Rights, Rights, Rights
Rights as applied to the general population are a relatively modern concept arising from the Enlightenment, mainly from the writings of English and French philosophers. Rights prior to their modern formulation were manifest in divine rights of rule granted to powerful minorities of rulers which, in Europe, arose during the rise of Christianity in the ashes of the Roman Empire and the conquest of post-Roman Europe by petty kings and lords claiming to be descendants of Adam and therefore divine rulers. The French Revolution, a veritable boon for liberalism, exposed exactly what havoc merchants and common folk, empowered by the obsolescence of the divine right of kings, could wreak upon the entitled nobles. Unsurprisingly, rights as an idea in contemporary society, although sometimes changed in their actual content, continue to dominate the public discourse, from the almost uncontroversial right to life to the more controversial UN Charter Rights, which include the right to a vacation from work among others.
Where do rights come from, however? What makes a right unalienable? There is no reason any particular right should be respected, as in the case of the uncontroversial right to life, it is necessarily taken away when you die in the trivial sense, but it is also taken away when you are condemned to death for a crime. As such it appears that no right is unalienable, that no right holds a sort of exalted or divine status. The right of the kings to rule was, our predecessors were told, handed down to them by God, but our right to live is not guaranteed by a divine power if we bar the existence of that power. As there is no objective source of rights and our modern fetishization of absolute rights is nothing more than latent Enlightenment thought; in actuality what rights we do have are those we are willing to declare that we have, and nothing more.
At this point, I'd like to quote the opening of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, a document steeped in the English natural right tradition:
These rights are based upon a foundation initially propounded by English moral and political philosophers, namely, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. These ideas were also garnished by French figures and a wide range of other philosophers, all of whom owed their thoughts to the particular material and idealistic conditions present during the Enlightenment. The actual bedrock of life, liberty and property (and others, note that the U.S. declaration uses the word 'among') and their subsequent derivatives and extrapolations rests on some peculiar and odd assertions about what the world is like and what governance and civil society is based on.
Ecce Homo! Behold the Man!
In fact: behold the man in a state of nature. Before the rise civil society, there is the only the individual, Hobbes asserts, and as each individual is equal in mental and physical capabilities, there is no reason why one individual should be more equal than another. There is mass individualism, the constant state of war, prior to the formation of a society people are content to protect their own person, indeed, people have a natural right to protect their person and bludgeon one another if they feel their person is being encroached upon. Just like that, a right is born, the right to self-defence, but also the right to take life, if you're able to do so, the right to take property, the right to enslave, etc. As there is no authority, there is nothing that keeps individuals from killing each other, and our lives are, to quote the most famous line from Leviathan, "nasty, brutish, and short." To Hobbes, the world of unrestrained rights and freedoms was a fundamentally dark and terrible world, because humans were deceitful, greedy and all-around horrible when allowed to be so.
Naturally this is a hypothetical scenario, whether or not such a society ever existed is besides the point in this discussion, and although I don't personally agree with basing political theory on hypothetical historical social organizations, for the sake of the discussion we dismiss this criticism. (It should be noted that Hobbes and Locke both believed in a literal State of Nature, an idea which has been rejected for lack of evidence by anthropologists.) Once our hypothetical ancestors have stopped bashing each other's heads in, they begin to realize that they'd be better off if they banded together into societies based on mutual contracts. This is when the social contract arises, when we agree that we are all better off if we, within reason, give up our rights to maim and/or kill one another for the trade-off that we ourselves (probably) won't be maimed and/or killed.
From there arises civil society, from there arises government. Government ensures that we follow the rules of the contract and yet somehow the government retains the right itself to imprison and possibly kill us when we violate the contract, because the majority have agreed (When? I don't recall signing anything!) that we ought to be punished for our violation for the sake of civil society. How is this wonderfully just society ensured? It is ensured by a strong central government, and to Hobbes, any insurrection against the government in the from of revolutionary action (he wrote during the English Civil War, if you care about his material conditions) or the like is a reversion to the state of nature and must be stopped for the sake of society by an absolutist sovereign, imagine - a king. The sovereign and his band of violently coercive social guardians ensure that we do not revert to the state of nature; the sovereign has a natural right to rule in order to prevent this reversion the the previous hypothetical horrors.
