Anti-Climacus

LINK: I think this is a slight oversimplification of the role of natural rights and the origins of the state in modern political thought:

"My feeling is that objections to Clarence Thomas’s jurisprudence should focus on what we think people’s rights are, substantively, rather than where we think they come from. But let me comment on the God vs Man question anyway. Actually, let Roberto Mangabeira Unger comment on it, from his Politics:

'Modern social thought was born proclaiming that society is made and imagined, that it is a human artifact rather than an expression of an underlying natural order.'"

I presume this argument is given to demonstrate that the contractarian nature of social organization somehow precludes the typical natural rights discourses. Obviously, these two appear side-by-side in Hobbes and Locke*. One could argue (as I probably would) that Hobbes isn't really committed to natural law (though he seems to spend a large amount of Leviathan substantiating it) and Locke isn't really all that committed to the social order being unnatural (though his system, at least in theory, presupposes individuality). Clearly, there's a tension between the two ideas, but I don't know if that is really as big of a problem as it is sometimes made out to be.

That is to say, I think one can tenably argue that society is unnatural or contractual, but the rules that govern society are natural, because the moral laws that guide the interaction of all human behavior are prior to even the founding of a society.

With this as preamble, a little more of the CT post:

"The Constitution of the United States is a decisive political expression of this conviction. It doesn’t preclude deep and shared religious convictions — it just doesn’t presuppose them."

I'll grant that, but with two notes I think worth making:

1. natural law discourse isn't wedded to the notion of a God, though it is of course much stronger for it (as Robert Prather points out in the comments, one of the fringe benefits of a God-given set of natural rights (and the recognition of them as such) is that no state has the power to take them away)

2. this is the thing that always annoys me about the Constitution--among other things the Bill of Rights does, it backwards-ly supposes that the state has a right to define what are rights and what aren't (and does this, confusingly, by declaring what rights the state doesn't have--thank you, Anti-Federalists)