> so man madedness does make an argument against anything?

I'm going to assume that there is a "not" missing between "does" and "make".

And this is the kind of useless statements that only make sense within the vacuum of philosophical discourse.

You know, there are a lot of iffy man made scientific stories about something called "oxidation", but I guess it being man made means that it's equivalent to all other man made stories. Hey, how about we go for a fun little duel of equal man made ideas! I'll grab my gun, and you go grab your pheonix-feather core wand. My bullets can't pierce your Protego Maximus, and I'm sure you can Expelliarmus me before I shoot you in the head.

> No, rights are not physical or materially real; that does not make them “fake” or contrived. Rather, they could be thought of as more or less useful in understanding material processes and relationships, in this case between people.

I agree with this. Imaginary concepts can certainly be useful, and I'd definetely say that rights are one of those, and a good thing for humanity overall. All I object to is the speaking of rights as if they are a discrete and "real" concept that can be discovered.

> Your argument is essentially the premise of Empiricism. But what you and the Empiricists fail to grasp is that everything we comprehend is man-made. Our conception of a physical rock is just as much a psychological construct as a notion of natural rights.

First of all, I understand the underpinnings of this argument. I understand the fact that we can never truly peer behind the veil of our own cognition. But this is just philosophical masturbation, and you do not act by those words even as you say them. Yes, all concepts exist to us only within our own cognition, but that does equate purely imaginary concepts with ones based in what we perceive as "physical reality". If you disagree we can perform a simple experiment: Take your notion of natural rights, and then throw it at my head. Then I'll go find an sensory object that I conceive off as a valid equivalent to my psychological construct of a rock, and I'll throw it at yours. I hypothesize that the effects of these actions will be somewhat different.

Yes, purely imaginary concepts such as "natural rights" can have a much bigger impact on the world than any amount of rock throwing, because we act upon them. I'm not saying they are not a part of physical reality. The brain is real, and what goes on inside one has real consequences. Technically, if we're being strict about it, there is no line distinguishing imagination from "reality". However, imaginary ideas are fundamentally flexible in a way that differs significantly from "reality". You and I can have completely different conceptions of the meaning of the word "rights", and the best we can hope for as a resolution is the agreements and disagreements of ourselves and others. Meanwhile, our conception of rocks might differ significantly, but the rock will have the same structure, mass and velocity, independent of whose head it is thrown at.

> Certainly, our words and arguments are constructed psychologically and socially.

Agreed

> But that doesn’t alter the purpose of the debate. In fact, it justifies it. If our words were perfectly consistent with the nature of reality, there would be no such thing as a debate, since a perfect word would need no elaboration; and if they were completely discordant, then there would also be no utility gained from engaging in debate.

Well, the debate would be significantly different if we were discussing our relative conceptions of rocks. For one, we could put forth hypotheses about rocks and come together to perform experiments on one. In doing so we could agree whose conception of a "rock" most closely correlates with the common sensory impulses we get from observing rock-related experiments, and get some idea of whose conception most closely matches what we think of as "reality". We have an external "judge" upon which to test our words and conceptions, and we can refine them both as a result. We might start with "rock", but end up with "Foid monzosyenite". Anyone else studying the same rock by the same methods, and given the same tools, time, intellect and rock studying passion would end up with more or less exactly the same name (ok perhaps not the same name, but the same conception).

But we are discussing an inter-imaginary concept, which makes for a very different debate. By debating we can refine our inter-imaginary set of logical precepts, and even agree on a set definition of the word. Let's say that, after a fierce debate, we agree that we both agree on what a right is, and that we have the right to self-determination and life. Tomorrow we meet someone that used the same logic to arrive at his right to determine the lives of others, and that proceeds to bash our heads in with a foid monzosyenite.

Did he not have the right to do this or not? Did he violate our rights by determining to take our lives, when we had just agreed that we had a right to live? But what about what his opinion that he has the right to take our lives? Who has the better definition of the word? I'm sure the debate would have been interesting and useful, as we elaborated on our understanding through rhetorical interaction. I'm also sure that whatever psychological concept and word we would have had for them, rock, foid monzosyenite or lumpy smashy thingy, if we had one we could have hit his rock with our rock and they would have gone "clunk" and perhaps saved our heads to self-determine yet another day.

This turned into a pretty long and stupid argument from my side. My point is that all words and psychological constructs are not created equal, and that this does in fact make a pretty significant difference.

> If they come from our imagination, they have no moral weight

All moral concept comes from our imagination. It is a purely inter-imaginary concept. Are you saying that morality itself has no moral weight, because it does not exist outside of the mind? Morality has consequence in reality because we act upon it, but that does not make it any less imaginary than Harry Potter.

> Your imagination can't make anyone else do anything, like respecting your entitlements.

This is simply wrong, especially when you consider that I said "our imagination" and not "my imagination". I was specifically referring to inter-imaginatory concepts, and in this sense you are replying to a strawman. However, let met offer two rebuttals, one to the straw man argument you are making(1), and another as if you had dealt with my actual argument(2).

1 - I imagine myself entitled to own a pet cat, and I have this pet cat in my posession. You pick up the pet cat that I imagine myself owning, and start to leave. Imagining my entitlements to be disrespected, I act upon those imaginary concepts by yelling "Drop the cat or I will punch you in the face". You, imagining that being punched in the face is something you do not want, proceed to drop the cat.

There, my imagination just made someone else respect my entitlement. Yes, my imagination did not act directly as if by some form of telepathy, but it imagined a set of noises that did pretty much the same thing. The only physically observable phenomenon were a set of vibrations in the air, and yet by medium of those vibrations my imagination found a way to make the other person imagination imagine a set of very unpleasant consequences to their actions, and made them do something else.

Yes, technically it was my voice - a physical thing - that made someone else do something, but the words to say came from my imagination. If you want to say that the fact that any physical action happened at all disqualifies this argument, I'd liken that a bit to saying that the triceps muscle cannot affect anything because it is in fact my hand that hits you when I punch. Yet, I can concede the fact that this is a semi-valid rebuttal, and to that I'd like to remind you of the fact that it is a rebuttal to a strawman argument that I never made in the first place.

2 - I imagine myself entitled to own a pet cat, and I do have this pet cat in my posession. You also imagine me entitled to own the cat that is currently in my possesion. Both of our imaginations share an acceptance to numerous imaginary concepts, such as ownership, entitlements and so on. In addition, we both imagine that punching someone in the face is an acceptable and likely response to trying to steal someones pet cat. Since we both imagine myself as the owner of the cat in currently in front of us, you imagine that you will be punched in the face if you take it, and so you do not do this.

In this scenario "our" imagination, the imaginary concepts that we both share or our inter-imagination, guided both our actions. You might have wanted to have the cat, but you accepted the inter-imaginary concept of "pet owner" and the consequences of violating certain entitlements that come with that role. Incidentally the cat, a third part in this scenario, almost certainly would not accept being "owned" by anybody, had it understood what this meant. It did not share our inter-imaginary reality, and would have happily gone with anyone that would have fed and petted it.

The final section doesn’t say much except that the state doesn’t create rights and the US founding fathers considered rights. Leaving aside that the Bill of Rights was literally and amendment to the Constitution and that several key rights were left out, this doesn’t really answer the question at all, it just asserts that some other people considered the question.