Dropping the Crown, Retaining the Divine
So much for Hobbes, the traditional originator of rights, now let's have a look at Locke, whose ideas were the fundamental basis of the American Revolution and had a profound impact on Thomas Jefferson, the author of the above-mentioned declaration of American Independence. In particular, the discussion on property rights is the most relevant contribution of Locke to this discussion, but also his own conception of the state of nature and the legitimacy of government is an important point. Locke was a very careful and erudite thinker that deserves special treatment over and above that given to Hobbes. It is on Locke that a lot of modern conceptions of rights and freedoms rest, although the subsequent efforts to secularize Locke's thoughts often crippled his foundational ideas.
The foundation of Locke's ideas on property, in particular, is the fact that you own what you create, and that you know what you create. When I create an item, such as a cake, I know the ingredients that I've put in, the quantities, and the manner in which I've combined them; as such, I know my product, but I also own my product, by the fact that I have created it. Just as I know and own my product, so the universe itself is a product, it is a product of a creator, the almighty God. God, therefore, unlike us, knows the universe in its entirety, and science is resolved to be an endeavor in which we seek to understand God's universe. Furthermore, as God created the universe, God owns the universe. Therefore, it is not the prerogative of one individual to kill another, or oneself for that matter, as we are all the property of God; as such, we all have the right to life, we also all have the right to liberty insofar as we are never the property of one another. You cannot interfere with what I do, because God guarantees my freedom.
What's more, Locke maintains that each individual has the right to his own interpretation of God's will, and anyone claiming to be an interpreter of divine will de facto claims himself to be closer to God than another. In short, no one is an expert on the will of God. If you tell me that it is God's will that I give you money and I claim I believe otherwise, you cannot compel me to do anything, because both our interpretations of God's will are legitimate, and since you are trying to impose your interpretation on me, and mine only involves myself, my interpretation easily trumps yours. This has important consequences on individuals claiming to know or understand God's will, individuals such as the pope and other religious leaders, but also secular leaders claiming to be divine descendants, such as kings.
Property, all property, is ultimately owned by God, however, because God created the Earth and everything in it. An often ignored aspect of Locke's philosophy is the point that there are no prior claims on property, no one individual has a right to particular property. An individual can go out into nature and take items for his own consumption and trade, but the initial condition is that we are all equally entitled to any part of God's creation. I can own something that I've made and taken out of nature, and I can have exclusive rights to these items, however I do not necessarily have a right to items that I cannot use, such as multiple residences, etc. I'll set this point aside, but it is an important elaboration of what Locke's idea of property truly is, and how it's been distorted through time.
Here we have the foundation of all, life, liberty and property, the foundations of the constitutional liberal state, such as the United States of America, and also of our modern ideals that an individual has the right to those unalienable rights. Note the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, we are "endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights" This is absolute, there are no caveats to this idea, provided that we accept that there is an entity that owns us outside of us, our rights are guaranteed by this entity beyond any doubt. The world has greatly changed since the time of Locke, however, and certain assumptions made by Locke no longer hold, at least not popularly.
God is Dead
Now we are arrived at our world and the assumption that God exists as an entity has, in intellectual and popular circles, been largely dismissed. When you remove God, who is to guarantee our rights? No longer is there an absolute grounding for our rights, and as a result it becomes difficult to claim that an individual has a right to anything. As the original thesis of divine guarantee is tossed aside, the antithesis that there are no fundamental rights looms. There have been synthesis, and many of them, attempting to reconcile the Lockean Enlightenment ideals with acknowledgment that God is not there, but they have been doomed to failure. We arrive at the point of moral relativism.
The ideas of Locke are still popular in this godless form, largely the result of continued popularly of American and French Constitutionalism, but putting the constitution aside one is greeted by a void. A gaping maw of nothingness: nothing guarantees the right to life, liberty and property except the pieces of paper proclaiming them and the coercive forces lurking behind them, they being fueled by almost mystical belief that there is something special about these particular rights. Unalienable rights rested on the assumption of the divine, but modern rights rest purely on the ability of those who hold the power to proclaim and enforce them.
As such, which 'rights' hold sway in a given location is based on power, and these rights are alienable by their nature, they can be enforced by the police, but they can also be enforced by a conquering or revolutionary power. In fact, some of the so-called rights of the United States were dead on arrival, such as the right to liberty, because the United States at the time of its independence was full of slave-owners and hereditary landholders, violating both the spirit and the word of the Lockean ideals on which they were supposedly based. Look at this point from the perspective of a post-US Civil War (former) slave-owner, who had the right of owning another individual because they were conveniently considered subhuman, and who then had his right taken away by a conquering foreign state (the Union). Was his right to property absolute even in the time of absolute property?
