Randall McElroy: From “the people ruling themselves” we could favorably read “each man/woman ruling him/herself,” but this idea is something of a fantasy.

I’m not sure what you mean. That this doesn’t currently exist, or that it’s fantastic to think that it could? Of course it doesn’t currently exist (the least invasive states in the world are mostly elective oligarchies). But I think it’s hardly fantasy to think that it could; as a libertarian, it’s the political system that I aim at fully and completely realizing. What about you?

That said, while I happen to think that libertarianism, and indeed anarchism, are implicit in democratic values, that’s not the point I was making.

Randall McElroy: The unavoidably common interpretation of democracy is “the whole body of people ruling the whole body,” and this can only really be done as it’s done now, by picking some people democratically who make decisions undemocratically.

What you’re suggesting, then, is that democracy is for all intents and purposes impossible, not that democracy is expressed through elective oligarchy. Elective oligarchies are closer to democratic values than appointed ones, and some methods of electing them closer to democratic values than others, but as long as they hold exclusive or supreme legislative authority you just haven’t got a democracy at all, but rather something else.

That said, I have no idea where you’re getting the idea that elective oligarchy is the closest approach to democracy possible. There have been lots of examples of more directly democratic political systems than the U.S. style of oligarchy (classical era Athens, contemporary Switzerland). Since actuality entails possibility, I conclude that there really are ways that democratic governance can be done other than picking rulers to make the decisions for you.

This also doesn’t touch on the second issue, viz. that democracy is not a purely procedural notion, but that substantive political equality between government officials and citizens is a necessary component of democracy. If that’s so, then knocking down laws that violate that substantive equality, no matter how those laws were enacted, and no matter how they were knocked down, has to be considered a promotion of democracy, not an undermining of it.

Macker, I’m not suggesting that Boyington was stupid. (How would I know? I never met him and I haven’t read his books.) I’m aware that there are plenty of smart people in the military; and also that there are plenty of rock-stupid people in the military. It’s a big and diverse outfit.

What I’m suggesting is that however smart or however stupid Boyington was, there is a difference between a life spent using knowledge, where you use it, in the interest of some instrumental good, and a life spent pursuing knowledge for its own sake. And there is a further difference between different kinds of instrumental goods: between using knowledge in order to create useful things, and using knowledge in order to destroy and to gain power. Sometimes it may be necessary, even admirable, to put yourself on the line in order to destroy and to gain power. Sometimes it may be necessary, even admirable, to use knowledge to kill lots of people. (And in those cases it serves nobody to get all squeamish and pretend that your “service” or “heroism” involves something other than justified death-dealing.) But that’s a different kind of life from the kind of life that the University has historically been concerned with hosting, fostering, promoting, and celebrating, which is not about using knowledge at all, but rather gaining, contemplating, manifesting, and sharing it, for its own sake. If you don’t understand the difference, or its importance, then you don’t yet understand the historical purpose of the University.

For comparison, I currently live near Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan. On one side of campus, EMU has this big statue of Martin Luther King Jr. Why? I don’t know; the suggestion seems just that he’s an important guy so he deserves a statue. But King’s achievements (though I think they are indeed admirable) have nothing in particular to do with EMU or with academic life in general (in fact, he seems to have been a rather bad academic). Nor did the campaigns he was involved in have very much to do with expanding or improving the University (although there were other Freedom Movement leaders who did do that). So what’s the statue doing there? I don’t know; if it’s just supposed to honor him qua admirable human being, then I don’t think it should be there.

A lot of people in the past century have thought that a University’s job was, in the first place, to serve as sort of a factory for manufacturing admirable, or perhaps useful, Citizens on behalf of Society or Our Future. That’s part of the “salivating statism” of educational ideas in the last century that I mentioned above. And a lot of people have held as a consequence of that view that its primary operations should be to act as a sort of job training center, to make people smart and knowledgeable enough to (say) fly fighter jets, or design aircraft, or manufacture widgets. I reject the whole idea root and branch, and I am long since tired of Universities being pushed around with the expectation that it’s their job to celebrate any admired citizen who managed to pass through their gates, to reward purported achievements even when the achievement has nothing to do with their purposes, and generally to act like a large, well-endowed booster club for their alumni and the polity at large.

Macker: They already have a marble memorial dedicated to General Lafayette, and a building named after General George Washington. There’s a monument called Memorial Gateway with the names of 58 University of Washington students killed in WWII. So this isn’t exactly something new or foreign to this educational institution.

