They are not <i>exactly</i> deducible by pure reason, but an artificial life algorithm based on human psychology and randomly sampled polls might be able to figure out the optimal allocation of powers to delegate to the government and to be retained by the people to maximize a total public benefit metric.<p>What we have now in the US is basically a guess from circa 1783, based on the prior centuries of British-American Common Law, plus a few hotfixes in the form of subsequent amendments.<p>This iteration has only run for 2.33 centuries, and hasn&#x27;t entirely collapsed yet, but a preliminary analysis seems to indicate that the interstate commerce clause, self-reinforcing redistricting procedures, and the currency clause should have undergone a bit more scrutiny the first time around.<p>As for &quot;natural rights&quot;, so long as &quot;might makes right&quot; is the dominant political paradigm on Earth, the natural rights are pretty much everything that people might threaten some form of rebellion over, if they were to be infringed.  So there is no universal set.  Different people would go to war over different principles.<p>If you love Taco Tuesday, and enough people share that sentiment that you would collectively present a legitimate threat to your current government if you were to actively oppose it, then you have a natural right to eat tacos on Tuesdays.  Any government infringes upon that right at its own peril.  That natural right is &quot;secured&quot; by the government only in the sense that its officers don&#x27;t want to be fired (or guillotined) over a handful of cilantro.  It does not secure and defend natural rights on behalf of the people, but avoids attacking them--<i>actually just avoids presenting the</i> appearance <i>of attacking them</i>--because the people will defend them if they are threatened.<p>So your rights did not exist before you were born.  They didn&#x27;t even exist as you were a baby.  What you may have thought in retrospect was your right to live was actually your parents&#x27; right to not have their children killed.  You didn&#x27;t get any of your own natural rights until you acquired the ability to inflict some form of pain--or at least inconvenience--upon potential adversaries.  Your right to yummy dessert after yucky vegetables was not defended by any government, but by the threat of the wailing, flailing temper-tantrum.<p><i>You</i> decide what your &quot;natural&quot; rights are.  If the government can&#x27;t find some way to slot them into its existing laws, then you will eventually have a problem with each other.