>it, but they exist because of the nature of human beings and the needs they
>have for successful social relationships.

That is to say that humans have aspects of our niche which are determined
genetically, rather than by culture. True enough, but those needs for physical
and psychological health may well include access to habitat like that we 
evolved in. Conversely, if this can be overriden by culture, it may be that
everything Yoder imagines to be a "right", fixed in human nature, can also
be overridden by culture. In that case the law would be the whole of the 
right.

Could it be that we lack sufficient understanding of our own evolution and
"nature" to be able to draw up as yet a final list of the rights needed to
realize the human niche? Of course Yoder will not think so. To a 
fundamentalist, everything fundamental is known.

As human rights arise from the historical evolution of our brains 
and bodies, there is absolutely no guarantee that they can in fact be 
realized in a world radically different from that in which our brains 
evolved -- a healthy biosphere may be a survival requirement not merely 
in terms of human *sustenance* but in terms of human *sanity* and the
possibility for a workable human sociality. 

How tragic it would be if Yoder's fundamentalist focus on revealed Rights
were to be followed... right into a world in which they could never, ever,
exist again, no matter how many social convolutions we tried -- because
their ultimate biological basis had been wiped out irreversibly through 
extinction? There would be very, very little freedom in a space-colony
Earth.

And how does Yoder know that only the niche requirements of humans create
"rights" -- and not those of other species as well? 

		*	*	*	*	*		

When the human niche has reached coevolutionary equilibrium with a healthy
biosphere, it will be seen that *all* niches define rights -- and that
no species *can* have rights unless all do. Rights are created, not by
some sterile aprioristic pseudologic, but by the evolution of life itself.

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Alan McGowen