The Nature of Law, How does it affect political philosophy?

[nimble]

Knowing all the members on this board, I figured this would be a good place to start to find out what people think rights are and where they come from, and if you think they matter. I would like for us to explore this through dialectics, so if anyone volunteers to explain, we can all be little Socrates-es and discuss until we hit some truth.

[PeteyRimple]

I think any moral laws adopted must be rationally acceptable to all persons that moral law affects. I think any moral law that did not recognize the right to self-ownership would be irrational, because it would not be Pareto efficient. (Pareto efficiency is when it is impossible to make someone better off while making the other worse off). This is the contractarian outlook endorsed by the philosopher Jan Narveson, in a nutshell.

[nimble]

I was under the assumption that contractuarians took a contrary position to natural law. I thought contractuarians took the stance that we only have rights because we contractually/mutually agree to them, not because there is anything objectively moral about them( you know, something inherently right about rights).

[PeteyRimple]

Contractarianism doesn't imply people have actually agreed to these rights, it just asks, if we are going to adopt rules that govern our society, what would be the most rational for all to accept? And because these rules apply to all of us equally, they are objective.