Unalienable Rights

Thank you Con for the “history of the phrase.” May I add a little more depth to this history?Jefferson had over 6000 books in his library, one could rest assure the well-read Jefferson would have study the scholars of past ages and possibly included Democritus. Perhaps, the discovery of Unalienable Rights, through recorded history, started as early as Democritus 460BC where he stated (http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk...): “Freedom from disturbance is the condition that causes human happiness, and this is the ethical goal.” Con also covered John Locke, one of Jefferson's inspirational figures, stating the following, “He [Locke] expressed the radical view that government is morally obliged to serve people, namely by protecting life, liberty, and property.” From Democritus to Locke, we see the historical formation of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” taking hold in Jefferson's presentation, while Jefferson insisting that all humans are born with these Unalienable Rights, without government, void of any man-made laws. However, Jefferson did not scientifically backed his claim with empirical evidence, instead he treated those Rights as an axiom using the term “self-evident.” On the subject of man-made laws, the nineteenth century French philosopher Frederic Bastiat stated the following (http://ebookbrowsee.net...):“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused man to make laws in the first place.”Property includes shelter and food by having the freedom (“Liberty”) during “the pursuit of” survival, where survival is positive-feedback and the prerequisite for human “Happiness.” Again, unbeknownst to Jefferson, he discovered, not developed, a primeval working function found throughout all living-systems from a single living cell, to humans, to social systems. He claimed a polished version of this primeval function, within the scope of humanity, giving it the label of Unalienable Rights in the celebrated form of, “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” We could play the word game and get trapped in semantics on the definition of “rights,” however, Jefferson used the label, “Unalienable Rights,” and that is just a label to a primeval working function, or a bio-program, found in all life. “Unalienable” is a fact, for when alienating any of those bio-program terms or “Rights” the result is death. Notably, it would be impossible to take away any one of the Rights while leaving the other two intact, as all of the Rights are dependent on one another. Without Life, one cannot enjoy Liberty or pursue Happiness. Without Liberty, one cannot pursue Happiness, and as this pursuit often overlaps with the pursuit of survival, one is unable to continue Life. Without the pursuit of Happiness/survival, one cannot continue Life or enjoy Liberty. Because of their interdependency and tendency to wane simultaneously with various degrees of obstruction, the three Rights define a spectrum of positions. The positive end of the spectrum is a position of Life, Liberty, and Happiness (positive-feedback), while the negative end is a position of Death, Tyranny, and Distress (negative-feedback). The spectrums between Life and Death, Liberty and Tyranny, and Happiness and Distress, entertains a natural tendency during the struggle of survival to support, prolong, and improve “Life.” At the same time, there is an inherent drive to increase freedom (“Liberty”), with an ongoing effort to reduce and optimize the energy expended during “the pursuit of” an objective, while increasing and exploring new levels of “Happiness,” fulfillment, pleasure, and anything to do with positive-feedback. Life's Unalienable Rights helps life to thrive within the matrix of the Laws of Nature and interact with other living-systems. A bio-program, having an organically persuasive, self-adjusting, fine-tuning algorithm throughout the flux of life's Unalienable Rights; encouraging life to take the path of least resistance, in the attempt to satisfy the pursuit of its objectives, to maintain survival, or search for new levels of positive-feedback; this is the machinery of evolution.Con's Locke quote also made reference to morality, “...government is morally obliged to serve people...” Governance is post-civil-society, where morality is the foundation to a civil-society. A moral event is doing something Right embracing positive-feedback relative to another's Unalienable Rights. An immoral event is doing something Wrong embracing negative-feedback relative to another's Unalienable Rights. When two or more humans form a group, the group becomes alive as a separate entity having its own Unalienable Rights. The “Life” of the group, has freedom (“Liberty”) in "the pursuit of" group "Happiness" through goodwill and kindness leads to a mutual moral respect for the Unalienable Rights of all the members within the group. Goodwill is a conservative force that promotes order, stability, and harmony through the pursuit of group-wide positive-feedback. Over time, group-wide positive-feedback is the genesis of traditions, values, beliefs, language, etc., the norms of society. These norms are tried and tested, and conservatively pass down from one generation to the next establishing its culture. A moral order guides an individual in the prudent exercise of judgment relative to those norms. The individual in a civil society strives, albeit imperfectly, to be virtuous; that is, restrained, ethical, and honorable, respecting and embracing the Unalienable Rights of others relative to those tested norms.The evidence of morality in a wide range of independently developed cultures across isolated human tribes empirically supports the hypothesis that morality is a universal force throughout nature. This force is responsible for the diversity of traditions, values, and languages that formed the independent civil societies found throughout the world today and throughout recorded history.Therefore, morality is an outgrowth of life's Unalienable Rights, which is an outgrowth of the Constructal Law, which is an outgrowth of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Therefore, morality is part of the physical Laws of Nature, not man-made.Of course morality is a man-made word that simply refers to the primitives of Right or Wrong. These primitives generates mutual positive- or negative-feedback, relative to the Unalienable Rights of another. Mutual positive-feedback is found throughout the spectrum of life in the beneficial formation in schools of fish, flocks of birds, packs of wolves, tribes of humans, and even inter-species relationships, such as those between humans and their pets.In the natural order of events first came life with its bio-program (aka Unalienable Rights), then came morality for group formation as in the human genesis of norms for a civil society, and then came institutions of governance to make man-made laws preserving those norms. We now came full circle to Frederic Bastiat’s quote: “Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused man to make laws in the first place.”