mushinnoshin

I think it was at approximately 2005-12-26 00:00:01 that conservative bloggers realized they could no longer wage their War on Christmas and so immediately returned to chewing on their favorite bone as abortion prohibitionists.

I personally abhor the entire abortion debate and am not looking to enter that fray here. But I want to address a meta-issue that makes the debate itself so tedious: it is impossible for anyone, on either side of the argument, to support their position coherantly without explaining first, in axiomatic terms, what rights are, where they come from, who has them, and why they exist. Unfortunately my experience has been that of everyone debating the issue, something in the area of 0.00001% can actually do so.

And so here I’ll offer up my take for the sake of posterity and future back-linking. The following is liberally snipped from a paper I wrote on the subject for my college Ethics course.

Natural rights, not supernatural

Natural rights theories seem to fall into one of three camps. Locke, Jefferson, and the other “classical liberals” rely on a theological explanation, that rights are granted to us by God. The problem with this approach is self-evident: if there is no god, all bets are off. Ayn Rand on the other hand acknowledged in For the New Intellectual “the source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law” – alas she then goes on to say, essentially, that man’s rights exist because they have to – because man cannot survive if they don’t. At face value at least, this is an obviously untrue statement, as humans have indeed survived as slaves, be it miserably (though Rand is adept at obfuscating – a subject for another time). However, from other works, I have understood a better depiction of her theory to be that rights exist because we agree they exist — because humans form societies where individuals agree to respect rights, in order that they may have their own. While this agreement is certainly essential for rights to have any value, our position is in this scenario is delicate at best. Without acknowledging the pre-existence of what one might call “primordial rights”, it would follow that rights may not exist without such agreement, and would be wholly subject to the terms of that agreement, which can only lead us down the path to moral relativism. That many on the left and right today use this argument to justify encroachments on liberty would seem to validate my concerns.

Finally there is a third camp, typically made up more of activists and pundits than of philosophers per se, which seems to forego any attempt to explain natural rights, proclaiming that rights exist simply “because they do”. Ironically I shall attempt to illustrate that this third view is in fact the closest to correct (although the difference between this position and the theological explanation may only be semantic – another subject for another time).

So let’s start at the very beginning (I’m told it’s a very good place to start). We know that existence exists, for if it did not, we could not ask if it does. We know that there is a universe, if we define it as the sum total of existence, which exists. We know that this universe is made up of entities, because we can observe them (whether or not the entities are ultimately distinct or intrinsically one is immaterial for these purposes). I then propose that we must proceed from the axiom that all entities are created equal – that is of course, of equal importance or value, not having equal characteristics – for to prove that entities were of unequal value, we first have to ask, as Rand would say, “of value to whom”, and prove that the “whom” in question was of greater value than others. This would of course be impossible without first proving that entities were of unequal value.

So: we know that we exist in a universe composed of entities, which have been created equal. Given this state of equality, it must be impossible for any one entity to have rights over another; to have such a right implies first having a greater value. I cannot prove that I have the right to hit you, without first proving my greater value, which we have shown to be impossible. And therein lies the key to understanding natural rights: I cannot prove that I have a right to speak, but I do not need to do so – rather, I speak because I will, and you cannot prove you have a right to stop me. Natural rights therefore are those that exist in absence of proof to the contrary, they are the natural complement to an infinite spectrum of failures to prove the existence of positively asserted rights of one entity over another – thus they exist “because they do”, or more accurately, because unnatural or supernatural rights do not.

So what if you choose to speak, and I choose to stop you? Since you cannot prove the right to speak, and I cannot prove the right to stop you, does this not mean there are no rights at all? No, when I choose to stop you from speaking, I assert by action that I do not believe in your rights, and I have no logically consistent grounds on which to object when you act in self-defense or retaliation. So while you cannot prove the right to speak, and I cannot prove the right to stop you, you can prove the right to stop me from stopping you. Thus we reach, I believe without assumptions, what is often considered the fundamental principle of libertarianism — as Rand writes, “No man has the right to initiate the use of physical force against another man”. Or as I prefer in Jefferson’s words, “Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plentitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.”

True for all, relevant for some, and a line – not a point

Now that we know what rights are and how they come to exist, the next question becomes, “who has them?” Rand above uses the word “man”, and while we know she means mankind and not just males, we have to ask, why not animals, why not plants, and why not rocks? It is my contention that in fact these do all have the same rights – they must, if the explanation of rights that I have provided is correct. One entity cannot declare itself to be of greater value than another; man cannot declare himself greater than the rocks. But before the reader stops breathing (for fear of violating the rights of oxygen atoms), I do have a “however”. Having a right is only meaningful if one wants that right to be respected; to have this want, one of course first must have the ability to want it. Without such “meaningful ability to want”, a right is just an empty intellectual abstraction.

So I think we can leave out the inanimate, but what of animals, or even plants? Certainly a cry of pain constitutes an indication that an entity does not want to be in pain. But does this mean such entities have the right to property, for example, or even the right to life? Well, note that I specifically said, “a right is meaningful…” as opposed to “rights are meaningful”. Rights are not an all-or-nothing proposition; different entities exhibit different degrees of intelligence, and the meaningfulness of a given right to a given entity is dependant on that entity’s ability to want that right. A cow may feel pain, and thus have a relevant right not to be tortured, while having little or no actual awareness of its existence and thus no relevant right to “life”; a cat may have a vague awareness of itself and have a relevant right to life, but no relevant right to property since it cannot conceive of such. These of course are suppositions only for the sake of example; a discussion of the actual objective awareness levels of various beings is well beyond the scope of this article. The point is simply to declare this principle: as entities exist along a spectrum ranging from the inanimate through the sentient to the sapient, the degree to which an entity’s rights become practically relevant is directly proportional to that entity’s position in the spectrum.

Rights and Ethics

Knowing what rights are, how it is that they exist, and to whom they apply, the next apparent questions would be, what do you do when you don’t know if an entity has a right, or when violating a right appears to be a greater good than respecting it? Does a fetus have a right to life, when we don’t know if it is sapient? Is it wrong to initiate force to push someone out from in front of a bus? Here we finally enter the realm of ethics.

I do not classify rights theory itself an “ethics” theory; rather, rights theory provides a first principle upon which ethical (and political) theories may be built. Rights theory cannot and should not claim that it’s “wrong” to initiate force, only that it is unjust – in the most correct definition of unjust: not proven justified. Rights theory can then say that because an action is unjust, retaliation is just.

Ethics is the study of right and wrong, good and bad — concepts of value judgement. And as we have already seen, objective value judgement is impossible without defining “of value to whom”; it is for this reason that every ethical theory must ultimately fail Hume’s “is-ought” dichotomy. Lacking this objective knowledge, all that we can do is subjectively evaluate various claims and theories – utilitarianism, virtue ethics, etc. — and make the best call we can make. But if I might make my own subjective value judgement, I say we should always start with what we know objectively to be true: that all men, indeed all entities, are created equal, and are endowed with certain unalienable rights. If we make exception to those rights, know that we do so without any knowledge that our actions are right, only belief, and we must be prepared to accept any consequence of the retaliation which can be proven just.