Hobbes, Locke, Natural Law and Natural Rights
                                         A  Tract Book Essay
                                                     By
                                            Anthony J. Fejfar
        © Copyright 2006 by Anthony J. Fejfar
                        What are rights?   That is what are legal rights?   Some people 
        wonder.   The best definition is that for every right there is a corresponding 
        duty of someone else to refrain from certain conduct or to engage in certain 
        conduct.   
                         Where do rights come from?   Are they just thin imaginary wisps 
        which fleetingly come and go?  Or, are rights more substantial?    John 
        Locke argued that all of us have Natural Rights which we are entitled to in a 
        State of Nature which proceeds society.   Thus, from a Lockean point of 
        view it perfectly possible to argue that you are being treated unjustly as a 
        matter of Natural Law, even though corrupt human law will not say so.  With 
        Locke,  I can argue that even the United States Supreme Court has made a 
        mistake in interpreting the Constitution.
                    I argue that behind Locke is something like my theory that Natural 
        Rights all subsist as Aristotelian Substantial Forms or Immutable Platonic 
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        Forms.   Thus,  Natural Rights are imprinted into the very nature of reality 
        itself.    Because Natural Rights subsist in reality, Locke could argue that 
        they existed in a State of Nature prior to society.
                    In contrast to Locke,  Thomas Hobbes argued that in a State of 
        Nature life is a dog eat dog, world of cutthroat survival of the fittest. 
        Hobbes argued that all right are simply social constructions which the people 
        or the sovereign find convenient to use.   Hobbes, in this sense was a 
        positivist.    Rights are merely arbitrary social conventions, and are paper 
        thin.   I argue that even if the world of the Forms did not exist, that the 
        Quantum Field does exist, and that the Quantum Field is affected by 
        meaning.   Thus, rights could become imbedded in the Quantum Field, and 
        in this sense, operate to function like the Aristotelian Substantial Forms, and 
        like the Immutable Platonic Forms.  
                       However, I need not go that far.  It is apparent to me that 
        Aristotelian Substantial Forms and Immutable Platonic Forms do exist.   We 
        experience language as substantial and objective when needed.   Language is 
        not just paper thin.  Language is rich with meaning. Language has depth. 
        Literature and poetry move are hearts, as do Constitutions.
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