what does it mean to have rights? what are rights, and why do we believe we have them at all? where do they come from, and how can we try to justify their goodness or truthfulness?
many seek to ground rights in society: this is the view that our governments or political organizations are the cause of our rights. others ground rights in religion, claiming that God or higher powers grant us our rights. in both of these cases, we are making the mistake of taking a concrete thing, a right, and trying to derive it from an abstraction (society or God). society is such an abstraction, because fundamentally there exist only individuals. society itself, government included, is the cooperation and contractual agreement between individuals. if it is society that grants man his individual rights, then society holds metaphysical and ethical primacy over the individual; yet this cannot be, since society is formed BY and OF individuals. likewise, trying to ground man’s rights in other-worldly faith-based beliefs is even more irrational, for obvious reasons.
rights may be viewed as grounded with regard to man himself, his natural conditions of existence and the requirements for his survival. as a living being, there are certain actions which man must take in order to assure his survival. the state of being-alive is not the default; it requires constant goal-directed and successful action to maintain. death, or inanimate matter, are the default. these states tend on their own to increase, and we can see this by imagining that an individual simply stops doing anything that is to his benefit, such as eating or drinking. if he ceases all goal-directed action, his state of being-alive will not last long.
therefore, we see that man is a living being which requires successful actions to survive. it is thus that man’s rights may be derived from this fact, the fact of mans concrete existence and of the specific and knowable actions he must make to avoid death. fundamentally, i argue that we can reduce the basic rights to three, and that each of these three themselves is grounded in this prior need for man to sustain his existence via rational thought. as man possesses no instincts for making fire, houses, antibiotics, etc, he must LEARN the actions and behaviors which assure his survival as an individual. (it is important to remember here that individual survival is the fundamental concern; species survival itself is derivative of and dependent on individual survival.)
man must think to survive; he must learn reason, be objective and identify things in his environment sufficiently to effect positive changes within that environment. because of this fundamental fact of his existence, as i stated, we may derive three basic rights directly from this fact:
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pursuit of goals/happiness/self interest. man has direct causal control over only one person: himself. because we are only able to control our own actions, we can therefore only be RESPONSIBLE for our actions. moral responsibility ends where control and volition end. further, man survives by a process of rational volition, and no one can think for man other than man himself. the moral imperative for securing individual survival, as well as the requirement of this survival to think, rest only on the individual himself. therefore he has the right to pursue his own goals, self interest and happiness. the right which recognizes man’s control over himself, his right to his life and pursuit of his goals and happiness, is a direct result of the necessary facts of man’s survival.
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freedom. freedom is derived from the facts of man’s existence because, as stated, man cannot survive without his mind. he needs to think. and in order to think, man must have the freedom to think without limitation or imposition. the freedom to think is necessary for man to understand his circumstances, contemplate truth and learn new ways of manipulating his environment for his own survival. as a corollary of the freedom of thought, man must be free to translate this thought into action. the freedom of action is necessary to the freedom of thought; if man is incapable of translating his thoughts into action, then his thoughts are robbed of their power, and they become impotent to secure his survival.
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property. man’s right to property is derivative of the first two basic rights. man has a right to work towards, and only towards, his own life and his own survival; because of this, man needs to develop shelter, tools, technology. if man discovers or creates something, only to have it taken by theft, he is robbed of his ability to survive; his pursuit of his goals/happiness is undermined, and therefore his basic survival ability itself. futhermore, property rights are also derived from freedom of action, for the same reason: if a man’s tools/wealth/shelter/etc are to be taken at the whims of others, his free action is robbed of its power in the same manner as his ability to pursue his own self interest. while it is true that property rights are necessary for the formation of a just and moral society, this is not why property rights are a basic right. they are a basic right because man creates, he discovers: and he does this for himself, to benefit his survival. all men have the right to retain what they own or produce, and dispose of it as they see fit without theft or coercion. anything less is the violation not only of man’s freedom and pursuit of goals/happiness, but therefore more fundamentally it restricts and robs him of his ability to survive.
from these three basic rights, we can derive all the rest of man’s rights, such as the right to freedom of speech/religion, the right to justice, the right to self defense, the right to equal treatment under the law, etc. but it is the basic rights to pursue his own goals/happiness, think and act freely, and possess inviolable right to his own property that guarantee all other rights; these three themselves are derived from the facts of man’s nature, of his existence, and of the requirements for his survival, namely that he must engage in a process of volitional reason to learn truths about his environment, and translate this knowledge into practical results, in order to fend off predators, resist famines, fight diseases, etc etc etc.
man’s rights are not granted by our government, our society or God. they exist as fundamental facts of our existence, requirements which we must be granted if we are to survive as individuals. in this sense, the proper role of our societies (governments) is to secure and protect these rights. to this extent there does exist a relational component to rights: the power for the practical enforcement of rights, and the power to prevent or punish violations of these rights, is granted to government by its people; by a mandate of the masses, the will of the people. an authority is required to make sure one man’s rights are not violated by another; however, this should not be confused as the SOURCE of man’s rights. government is not the source of rights, it is just the most efficient way we have developed so far to secure our rights from violation by others.
as for man’s rights themselves, they are reducible to, dependent on and derivative from the specific requirements for our survival as thinking, rational beings.