Thanks for the review! I describe what I mean by freedom here and its moral relevance here, if that helps at all.

Hello all, I'm looking for feedback on the definition of morality that I defend in the article. Any questions, comments, or criticisms would be highly appreciated.

Summary: Morality exists as "should" statements resulting from the values of freedom and reason. We can assess the truth of morality claims by determining whether they properly derive from these moral values. Moral principles are therefore those principles that free agents cannot reasonably reject based on public reasons. Under this theory of morality, there are no true moral dilemmas. If a principle can be reasonably rejected by a free party, then it is not a moral principle. Yet if it cannot be, then it is morally binding to agents that value freedom and reason.

This is moral relativism that this substack addresses and refutes. Right and wrong mean something. And natural rights derive from this objective ethics.

There is a lot here that id be happy to address. Feel free to DM me if you’re interested.

Hobbes never relied on actual consent either. And yes they do, because you can't declare rights that impose duties onto others without a reasonable justification that others can reasonably accept. And this is not Locke's view of rights.

Yes, this is the only argument made for implicit consent and its not even applied to moral philosophy (I'm not even sure how implicit consent would apply in that case). Again, contractualists have never used either actual or implicit consent, and their failure to do so isn't Lockean. To attribute this view onto them is a blatant misunderstanding. But if you know of any social contract theorists that rely on those ideas of consent, I'd be curious to know.

See here for Locke on tacit consent. Again, contractualists don't take either an actual or implicit consent view. This is a misunderstanding of the philosophy.

This is a descriptive account of rights, not a normative one that philosophy focuses on. Rights exist regardless of their violation or their declared non-existence or someone's imagination.

Implicit consent is not actual consent as you refer to above. Only Locke has made a serious argument for implicit consent, which contractualists have not adopted. Social contract theory takes after Kant and Rawls. Again, why this social contract theory is not Lockean but Kantian.

It doesn't. I discuss this in the piece as well: "[our laws] weren’t created from scratch out of someone’s rational intuition. Rather, they evolved as legal scholars and authorities developed and discussed broad legal principles and applied them to ever-changing circumstances."

Social contract theory has never referred to an actual, material, morally binding agreement. No social contract theorist has argued this. Rather, it is a very common misconception and mischaracterization of the argument. I'd recommend reading the above posted articles that develop this contractualist view. Keep in mind that you're addressing a strawman.

>I was specifically referring to inter-imaginatory concepts, and in this sense you are replying to a strawman.

So all one has to do is imagine a different set of rights (say the right to do wrong) and then you have no rights. All this is is "what if we both happened to imagine the same rights?" But what if we don't? What if we had the conflict of John and Bill as discussed in the piece? Do we then not have rights?

I argue that we still do, regardless of our imaginations, that we have rights based on the principles of the social contract. I argue for its meta-ethical basis and its moral authority here and here.

I'd recommend re-reading. I argue that we develop reasonable principles and apply them to specific facts create rights. Their application specifies what these rights are (I provide this linked articleas an example, to show how constitutional principles applied based on reason, create rights). This resolves the specification problem.

And the prioritization problem can be resolved by examining the meta-principles of certain rights (this linked article is provided as an example of how our moral/legal rules of consent are based on meta-ethical principles).

I've already addressed why the social contract has moral authority in the above-linked pieces, as well as why I am not a Lockean.

I've addressed hypothetical consent here. Summary: You can't have moral principles of actual consent without reference to the social contract, which relies on hypothetical consent. Actual consent depends on hypothetical consent.

Not discover, create. And there would not be rights outside of this procedure. This is discussed in the article: " it’s reason that leads us to develop the universal moral principles which make up the social contract." And these moral principles are the basis of our rights.

I argue that there are no moral facts outside of a hypothetical contractual procedure, Locke argues that there are. That is how I am not a Lockean.

Not all views of an objective morality pre-existing the state are Lockean. There are many different schools of thought in meta-ethics. Mine is metaethical constructivism linked here if you would like to read it. You will find references to Kant, not Locke.

Thank you for reading the piece! I'll look more into Rothbard's views on the topic. I just wanted to address one of his rights-based arguments to show how the BRA can lead us down the wrong path.

>Again, since your "social contract" isn't really a contract at all, and basically collapses into "rationality,"

"The social contract is a metaphor for the exchange of freedom for reason-based duties." This is what I say in the piece I linked. If you mean a material written contract binding on all, then no, that doesn't exist. If you mean principles that people would reasonably agree to, then yes, those exist and have moral weight, as the linked pieces discuss.

But I argue in the piece why a Lockean conception of rights fail to address the specification, prioritization, and genealogy problems, and how a social contract analysis does (again, its only a metaphor).

They are constructed in the sense that they derive from the hypothetical social contract, where free people accept certain reasonable non-rejectable principles (as described here). All of ethics is constructed in this metaphysical sense.

Yet rights exist in that we have certain rights that can be violated, as in reference to the social contract. The piece discusses this in the last section.

If they come from our imagination, they have no moral weight. Your imagination can't make anyone else do anything, like respecting your entitlements. The rebuttal (the answer to the specification, prioritization, and genealogy problems) is provided in the last section.

This argument is discussed in the piece and rejected.

This is definitely not a Lockean view of rights, as the article discusses. Instead, it argues that these rights come from the reason based principles of the social contract. These principles create rights (in the metaphysical sense) and we discover them (in the real world sense). And I argue why these reason-based principles have moral weight here and here.