And so what? I think those are stupid too and if students had acted to block them from being erected I’d cheer them on. (The Memorial Gateway comes the closest to being a reasonable structure, since it aims to remember students lost rather than to celebrate an unrelated military triumph.) UW isn’t a military academy and there’s no reason for it to act like one. And there’s no time like the present to stop.

Macker: Besides, since when is the history involved in the exploits of Boyington not educational? There’s a lot to be learned from his experiences and his connection with the university.

This is frankly silly. Nobody is proposing that books on Boyington or the air war during World War II be thrown out of the library. If your aim is to educate people about the history of World War II, or Boyington’s exploits in particular, then there are lots of better ways to do it than a vacuously celebratory public monument.

Roy W. Wright: Freedom in America died decades ago.

“Decades ago” millions of people in the United States lived under conditions of government-enforced apartheid.

For freedom to have “died,” it first had to be alive. And when was that?

For what it’s worth, the jiggery-pokery should no longer be necessary; initial support for WP 2.0 is now incorporated into version 0.98 (just released). Cf. FeedWordPress 0.98: Now compatible with WordPress 2.0.

Also note that this upgrade fixes a subtle bug with category post counts that a lot of users have reported, but which the diffs that have been floating around don’t fix.

HTH!

Brandon: My point is that there’s nothing democratic about special interest groups lobbying unelected judges to overturn laws passed by democratically elected legislatures.

This argument presupposes two things: (1) that how “democratic” a constitution is depends purely on the procedural question of who passes the law, and not on any substantive questions about what spheres of sovereignty and authority the laws that are made give to individual ordinary people; and (2) that having laws passed by a select legislature is a democratic procedure.

But why accept either claim? “Democracy” means the people ruling themselves, not the people choosing who rules. (The Greeks, who knew something about democracy, had a word for a system on which the people got together every so often to pick a ruler for the polis. But they didn’t call it “democracy;” they called it “tyranny.”) There’s a good argument to be made that laws produced by elective oligarchies deserve no special respect as any more “democratic” than the reasoned rulings of judges; and there’s another good argument to be made that democracy simply does not exist, anyway, to the degree that laws (however they were made) compromise the substantive political equality between ordinary people and government officials (by, for example, trashing civil liberties and treating people as if they are permitted to live their lives only at the pleasure of the Authorities).

Here’s a repost of the remarks I put on the original post in reply:

DSH,

I can’t say that I’m convinced by your philosophical overview.

1. First, the is-ought problem, the fact-value distinction, and the naturalistic fallacy. You refer to all of these topics as if they were three different ways of speaking of the same thing. In fact they’re not: they are three distinct topics. Moore, for one, would be very surprised to hear that he endorses the fact-value distinction; in fact he takes for granted that there are objective moral facts and characterizes ethics as a theoretical science aiming at giving true general propositions about the things that are good and the nature of goodness as such (PE 1-5). For a painstaking argument, see Chapter III and Chapter IV of Moore’s sequel Ethics (1912), on “The Objectivity of Moral Judgments.” Importantly, you should note that Moore would object just as much to those non-cognitivists who analyzed “X is good” as merely expressing an attitude towards X rather than making a factual assertion; since the analysis into other concepts such as “commendation” treads on the conceptual simplicity that he thinks “good” has, and the claim that judgments of good assert nothing is explicitly denied in PE 13.

Moore defined the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ (at PE 10) as the fallacy of attempting to offer a definition of “good” in terms of simpler concepts (Moore held the term, when used in the sense of intrinsic value, to be a simple term that does not admit of further conceptual analysis). When using the term in diagnosing other philosophers arguments, he typically uses it to identify confusions between a synthetic statement claiming that everything that is good has some other non-moral property (which needs to be defended by argument or intuition), with an analytic statement claiming that “good” just means having that other non-moral property (which supposedly needs no further defense). Cf. PE 10: “But far too many philosophers have thought that when they named those other properties they were actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply not ‘other,’ but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. This view I propose to call the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ and of it I shall now endeavour to dispose”; cf. also PE 6. Moore, of course, refuses to call the property of goodness “natural” but he does not deny that it is a matter of objective fact, or that statements to the effect of “X is good” can be judged objectively true or false. His complaint is against reductionist theories of ethics, which attempt to analyze “good” as just meaning some complex of non-moral properties.

