Hi Matt, DMB, and all philosophy experts, I found it interesting to learn that Thomas Jefferson originally wrote, “we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” but Benjamin Franklin favored substituting the verbiage "self-evident." Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Franklin, explained how Franklin arrived at “self-evident.” Franklin was inspired by the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of David Hume, a close friend of Franklin. According to Isaacson:
“In what became known as ‘Hume's fork,’ the great Scottish philosopher, along with Leibniz and others, had developed a theory that distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact (such as ‘London is bigger than Philadephia’) and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition (‘The angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees’; ‘All bachelors are unmarried’). By using the word ‘sacred,’ Jefferson had asserted, intentionally or not, that the principle in question--the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights--was an assertion of religion. Franklin's edit turned it instead into an assertion of rationality." So, I take it that Franklin is saying that human rights are not a matter of a fact about the world but are a matter of definition. I'm wondering what the difference is if any with regard to essentialism. Aren't both saying that human rights are a matter of conformity with the essential nature of humanity? Is "sacred and undeniable" a synthetic truth? Or are they both ways of saying rights are an analytic truth and the difference here was really the part of the Creator in all this since even the Creator is listed among the things that are self-evident instead of something to be held as sacred. (Not having access to Darwin at the time, a Creator of some sort was a self-evidently truth “by virtue of reason and definition” rather than by religious faith.) Instead of saying that we hold rights to be true because they are sacred, The Declaration as it is written says that we hold these things to be sacred because they happen to be true. I think what it is saying is that they are true because they are part of our own very Nature as human beings. If one does not have the rights to life, liberty, and property one is not really human. In other words, to kill, to enslave, or to steal from someone is to treat them as less than human and to do so is also to be less than human. The anti-essentialism of pragmatism undermines this justification for rights, not that we can't articulate other ways of defending them. Anyway, how does Humes' fork play into all this. Are both sides of the fork essentialist or did Franklin put rights on a non-essentialist footing? Are Jefferson and Franklin or different sides of the fork, or is it irrelevant to distinguishing their views and only relevant in explaining what Franklin meant by self-evident? Best, Steve Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
