The Self-Evidence of Freedom
The Declaration of independence makes no argument for the legitimacy of its claim that the rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, that governments are instituted from the consent of the governed, or that the people have the right to overthrow oppressive governments. These are held to be self-evident - conclusions that anyone could arrive at without much thought. But are these truths actually self-evident anymore in the context of modern thought?
The American Revolution was the direct spawn of Enlightenment political thought. John Locke, in his Two Treatises on Government, was perhaps the most influential, having stated that each individual has the right to life, liberty, and property, a phrase that was copied with little modification straight into the American Declaration of Independence. Locke believed that the first right was unalienable due to its bestowment by the Creator, and the latter two derive from one’s capacity for rational thought - i.e., children have not yet developed and criminals have demonstrated their lack of rational thought, and so are not entitled to these rights.
So what of the deterministic shift in recent thought? Criminals are becoming less responsible for their actions, and more extreme determinists would say that no one at all is capable of truly rational thought except what is incidental. This therefore precludes the self-evidence of the latter two rights, and since naturalistic determinism itself precludes the existence (or at least involvement) of a Creator, the first right as well loses its self-evidence. Even without naturalistic determinism, simply secularity of state makes these rights much less clear, for without a Creator, nothing can be self-evident. One can certainly make the argument that it is advantageous to allow one’s citizens freedom of life, choice, and property, but any argument for the superiority of such a system can only evaluate it based on its results rather than any intrinsic value.
Though Ecclesiastical states have their share of problems with corruption among other things, instability is not one of their weak points. Democracy and liberal freedom in general have proven over the past centuries to be remarkably stable compared to other secular forms of government, but how much longer can it exist before a more convincing system exploits the popular unrest inevitable in a state old enough to be removed from its prior government with another set of “self-evident” truths so called only because they exemplify the mindset of the time?
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