The is-ought problem, as classically set out by David Hume, doesn’t have to do with definition at all, but rather with entailment; Hume claims it to be impossible to derive “ought” sentences from “is” sentences without an auxiliary premise using “ought.” The idea here is that ought-statements aren’t entailed by is-statements alone (the issue is not analyticity vs. syntheticity, but rather whether or not you can make the inference of the ought-statement from the is-statement apriori without any further premises). Now, Hume took this to point towards a genuine and unbridgeable gap between facts and values; but not every philosopher who recognizes the problem feels the same way. One such philosopher was Aristotle, who both believed all of ethics to be founded in natural facts and also wrote the first known expression of the “is-ought” problem in the philosophical literature, at NE 1144a.

I mention this not only as an exegetical and historical point, but also as a critical one. There’s a big difference between (1) arguing against the reducibility of good to any non-moral property, (2) arguing against the validity of any argument with entirely non-normative premises and a normative conclusion, and (3) arguing against the notion that there is any such thing as a moral fact. I think that the reasons that you offer above, aside from the appeals to philosophical authority, support at the very most (1) and perhaps (2); they don’t support (3) (and while Hume thought they did, Moore rightly denied it). This is a matter of some importance, because Aristotelian moral philosophy actually accepts the reality and importance of irreducibly moral or normative facts; the idea that there is some further (metaphysical? supernatural?) fact that undergirds and explains goodness is a Platonic, not an Aristotelian doctrine. But the idea that the factuality or objectivity of goodness is undermined by not having some further fact beyond the moral fact to undergird and explain it, is merely to flip over the Platonic coin. Aristotle (like Moore) rejects the idea that you have to choose between propping up objective goodness with further facts, or giving it up as a myth.

I think that this is rather important, actually, to understanding the status of the “natural law,” as Aristotelians understand it: as a free-standing natural fact that can be true and be recognized in its own right (a fact, or set of facts, about the way we ought to treat one another), not something that you derive from empirical observations of nature or by appeal to your mystical observation of the Forms.

1. Wittgenstein and essences. You claim straightforwardly “The notion of essences has largely been abandoned ever since Wittgenstein alighted onto ‘family resemblances.’” I take it you’re referring to Philosophical Investigations 67. But Wittgenstein doesn’t take the lesson of 67 to be “there aren’t any essences” or even “there aren’t any words that admit of strictly limited general definitions.” He thinks there are lots of words that do, and that any word can in the right conversational context (cf. PI 68). There are language-games for which the old account of linguistic simples and complexes defined in terms of them are “really valid” (cf. PI 48); it is just that there are other language games where it doesn’t help us understand what’s going on.

I don’t know who you mean when you say that the notion of essences has largely been abandoned. Certainly there are lots of philosophers who don’t put much stock in the notion, but there are lots of others who do; it’s an issue of some debate in metaphysics and philosophy of language both. One of the most notorious essentialists in contemporary philosophy (Kripke; cf. Naming and Necessity) happens to be deeply influenced by Wittgenstein in particular. Most of the anti-essentialists, in Analytic philosophy at least, are not influenced mainly by Wittgenstein, but rather by Quine or by Rorty.

1. Aristotelian teleology. It’s certainly true that Galileo and Newton helped put the kibosh on the old Aristotelian system of natural ends and final causes as an explanatory framework in physics. And the long shadow that their reputation has cast has tended to make natural ends and final causes seem shabby and disreputable in any natural science. But it’s not at all clear to me that this is the way it needs to be or ought to be. There’s no reason to believe that the methods and explanatory framework that works best for physics and chemistry will also work best for all the other sciences; and in fact I think that really rubbing out teleological notions would simply mean the death of natural history and biology at large as sciences. See Michael Thompson’s The Representation of Life for a good extended discussion, or my post The ends in the world as we know it for a brief and partial discussion of one of the central issues.

Again, this is a matter of some import, which certainly deserves more argument than you’ve given it here (that is to say, it needs at least some argument…) because if teleological notions play an important role in our understanding of the “forms of life” in the natural world, then they give us an important point of reference for what sort of facts the facts of natural law — if there are any — might be.

The point here is not to suggest that you are wrong about the natural law. I happen to think that you are, but I haven’t argued it here. What I do think is that you have not supported your case nearly as strongly as you’ve presented it. The specific points you urge against the notion of natural law are not the uniform consensus of contemporary philosophy or scientific method and they need considerably more argument and attention to detail than the historical overview you’ve tried to give here.

