Gotta be a debate bro about it cause he's pretending to be intellectual. Marx has a pretty famous saying regsrding philosophy and whether its duty is to describe pr change society. So im pretty sure Marx himself would have some degree of leeway regarding where someone came from if they agree with his prescriptions.

Ok listen, you don't get it, natural rights are only for white peopl-

That's the likely response

White libs have never feared for their lives and it shows

Its true 16th century liberalism.

There are differing views on the true purpose of the social contract, but the argument he is presenting is that we have natural rights, i.e. rights that precede any human construction or even really humans themselves, and the function of a social contract is to create a social framework (particularly laws, including legal rights, i.e. rights constructed by humans for governance) that allows us to make sure our natural rights are observed.

You are right about social contract frameworks normally being based on unpersoning, which brings into question how seriously the social contractors are really taking those supposedly-transcendent natural rights, but I think the more fundamental issue really is what the commenter in the OOP says, which is that natural rights are literally just totally made up and fictitious.

rights don’t exist in material world, if i put you on the desert island you will have exactly zero rights, so where does the naturalism comes from? moreover, if i put 50 babies of lawyers on the desert island, and they grow up, the rights still wouldn’t exist. so neither your own conception or brain shape pre-figures those “natural rights”. therefore those rights are social rights, and historically contingent ones, not natural ones.

Nah, people conflate the Mandate of Heaven with European Divine Right of Kings.

While they both seem to be using the divine to justify the legitimacy of the ruler, they differ in how they relate to said ruler losing legitimacy.

The Divine Right of Kings precludes any thought about removing the monarch as taboo and expects unconditional obedience.

The Mandate of Heaven is used to explain why certain rulers get overthrown by peasant rebellions and others don't (either the peasants don't even try, or they're unsuccessful). Basically getting overthrown means losing the Mandate of Heavens, resisting the rebellion proves holding it.

The Mandate of Heaven ultimately says the legitimacy of rule comes from the consent of the ruled.

I can only speak from my limited reading, but the Daoist meaning appears more like "you've clearly fucked up - so either get a grip, or retire to be a fisherman".

The heavens show displeasure through famine, banditry, unrest, etc - which is to say all the things that result from poor governance. Not keeping your generals under control results in corruption and theft, meaning extortion of the farmers, reducing food security, and turning merely poor weather into apocalyptic punishments.

At which point your rulership is fair game for someone who can fix your mess, humble warlords, and feed people.

Afaik, the Mandate of Heaven is basically the approval of a monarch by the divine as legitimating their authority. It's not really a social contract except in sort of a "right to work" sense where the divine holds all the cards and is merely condescending to tentatively accepting your appointment until it changes its mind. There are said to be conditions, but it's not any observable objective metric that defines whether you have lost legitimacy or not (e.g. certain specific actions that you did or did not do), it is the declaration of Heaven in the form of various manifestations of ill fortune.

I welcome correction from someone more familiar with this topic.

Well, if we're supposed to follow moral codes ordained by God, then that sort of conflicts with the materialist mode of decision-making described by Marx. He's right that they are in contradiction, he is just wrong about which side we should favor.