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I am doing some reading on Strauss and Strauss related things and having a hard time getting my head around what exactly is meant by "natural right", as well as "positive right" by contrast.

I checked out the SEP and there, as seems to be the case everywhere I'm looking, people keep presupposing its definition. An appreciate inclusion to the offered definition would be an explanation of the use of the singular and its importance. What is being connoted by the use of 'right' as opposed to 'rights' or 'what is right'.

Thanks!

Also, wasn't sure what to tag, perhaps y'all can help.

LootHypothesis
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    Says SEP:"*natural rights are the sub-class of moral rights that humans have because of their nature*", "*civil and political rights... are familiar from historic bills of rights such as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) and the U.S. Bill of Rights (1791, with subsequent amendments).*" If you want something beyond that please be more specific, definitional questions are considered off-topic here. – Conifold Aug 21 '19 at 03:09
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    Strauss and his commentators specifically use the phrase "Natural Right", with the implication that it means something other than 'natural rights'. – LootHypothesis Aug 21 '19 at 19:02
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    SEP has an [article on Strauss](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/) too:"*Strauss criticized what he took to be the moral relativism upon which the social sciences rested... Natural Right and History asks, though does not answer, the question of whether it is possible to return to some concept of nature for understanding who we are as human beings and therefore to some notion of absolute moral standards.*" Defining was not his style. You can look at [Dyske](https://dyske.com/paper/762) for an informal characterization of Natural Right. – Conifold Aug 21 '19 at 20:51
  • read the article on Strauss and update your question appropriately... definitions aren't **completely** off topic here –  Aug 21 '19 at 23:32
  • There are references you can check in the library, eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_Philosophy also books on/by Leo Strauss. – Gordon Aug 23 '19 at 00:42

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It's been a while since I read Strauss, but think the upshot is that, for Strauss, a 'Natural Right' is something that is (err...) naturally right. To give a trivial example, Strauss would likely say that preserving life is naturally right. People everywhere reject death in all its forms, and consider those who embrace death as pathological beings subject to restraint and/or treatment for their own good and the good of society. As I'll explain in a moment, this thought is different from a 'natural right' to life, and from 'legal' rights that protect people from harm and/or foster their well-being.

Strauss is trying to address the problem of moral relativism, and to his mind the root of moral relativism in the modern world is the Liberal (in the sense of classical Liberalism) reduction of things that are naturally right to the 'flat' construct of 'natural rights.' The Liberal notion of natural rights arose to oppose destructive momentary urges (i.e., things that feel 'naturally right' in the visceral heat of the moment, but which seem overly wrong from any broader perspective), but to Strauss' mind that notion of a 'natural right' can become dogmatic, imposing itself on individuals and preventing them from doing what is truly 'naturally right'.

Strauss doesn't really clarify where this apperception of 'naturally right' comes from, aside from a certain fondness for religious revelation; he seems more interested in maintaining an openness to the philosophical question of how rights are distributed in society. His work has been co-opted by the conservative right as a weapon agains liberal (in the sense of progressive) policies, but they generally misuse the work, because they don't realize that Strauss is talking about large-L Liberalism (the 18th century model that conservatives adore) as much as small-L liberalism (the 20th century progressive model that conservative abhor).

Ted Wrigley
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To anyone still interested in this, I'd say Conifold's extract from the SEP and Dyske's essay are great starts, but I've found the clearest exposition to be in Luc Ferry's Political Philosophy (Volume 1). There he compares natural right (ideal) to positive right (real).

He explains that Strauss was against the Enlightenment philosophy which led to modernity. Strauss characterizes this through his "three waves of modernity" which explains the process by which modern philosophy grew to seek the coinciding of the ideal and the real. This is opposed to classical philosophy, where the real and the ideal are separate and distinct. For Strauss's classical philosophy, the ideal = the cosmos -- the order and rationality inherent in nature. In this sense, Natural Right is not "natural" in the way we use the word. It is referring to the order of the cosmos, which we (the Real) have to work toward in order for our souls to be harmonious with it (the Ideal).

Machiavelli, the first wave, sought to "lower the standard" of the ideal, so that instead of a hard-to-achieve rational cosmic order, that relied very much on chance for its actualization, we could replace the old ideal with a new one. Most of the populace cares primarily about peace, health, and prosperity according to Machiavelli (see The Prince). So, let's make that the new ideal (achieved through technology - the burgeoning natural sciences at the time). In this way, the ideal becomes accessible through the real and much more attainable.

The ultimate culmination of this was German Idealist philosophies of history (the third wave of modernity), such as Hegel's, which posited that the progress of history constituted rationality itself. Progress - what is Right - is achieved through the "cunning of reason" (passion) operating through history. This is the ultimate fusion of the real and the ideal, where there is no distinction between them at all. And this is what Strauss was arguing against.

So Natural Right = based in a distinct ideal, and Positive Right/Political Right = basing the Ideal in the Real (Real = that which exists positively, think positivism).

This was written in a rush and is no polished exposition or philosophical tract, but it is the gist of what I've gathered.

LootHypothesis
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