> You can't write a Constitution like the United States', without natural rights.
Sure you can.
> The most basic question in any government is "who has the right to rule"?
I don't think that's true. I think that you are assuming a framework of natural rights to make this statement, which is a circular argument.
> The very first line of the Constitution establishes that it is the people who hold that right in the U.S., which means they have some sort of natural rights.
Alternatively, the first line of the Constitution acknowledges the empirical fact that government is simply that which people treat as legitimate authority, and therefore, independent of any notion of right, the people have an inherent power to govern and choose their government, as any government that the people do not choose to treat as such cannot government, and anything that the people choose to treat as a government can govern, whether or not one assumes any mystical notion of pre-legal "rights".
Now, I suppose you could call this inherent, immutable power a "natural right" -- it is a real thing that really exists -- but, if so, its fundamentally different than all the other things that people hold out as "natural rights", which are not inherent, immutable powers, but instead are simply preferences for the conduct of relations between persons (including persons acting through or on behalf of "governments"), rendering the whole field a morass of equivocation.
> I think that you are assuming a framework of natural rights to make this statement, which is a circular argument.
Not true! For thousands of years, in hundreds of nations, the right to rule was divinely conferred and hereditary. The concept of natural rights was the legal invention that conferred similar rights upon everyday regular folks, so that they could self-organize to form their own sovereign government.
Sure people had done that before, but the concept of "natural rights" formalized an existing cultural convention--which is what all law does.
> independent of any notion of right, the people have an inherent power to govern
I mean, how can you have power without rights? Slaves in the American south are examples of people who did not have rights. Not coincidentally, they also had no power.
Quite easily. "Rights" are the moral (in the case of idealized views of rights, including natural rights) or legal (in the case of legal rights) authority to make a decision and expect it to be respected by others. "Power" is the practical ability to make a decision and have it take effect (whether or not others respect it, though others respecting it may be part of why you have that ability.)
Power can be a result of legal rights which may be the result of a cultural agreement on moral views of rights, but its possible for any or all of those three to vary from the others rather than reflecting them.
Let me rephrase: how can you have legal power without legal rights. (Answer: you can't.)
Sure, a slave can physically harm his master even though the slave has no legal rights. But the legal authority of his society will then fall upon him, and he will have no redress to process--like a presumption of innocence or evidentiary rules. He is property, and property can be destroyed by its owner.
Likewise, in a society in which the right to rule is conferred divinely, a king's subjects do not have the legal right to challenge the king's rulings. From a practical perspective, a populace can depose a king, but then what? If they install a new king, then that king assumes the same right to rule. If they choose to set up a republic, then they need a new basis for right to rule.
Natural rights are like the legal equivalent of a logical axiom. Legal reasoning must have a place from which to start; by asserting a small set of permanent, self-evident rights, the law has a foundation upon which to build a government of equals. Then the conversation can shift from "how does a government of equals grant the right to live" to "what are the few circumstances in which the law can impinge the right to live?"
The handy thing about the latter architecture is that the law becomes self-referential--the Constitution describes the powers and limits of the government rather than trying to comprehensively list all powers and rights of the people in all situations--which would be a much longer and more complicated list.
Sure you can.
> The most basic question in any government is "who has the right to rule"?
I don't think that's true. I think that you are assuming a framework of natural rights to make this statement, which is a circular argument.
> The very first line of the Constitution establishes that it is the people who hold that right in the U.S., which means they have some sort of natural rights.
Alternatively, the first line of the Constitution acknowledges the empirical fact that government is simply that which people treat as legitimate authority, and therefore, independent of any notion of right, the people have an inherent power to govern and choose their government, as any government that the people do not choose to treat as such cannot government, and anything that the people choose to treat as a government can govern, whether or not one assumes any mystical notion of pre-legal "rights".
Now, I suppose you could call this inherent, immutable power a "natural right" -- it is a real thing that really exists -- but, if so, its fundamentally different than all the other things that people hold out as "natural rights", which are not inherent, immutable powers, but instead are simply preferences for the conduct of relations between persons (including persons acting through or on behalf of "governments"), rendering the whole field a morass of equivocation.