Hi work2,Good question, because
(D)looks like it's on the defender's side (it talks about societies protecting rights), but it actually doesn't answer the objection at all.
First, pin down what the objection is really saying:
"Since there is no right that is universally protected, there are no natural rights."The hidden assumption is:
for a natural right to exist, it must be protected everywhere. So the defender's job is to break that link - to say a right can
exist even where it isn't protected. That's exactly what
(E) does.
Now look at
(D):"all societies have some institution that protects the rights of an individual in that society."- Notice the phrase
"some" rights, and
"in that society." (D) only says each society protects
some of its own rights. That is not the same as any single right being protected
universally across all societies.
- So even if (D) were true, the objection stands untouched - the objection was about
universal protection, and (D) never establishes that.
- On top of that, (D) is an unsupported factual claim about institutions, not a statement about whether natural rights
exist. The whole debate is about existence, and (D) never addresses existence.
In short, (D) changes the subject to "do societies protect rights?" when the defender needs to answer "can rights exist without being protected?"
Turn one knob to feel it: imagine the choice read instead -
"natural rights exist even though no single society protects all of them." Now it speaks directly to existence-vs-protection, and it defends the theory. That rewrite is basically
(E). (D) never makes that move, which is why it fails.
Answer: Ework2
I'm confused- why can't it be D?