It is rather amazing how much trouble my use of "positive right" instead of "privilege" has caused. At this point it is probably prudent to link to
Wikipedia and leave it at that. This is why I prefer to use readily-acceptable terminology, rather than trying to define a concept like "privilege," which has a host of technical and colloquial definitions.
@myrkul999:
The Second Amendment very much involves a negative right. It is a quite express limitation on government power. A positive Second Amendment right would involve a mandate that the government distribute firearms. Some Amendments can be characterized as either, although they all functionally act to limit government power.
@Sandy:
At no point did I say that the Bill of Rights enumerates only negative rights. Else I would not have asked whether the Sixth Amendment enumerates rights or "privileges" (positive rights). The Sixth amendment is a limitation on government power.* But does it grant the
privilege to a jury trial in criminal cases, or protect the
right to a jury trial by preventing the government from using any other method? And is that right/privilege/whatever "natural?" There is no conceptual confusion. Nor do I understand why you think I am conflating permissions with positive rights, unless you are using the term "permission" in a specific sense I am not familiar with. If anything, we're probably in agreement that the Bill of Rights does not enumerate all that many actual rights as we define them.
As for specific examples of how natural rights are subjective, I thought they would be unnecessary. How inalienable and natural has Locke's right to property been considered historically? Does it extend to women? Quite a few of the Framers certainly did not think so, and that thinking was reflected in laws which barred women from entering into contracts or owning property independently. Is liberty inalienable and natural for non-Caucasians? The liberty of slaves was very much alienable and was hardly considered natural for much of early American history. I should not have to go into all the cases where the "right to life" of one group or another was both very alienable** and considered quite unnatural.
Fact of the matter is that what we consider "natural rights" were not considered natural for much of human history, except for a privileged few.
Some disagree, and argue that natural rights exist in the aether, waiting to be discovered. That is a matter of personal preference. I reject that notion just as strongly as I reject the sort of moronic moral relativism that was until recently in vogue. My point is that positive rights, whatever you want to call them,
can be considered "natural." Whether they
should be considered so is a different matter.
* It is true that positive and negative rights apply to individuals. But the usual discussion involves individuals acting collectively as part of that organization we call a government.
** Alienable in the sense that not only
could a certain group's rights be denied, but that they
should be denied.