Hello, I’m Pang Ying. Welcome to the post-debate reflection for Episode 28 of Think Like a Debater.

Listening back to our debate on whether rights are natural or human-made, I realized we were speaking at different levels. Let me clarify.

I wanted to ask what justifies basic rights. If natural, their source is nature; if human-made, their source is people. We agree that Black people, women, sexual minorities, and people with disabilities deserve equal rights. But why? What is the foundation?

Natural rights answer that being human is enough. The human-made-rights side must argue specifically why a group in a society should receive equality.

Natural rights are innate and self-evident, independent of whether national law protects them. Human-made rights exist only when law establishes them.

The Nuremberg trials show the difference. Nazi crimes against Jews did not necessarily violate German law at the time. Natural rights transcend national law and justify international prosecution.

A strict human-made view might deny authority to judge officials who merely obeyed then-valid law. Can we judge people raised entirely within a distorted value system? Are right and wrong absolute or relative? That was my subject.

Zhan avoided this because our values overlap far more than they differ.

Some defend equality as simply the right thing to do. Others say racial equality should occur only if it benefits the economy, or perhaps not at all otherwise.

Likewise, some oppose rescuing trafficked rural women because they think leaving them captive benefits social stability. Zhan and I agree against that, so she did not contest it.

She offered several challenges. Let us separate those from her positive case.

First, she treated “self-evident” as refusing to justify a right while asserting it confidently. That misreads the term.

In mathematics and physics, we use conclusions such as the shortest path between two points, the angles of a triangle, or Newton’s laws without reproving them in every exercise.

Most of us could not independently derive Newton’s laws. Directly invoking a supported conclusion does not mean ignoring whether it is true. Zhan unfairly characterized self-evidence.

Second, she said the vague scope of natural rights could be abused to include illegitimate claims.

Someone may demand state assistance in reproducing or call cannabis use a basic right. I accept some ambiguity but not inevitable abuse on that scale.