[MD] Hume's Fork

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Matt, DMB, and all philosophy experts,

I found it interesting to learn that Thomas Jefferson originally
wrote, “we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” but
Benjamin Franklin favored substituting the verbiage "self-evident."
Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Franklin, explained how Franklin
arrived at “self-evident.” Franklin was inspired by the scientific
determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of David Hume,
a close friend of Franklin. According to Isaacson:

“In what became known as ‘Hume's fork,’ the great Scottish
philosopher, along with Leibniz and others, had developed a theory
that distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of
fact (such as ‘London is bigger than Philadephia’) and analytic truths
that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition (‘The angles
of a triangle equal 180 degrees’; ‘All bachelors are unmarried’). By
using the word ‘sacred,’ Jefferson had asserted, intentionally or not,
that the principle in question--the equality of men and their
endowment by their creator with inalienable rights--was an assertion
of religion. Franklin's edit turned it instead into an assertion of
rationality."

So, I take it that Franklin is saying that human rights are not a
matter of a fact about the world but are a matter of definition. I'm
wondering what the difference is if any with regard to essentialism.
Aren't both saying that human rights are a matter of conformity with
the essential nature of humanity?

Is "sacred and undeniable" a synthetic truth? Or are they both ways of
saying rights are an analytic truth and the difference here was really
the part of the Creator in all this since even the Creator is listed
among the things that are self-evident instead of something to be held
as sacred.

(Not having access to Darwin at the time, a Creator of some sort was a
self-evidently truth “by virtue of reason and definition” rather than
by religious faith.) Instead of saying that we hold rights to be true
because they are sacred, The Declaration as it is written says that we
hold these things to be sacred because they happen to be true.

I think what it is saying is that they are true because they are part
of our own very Nature as human beings. If one does not have the
rights to life, liberty, and property one is not really human. In
other words, to kill, to enslave, or to steal from someone is to treat
them as less than human and to do so is also to be less than human.

The anti-essentialism of pragmatism undermines this justification for
rights, not that we can't articulate other ways of defending them.

Anyway, how does Humes' fork play into all this. Are both sides of the
fork essentialist or did Franklin put rights on a non-essentialist
footing? Are Jefferson and Franklin or different sides of the fork, or
is it irrelevant to distinguishing their views and only relevant in
explaining what Franklin meant by self-evident?

Best,
Steve