Jonathan,

One thing that might help clear up some of the difficulties that you’re concerned with here is a clear differentiation between different things that “natural law” might be taken to mean. The way that the term is used by those who want “natural law” reasoning to be an important part of political or legal norms is substantially different from some sort of idea that “whatever is natural, in the appropriate sense, is licit, and whatever is unnatural, in the appropriate sense, is illicit.” Natural law is first and foremost a theory of the source and limits of rightful political authority; the idea is specifically that there is a natural law, prior to and independent of any statutory law, that can be discovered by the natural light of reason, that provides the basis for all legitimate authority and that dissolves all illegitimate claims to authority. (This is how you get the idea that a statute in violation of natural law is thereby null and void; if nobody can claim legitimate authority to do X, then any law that claims to do X cannot possibly be binding, any more than arbitrary commands that I happened to issue to my neighbors.) Call this the constitutional natural law.

Now, there are other senses of the word “natural law.” For example, “natural law” is sometimes used to refer to the universal or general empirical truths about nature, which we discover through observation and reasoning. But this is only “law” in an analogical sense, and thus competing claims such as “Homosexuality isn’t found anywhere in nature!” and “Homosexuality is found everywhere in nature!” have to do with “natural law” in the scientific sense, but not in the constitutional sense. Call this the scientific natural law.

Finally, claims about whether homosexuality or contraception violate or pervert the natural form of life that humans enjoy, and whether or not this entails that they are wrong, could be said to fall under a normative meaning of “natural law.” But they don’t fall under the strict constitutional meaning that I mentioned above; they have to do with what it may be right or wrong to do, not what you do or don’t have the right to claim authority to make people do. Call this the moral natural law.

So I’d suggest that folks who want to appeal to the moral natural law, but also want their appeals to have direct bearing on questions of what laws can be legitimately enforced (e.g. whether we should treat sodomy or contraception as a crime), are either just equivocating between the moral and constitutional senses of “natural law,” or else hiding a premise that moves from the claim about virtue and vice to a further claim about the legitimacy of a particular claim of authority.

It’s possible to mount an argument like this. For example, if you’re a particular kind of Catholic you might suggest that the use of contraception (for example) violates the natural law because it involves an attempt to usurp the rightful Lordship of God (and thus ought to be prohibited by statute). If someone offers an argument like this, then there are at least three possible responses: (1) you can deny that contraception attempts to usurp God’s authority; (2) you can deny, as a matter of natural law, that human rulers have the rightful authority to try to enforce God’s prerogatives on their fellow creatures; (3) you can deny that God exists, and thus that She has any authority to usurp. I’ll leave it up to the reader which, if any, is the best tack to take; the important point here is that rational conversation can continue; it doesn’t just devolve into bludgeoning each other with conflicting intuitions about the content of the natural law.

Incidentally, you mention that you don’t think the Declaration “can … be proven like 2+2=4.” I take it you mean the foundational claim that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. [etc.]” Maybe these claims and the following admit of proof, and maybe they do not; but Jefferson, at least, wouldn’t consider that a criticism. He states, after all, that they are self-evident, and thus suggests that they need no further proof, that they recommend themselves to sober reflection just as they are without prior argument.

DSH,

I can’t say that I’m convinced by your philosophical overview.

1. First, the is-ought problem, the fact-value distinction, and the naturalistic fallacy. You refer to all of these topics as if they were three different ways of speaking of the same thing. In fact they’re not: they are three distinct topics. Moore, for one, would be very surprised to hear that he endorses the fact-value distinction; in fact he takes for granted that there are objective moral facts and characterizes ethics as a theoretical science aiming at giving true general propositions about the things that are good and the nature of goodness as such (PE 1-5). For a painstaking argument, see Chapter III and Chapter IV of Moore’s sequel Ethics (1912), on “The Objectivity of Moral Judgments.” Importantly, you should note that Moore would object just as much to those non-cognitivists who analyzed “X is good” as merely expressing an attitude towards X rather than making a factual assertion; since the analysis into other concepts such as “commendation” treads on the conceptual simplicity that he thinks “good” has, and the claim that judgments of good assert nothing is explicitly denied in PE 13.

