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Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 11 of George Will’s hot-off-the-press 2019 volume, The Conservative Sensibility [2]:

We are social animals, dependent for our physical survival and mental well-being on some degree of sociability. To speak of natural rights is to bring the theoretical into the service of the practical: Are there things we must do, and must not do, in order to improve the probability of commodious and worthy living for creatures with our natures? Are there claims – natural rights – that, in a good society, people should be able to effectively assert in order to protect such ways of living? At no point does one need to feel bound to postulate that natural law, in the sense described here, requires a transcendent lawgiver. One can believe in moral knowledge teased from reflection on human nature and historic experience without believing that this is related to God’s revealed intentions.
….
A secular basis for natural rights reasoning is that rights are natural in the sense that they are discovered by something that is natural: reason.

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