JONTILLMAN.COM | part of the problem since 1976

When I wrote earlier of the immorality and unconstitutionality of the proposed draft, I was questioned by an astute reader as to why I did not include the word “unethical” in my list of negatives.

I must admit that it was not an accidental omission - I purposely avoided the word. I avoided it because all internet discussions of American politics that involve the Constitution will eventually invoke the Declaration of Independence and the famous beginning of the Preamble:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

That sentence defines an ethical space in which to assert the basis for revolution, and according to Samuel P. Huntington, was necessary because “The British were white, English, and Protestant, just as we were. They had to have some other basis on which to justify independence”.
My problem with that sentence is two-fold:

1. “We hold these truths to be self-evident” is is simply a “more elegant version of “Because we said so”. It is a derivation of an “ought” statement from “is” statements with no “ought” premise (see G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica). It is supposedly derived from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, which is one giant exercise in conjugating an ought from an is (see David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, book 3, part 1, section 1), but also inherits much from Thomas Hobbes’ long-winded obliteration of the semantic differences between the words “can”, “desire”, “ought” and “right” called Leviathan.
2. “…endowed by their creator…” is an appeal to theological principles, or less firmly, an appeal to authority, though the authority seems not to in the Bible, the authority that, presumably, a group of white English Protestants would have been appealing to.

Both of those issues are logical fallacies, and those fallacies (is, ought and appeal to authority) are at the core issues of Ethics, making them a field for much scholarly debate, but not much use in a political discussion. Suffice it to say that with my meager training in Philosophy I find myself so far firmly in the camp with Jeremy Bentham (on this issue alone - I am no friend of Utilitarianism), who famously said:

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.

So, while I might agree that there may be an ethical basis for opposing Rangel’s proposal, it is not the one that my correspondent assumed it was, and I wished to avoid the appearance of endorsing the implicit ethics of “natural law” that are so linked to Constitutionality in so many American’s minds.