Moore defined the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ (at PE 10) as the fallacy of attempting to offer a definition of “good” in terms of simpler concepts (Moore held the term, when used in the sense of intrinsic value, to be a simple term that does not admit of further conceptual analysis). When using the term in diagnosing other philosophers arguments, he typically uses it to identify confusions between a synthetic statement claiming that everything that is good has some other non-moral property (which needs to be defended by argument or intuition), with an analytic statement claiming that “good” just means having that other non-moral property (which supposedly needs no further defense). Cf. PE 10: “But far too many philosophers have thought that when they named those other properties they were actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply not ‘other,’ but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. This view I propose to call the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ and of it I shall now endeavour to dispose”; cf. also PE 6. Moore, of course, refuses to call the property of goodness “natural” but he does not deny that it is a matter of objective fact, or that statements to the effect of “X is good” can be judged objectively true or false. His complaint is against reductionist theories of ethics, which attempt to analyze “good” as just meaning some complex of non-moral properties.

The is-ought problem, as classically set out by David Hume, doesn’t have to do with definition at all, but rather with entailment; Hume claims it to be impossible to derive “ought” sentences from “is” sentences without an auxiliary premise using “ought.” The idea here is that ought-statements aren’t entailed by is-statements alone (the issue is not analyticity vs. syntheticity, but rather whether or not you can make the inference of the ought-statement from the is-statement apriori without any further premises). Now, Hume took this to point towards a genuine and unbridgeable gap between facts and values; but not every philosopher who recognizes the problem feels the same way. One such philosopher was Aristotle, who both believed all of ethics to be founded in natural facts and also wrote the first known expression of the “is-ought” problem in the philosophical literature, at NE 1144a.

I mention this not only as an exegetical and historical point, but also as a critical one. There’s a big difference between (1) arguing against the reducibility of good to any non-moral property, (2) arguing against the validity of any argument with entirely non-normative premises and a normative conclusion, and (3) arguing against the notion that there is any such thing as a moral fact. I think that the reasons that you offer above, aside from the appeals to philosophical authority, support at the very most (1) and perhaps (2); they don’t support (3) (and while Hume thought they did, Moore rightly denied it). This is a matter of some importance, because Aristotelian moral philosophy actually accepts the reality and importance of irreducibly moral or normative facts; the idea that there is some further (metaphysical? supernatural?) fact that undergirds and explains goodness is a Platonic, not an Aristotelian doctrine. But the idea that the factuality or objectivity of goodness is undermined by not having some further fact beyond the moral fact to undergird and explain it, is merely to flip over the Platonic coin. Aristotle (like Moore) rejects the idea that you have to choose between propping up objective goodness with further facts, or giving it up as a myth.

I think that this is rather important, actually, to understanding the status of the “natural law,” as Aristotelians understand it: as a free-standing natural fact that can be true and be recognized in its own right (a fact, or set of facts, about the way we ought to treat one another), not something that you derive from empirical observations of nature or by appeal to your mystical observation of the Forms.

1. Wittgenstein and essences. You claim straightforwardly “The notion of essences has largely been abandoned ever since Wittgenstein alighted onto ‘family resemblances.’” I take it you’re referring to Philosophical Investigations 67. But Wittgenstein doesn’t take the lesson of 67 to be “there aren’t any essences” or even “there aren’t any words that admit of strictly limited general definitions.” He thinks there are lots of words that do, and that any word can in the right conversational context (cf. PI 68). There are language-games for which the old account of linguistic simples and complexes defined in terms of them are “really valid” (cf. PI 48); it is just that there are other language games where it doesn’t help us understand what’s going on.

I don’t know who you mean when you say that the notion of essences has largely been abandoned. Certainly there are lots of philosophers who don’t put much stock in the notion, but there are lots of others who do; it’s an issue of some debate in metaphysics and philosophy of language both. One of the most notorious essentialists in contemporary philosophy (Kripke; cf. Naming and Necessity) happens to be deeply influenced by Wittgenstein in particular. Most of the anti-essentialists, in Analytic philosophy at least, are not influenced mainly by Wittgenstein, but rather by Quine or by Rorty.