Our rights in the liberal democracies, as they stand, are largely the result of these Enlightenment traditions taken to their logical extremes during the nineteenth century and propagated ever since. Because these rights are grounded in coercive power rather than grounded in science or in logic, we should consider ourselves lucky to be living in states which continue to guarantee them. We cannot, however, consider ourselves entitled to any right or set of rights in particular, vigilance is required to ensure that the rights that we desire are those rights that we have, lest we end in a position where we are as individuals, not as societies, required to defend and take those rights which we feel entitled to.
Robert Nozick, the American philosopher, and many others, believe(d) that the only function of the state ought to be the protection of individuals from each other in cases where they violate one another's rights. The assertion is that the only natural monopoly is the monopoly of coercive force and that all others are merely artificial monopolies. Tentatively accepting this, we need not accept that there is a particular goal or idea toward which this coercive force ought to be directed, at least there isn't an objectively correct answer. Certainly some social organizations lead to better results than others, and some are rooted in historical or material conditions of their times, but there is no reason to believe that the guarantees of life, liberty or property are the proper or only rights to be upheld by the coercive monopoly or that any other rights ought to be upheld either. There are no unalienable rights.
Rights as applied to the general population are a relatively modern concept arising from the Enlightenment, mainly from the writings of English and French philosophers. Rights prior to their modern formulation were manifest in divine rights of rule granted to powerful minorities of rulers which, in Europe, arose during the rise of Christianity in the ashes of the Roman Empire and the conquest of post-Roman Europe by petty kings and lords claiming to be descendants of Adam and therefore divine rulers. The French Revolution, a veritable boon for liberalism, exposed exactly what havoc merchants and common folk, empowered by the obsolescence of the divine right of kings, could wreak upon the entitled nobles. Unsurprisingly, rights as an idea in contemporary society, although sometimes changed in their actual content, continue to dominate the public discourse, from the almost uncontroversial right to life to the more controversial UN Charter Rights, which include the right to a vacation from work among others.
Where do rights come from, however? What makes a right unalienable? There is no reason any particular right should be respected, as in the case of the uncontroversial right to life, it is necessarily taken away when you die in the trivial sense, but it is also taken away when you are condemned to death for a crime. As such it appears that no right is unalienable, that no right holds a sort of exalted or divine status. The right of the kings to rule was, our predecessors were told, handed down to them by God, but our right to live is not guaranteed by a divine power if we bar the existence of that power. As there is no objective source of rights and our modern fetishization of absolute rights is nothing more than latent Enlightenment thought; in actuality what rights we do have are those we are willing to declare that we have, and nothing more.
At this point, I'd like to quote the opening of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, a document steeped in the English natural right tradition:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."Notice, unalienable rights, which include Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness; the latter replaced the word Property per the pen of Thomas Jefferson. Never mind that, at this time, you could be condemned to death in America, as you can today, never mind that Liberty did not apply to slaves and never mind that Happiness is at best a fluffy way of saying property to avoid the slavery question (and to allow taxation, as I found out recently); actually, no, mind all of these things. Do any of these rights strike you as unalienable? Bear that question in mind, and also bear in mind that unalienable means absolute and objective. Keeping in mind the practical consideration, we'll soon look at the theoretical foundations of these rights, if they don't seem apparent in the real world, then they at least ought to be apparent on a theoretical basis.
These rights are based upon a foundation initially propounded by English moral and political philosophers, namely, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. These ideas were also garnished by French figures and a wide range of other philosophers, all of whom owed their thoughts to the particular material and idealistic conditions present during the Enlightenment. The actual bedrock of life, liberty and property (and others, note that the U.S. declaration uses the word 'among') and their subsequent derivatives and extrapolations rests on some peculiar and odd assertions about what the world is like and what governance and civil society is based on.
Ecce Homo! Behold the Man!
In fact: behold the man in a state of nature. Before the rise civil society, there is the only the individual, Hobbes asserts, and as each individual is equal in mental and physical capabilities, there is no reason why one individual should be more equal than another. There is mass individualism, the constant state of war, prior to the formation of a society people are content to protect their own person, indeed, people have a natural right to protect their person and bludgeon one another if they feel their person is being encroached upon. Just like that, a right is born, the right to self-defence, but also the right to take life, if you're able to do so, the right to take property, the right to enslave, etc. As there is no authority, there is nothing that keeps individuals from killing each other, and our lives are, to quote the most famous line from Leviathan, "nasty, brutish, and short." To Hobbes, the world of unrestrained rights and freedoms was a fundamentally dark and terrible world, because humans were deceitful, greedy and all-around horrible when allowed to be so.
