| | Ed,
Your first three truths, or rights, derive from the more fundamental right of the right to life. The right to life means the right to own one's own life, and thus to use it as one chooses. This in turn implies 1) the right to be free, since clearly one can use one's own life as one chooses only if one is free, 2) the right to the product of one's labor since this labor is the time and energy of one's life, and in turn the right to property since this time and energy of one's life is used in its creation and 3) the right to Eudaimonia, since if one owns one's life, one is free to choose one's pursuits. These first three truths are actually the first three corollaries of the right to life on the way to laws of lower level of abstraction. Therefore, there is actually one starting truth and the hierarchy must be formed from it, else other rights can not be properly derived.
I wrote,
However, it could be applied to the displacement of a person by force by writing it as "it shall be unlawful to require a person to mover more than a distance of ten feet under the threat of force" thus creating a law forbidding kidnapping, etc. And you responded,
This one is probably premature, as it could be used in order to prevent police from disbanding a rights-violating riot in the streets . . . True. This should be amended as " . . . of initiating the use of force . . . " The first application should be amended in this way also.
I wrote,
. . . however to help ensure the logical consistency of the legal code it would also seem that the most general political principles should also be included. And you responded,
. . . I don't see any kind of a problem with balancing these 2 things . . . I did not imply these two are exclusive, but complimentary, and showed both necessary to complete the full hierarchy of objective laws.
Given that all laws must be derived from the right to life through its application to circumstances of progressively lower levels of abstraction, until the level of existential concretes is reached, the problem of writing objective laws becomes the identification in the context of the current social system all those existential situations in which the right to life may be violated. Since this would require the listing of a prohibitive number of laws, some level of generality in the legal code must be retained. This point of generality will be determined by balancing the need for specificity against the burden of expanding the number of laws. This is the governing principle to be followed in this derivation, and would be the standard by which the application of Aristotle's rational choice theory and Pareto Optimality would be applied, in that more laws are less choice worthy and make the society worse off by complicating the legal code beyond tractability, and less laws are more choice worthy and leave society better off by simplifying the legal code to easy application.
(And of course the use of Aristotle's rational choice theory in the derivation of rights themselves from the right to life is superfluous since it is already implied by the condition of logical consistency with the right to life, since only those laws which were consistent with the fundamental right to life would be choice worthy, and any which were not would not be, and Pareto Optimality is superfluous here also since no law consistent with the right to life could make anyone worse off and any law inconsistent with it would.)
I think this lays down the complete recipe for derivation. What do you say?
Bob
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