1. Aristotelian teleology. It’s certainly true that Galileo and Newton helped put the kibosh on the old Aristotelian system of natural ends and final causes as an explanatory framework in physics. And the long shadow that their reputation has cast has tended to make natural ends and final causes seem shabby and disreputable in any natural science. But it’s not at all clear to me that this is the way it needs to be or ought to be. There’s no reason to believe that the methods and explanatory framework that works best for physics and chemistry will also work best for all the other sciences; and in fact I think that really rubbing out teleological notions would simply mean the death of natural history and biology at large as sciences. See Michael Thompson’s The Representation of Life for a good extended discussion, or my post The ends in the world as we know it for a brief and partial discussion of one of the central issues.

Again, this is a matter of some import, which certainly deserves more argument than you’ve given it here (that is to say, it needs at least some argument…) because if teleological notions play an important role in our understanding of the “forms of life” in the natural world, then they give us an important point of reference for what sort of facts the facts of natural law — if there are any — might be.

The point here is not to suggest that you are wrong about the natural law. I happen to think that you are, but I haven’t argued it here. What I do think is that you have not supported your case nearly as strongly as you’ve presented it. The specific points you urge against the notion of natural law are not the uniform consensus of contemporary philosophy or scientific method and they need considerably more argument and attention to detail than the historical overview you’ve tried to give here.

Jonathan,

One thing that might help clear up some of the difficulties that you’re concerned with here is a clear differentiation between different things that “natural law” might be taken to mean. The way that the term is used by those who want “natural law” reasoning to be an important part of political or legal norms is substantially different from some sort of idea that “whatever is natural, in the appropriate sense, is licit, and whatever is unnatural, in the appropriate sense, is illicit.” Natural law is first and foremost a theory of the source and limits of rightful political authority; the idea is specifically that there is a natural law, prior to and independent of any statutory law, that can be discovered by the natural light of reason, that provides the basis for all legitimate authority and that dissolves all illegitimate claims to authority. (This is how you get the idea that a statute in violation of natural law is thereby null and void; if nobody can claim legitimate authority to do X, then any law that claims to do X cannot possibly be binding, any more than arbitrary commands that I happened to issue to my neighbors.) Call this the constitutional natural law.

Now, there are other senses of the word “natural law.” For example, “natural law” is sometimes used to refer to the universal or general empirical truths about nature, which we discover through observation and reasoning. But this is only “law” in an analogical sense, and thus competing claims such as “Homosexuality isn’t found anywhere in nature!” and “Homosexuality is found everywhere in nature!” have to do with “natural law” in the scientific sense, but not in the constitutional sense. Call this the scientific natural law.

Finally, claims about whether homosexuality or contraception violate or pervert the natural form of life that humans enjoy, and whether or not this entails that they are wrong, could be said to fall under a normative meaning of “natural law.” But they don’t fall under the strict constitutional meaning that I mentioned above; they have to do with what it may be right or wrong to do, not what you do or don’t have the right to claim authority to make people do. Call this the moral natural law.

So I’d suggest that folks who want to appeal to the moral natural law, but also want their appeals to have direct bearing on questions of what laws can be legitimately enforced (e.g. whether we should treat sodomy or contraception as a crime), are either just equivocating between the moral and constitutional senses of “natural law,” or else hiding a premise that moves from the claim about virtue and vice to a further claim about the legitimacy of a particular claim of authority.

It’s possible to mount an argument like this. For example, if you’re a particular kind of Catholic you might suggest that the use of contraception (for example) violates the natural law because it involves an attempt to usurp the rightful Lordship of God (and thus ought to be prohibited by statute). If someone offers an argument like this, then there are at least three possible responses: (1) you can deny that contraception attempts to usurp God’s authority; (2) you can deny, as a matter of natural law, that human rulers have the rightful authority to try to enforce God’s prerogatives on their fellow creatures; (3) you can deny that God exists, and thus that She has any authority to usurp. I’ll leave it up to the reader which, if any, is the best tack to take; the important point here is that rational conversation can continue; it doesn’t just devolve into bludgeoning each other with conflicting intuitions about the content of the natural law.

Incidentally, you mention that you don’t think the Declaration “can … be proven like 2+2=4.” I take it you mean the foundational claim that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. [etc.]” Maybe these claims and the following admit of proof, and maybe they do not; but Jefferson, at least, wouldn’t consider that a criticism. He states, after all, that they are self-evident, and thus suggests that they need no further proof, that they recommend themselves to sober reflection just as they are without prior argument.

This may be interesting and entertaining, but it’s not a “meme.” There’s no such thing as a meme. It’s a web game that you chose to play and recommend to others, because (I take it) you found it fun.

Take responsibility for the contents of your own mind!