Jane mentioned negative and positive rights. That terminology comes from a famous paper by Issiah Berling. Google came up with

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/twoconcepts.pdf

which is the paper. Well worth reading.

Jane, I can think of several problems with your approach via human society. For example, if I want to go shopping, I need some confidence that I won’t be hit over the head and my money stolen. Any society must control violence. But that only means that the society will try to minimize violence, it doesn’t give a right not to be attacked.

As a matter of historical fact, the scientific and industrial revolution occured in societies that did not give equal rights to women and discriminated on race and religion. If I remember correctly, US universities in the 1930s had quotas for how many Jews they would admit.

You can’t derive a right to equal treatment (whatever that means) from what is needed for a science based society.

I may add more if I can get a decent sleep tonight.

That the belief in an objective reality, reasoned argument and the rejection of argument based on revelation or tradition is necessary for the advancement of science, I do not doubt, and I don’t think any rational person could doubt. But that only gets us as far as the laboratory. To judge by what we now know of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Iran’s nuclear program–or North Korea’s for that matter–is as “Western” in that sense as our own. The “devotional school of ballistics” (Parkinson) isn’t practiced anywhere these days, but the cause of human rights is not notably advanced thereby.

Nor, frankly, do I believe the proponents of the Bill of Rights and the author of the Virginia Declaration of Religious Liberties did so in order to speed the arrival of the cotton gin, interghangeable parts and the railroad. They thought liberty of conscience, free speech and security of property had value OF THEMSELVES and not as a stepping-stone to a higher technolgical level. And please keep in mind that if you base your claim to those rights on the tech level of your society, anyone who finds a way to promote scientific research in contemporary China has undercut the justification for freedom of religion. Would you agree to an established church if it would advance maglev trains or “railgun” space launches? I didn’t think so.

As for the overall status of rights–or morals–derived by reason, I remain deeply suspicious. In the physical world, reasoning by evidence works quite well. We knew that the world was round, and roughly what the circumference was, by Hellenistic times, and educated men who had studied the matter did not disagree. The same is true of the distance and mass of the Moon. Our assessment of surface conditions on Mars has changed rapidly over the past century, but at each stage, as new evidence was available, reason led everyone to the same narrowing range of conclusions. There was never a democratic and a communist reading of the evidence, nor a catholic and a freudian one.

In the moral and political world, if anything, we have a growing divergence, with ethicists now arguing that cattle have rights, or that babies are a potential soruce of spare parts. Much of the West believes in a right to “free” health care, but not in the right to free speech. I do not say that everyone is wrong but me. I do say that unaided reason cannot be shown to lead to a moral code to to a system of human rights in the way it led to the acceptance of Newton’s work, or Einstein’s.

Wishing does not make it so. And that includes wishing that reason were enough.