ARTICLES
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RELIGION, SOVEREIGNTY, NATURAL RIGHTS,AND THE CONSTITUENT ELEMENTS OF EXPERIENCE Jordan B. Peterson*
ABSTRACTIt is commonly held that the idea of natural rights originated with theancient Greeks, and was given full form by more modern philosopherssuch as John Locke, who believed that natural rights were apprehen-sible primarily to reason. The problem with this broad position is three-fold:
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rst, it is predicated on the presumption that the idea of rightsis modern, biologically speaking (only twenty three hundred years sep-arates us from the Greeks, and three hundred from the English liber-als); second, it makes it appear that reason and right are integrally,even causally, linked;
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nally, it legitimizes debate about just what rightsmight be, even in their most fundamental essence. In consequence, themost cherished presumptions of the West remain castles in the air, his-torically and philosophically speaking. This perceived weakness of foun-dation makes societies grounded on conceptions of natural right vulnerableto criticism and attack in the most dangerous of manners. Most of thebloodiest battles and moral catastrophes of the twentieth century werea consequence of disagreement between groups of people who haddi
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erent rationally-derived notions of what exactly constituted an inalien-able right (“from each according to his ability, to each according tohis need”). If natural rights are anything at all, therefore, they betterbe something more than mere rational constructions. The adoption of a much broader evolutionary/historical perspective with regards to thedevelopment of human individuality and society allows for the gener-ation of a deep solution to this problem—one dependent on a trans-formation of ontology, much as moral vision. Such a solution groundsthe concept of sovereignty and natural right back into the increasinglyimplicit and profoundly religious soil from which it originally emerged,and provides a rock-solid foundation for explicit Western claims forthe innate dignity of man.
The Constituent Elements of Experience
Imagine for a moment that the human environment is not merelywhat is objectively extant in a given situation, present or past, oreven across the broad span of some evolutionarily archetypal Pleistocene
*Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, 4thFloor, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 3G3, jordanpeterson@yahoo.com
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