Naturally this is a hypothetical scenario, whether or not such a society ever existed is besides the point in this discussion, and although I don't personally agree with basing political theory on hypothetical historical social organizations, for the sake of the discussion we dismiss this criticism. (It should be noted that Hobbes and Locke both believed in a literal State of Nature, an idea which has been rejected for lack of evidence by anthropologists.) Once our hypothetical ancestors have stopped bashing each other's heads in, they begin to realize that they'd be better off if they banded together into societies based on mutual contracts. This is when the social contract arises, when we agree that we are all better off if we, within reason, give up our rights to maim and/or kill one another for the trade-off that we ourselves (probably) won't be maimed and/or killed.
From there arises civil society, from there arises government. Government ensures that we follow the rules of the contract and yet somehow the government retains the right itself to imprison and possibly kill us when we violate the contract, because the majority have agreed (When? I don't recall signing anything!) that we ought to be punished for our violation for the sake of civil society. How is this wonderfully just society ensured? It is ensured by a strong central government, and to Hobbes, any insurrection against the government in the from of revolutionary action (he wrote during the English Civil War, if you care about his material conditions) or the like is a reversion to the state of nature and must be stopped for the sake of society by an absolutist sovereign, imagine - a king. The sovereign and his band of violently coercive social guardians ensure that we do not revert to the state of nature; the sovereign has a natural right to rule in order to prevent this reversion the the previous hypothetical horrors.
Dropping the Crown, Retaining the Divine
So much for Hobbes, the traditional originator of rights, now let's have a look at Locke, whose ideas were the fundamental basis of the American Revolution and had a profound impact on Thomas Jefferson, the author of the above-mentioned declaration of American Independence. In particular, the discussion on property rights is the most relevant contribution of Locke to this discussion, but also his own conception of the state of nature and the legitimacy of government is an important point. Locke was a very careful and erudite thinker that deserves special treatment over and above that given to Hobbes. It is on Locke that a lot of modern conceptions of rights and freedoms rest, although the subsequent efforts to secularize Locke's thoughts often crippled his foundational ideas.
The foundation of Locke's ideas on property, in particular, is the fact that you own what you create, and that you know what you create. When I create an item, such as a cake, I know the ingredients that I've put in, the quantities, and the manner in which I've combined them; as such, I know my product, but I also own my product, by the fact that I have created it. Just as I know and own my product, so the universe itself is a product, it is a product of a creator, the almighty God. God, therefore, unlike us, knows the universe in its entirety, and science is resolved to be an endeavor in which we seek to understand God's universe. Furthermore, as God created the universe, God owns the universe. Therefore, it is not the prerogative of one individual to kill another, or oneself for that matter, as we are all the property of God; as such, we all have the right to life, we also all have the right to liberty insofar as we are never the property of one another. You cannot interfere with what I do, because God guarantees my freedom.
What's more, Locke maintains that each individual has the right to his own interpretation of God's will, and anyone claiming to be an interpreter of divine will de facto claims himself to be closer to God than another. In short, no one is an expert on the will of God. If you tell me that it is God's will that I give you money and I claim I believe otherwise, you cannot compel me to do anything, because both our interpretations of God's will are legitimate, and since you are trying to impose your interpretation on me, and mine only involves myself, my interpretation easily trumps yours. This has important consequences on individuals claiming to know or understand God's will, individuals such as the pope and other religious leaders, but also secular leaders claiming to be divine descendants, such as kings.
Property, all property, is ultimately owned by God, however, because God created the Earth and everything in it. An often ignored aspect of Locke's philosophy is the point that there are no prior claims on property, no one individual has a right to particular property. An individual can go out into nature and take items for his own consumption and trade, but the initial condition is that we are all equally entitled to any part of God's creation. I can own something that I've made and taken out of nature, and I can have exclusive rights to these items, however I do not necessarily have a right to items that I cannot use, such as multiple residences, etc. I'll set this point aside, but it is an important elaboration of what Locke's idea of property truly is, and how it's been distorted through time.
Here we have the foundation of all, life, liberty and property, the foundations of the constitutional liberal state, such as the United States of America, and also of our modern ideals that an individual has the right to those unalienable rights. Note the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, we are "endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights" This is absolute, there are no caveats to this idea, provided that we accept that there is an entity that owns us outside of us, our rights are guaranteed by this entity beyond any doubt. The world has greatly changed since the time of Locke, however, and certain assumptions made by Locke no longer hold, at least not popularly.
God is Dead
Now we are arrived at our world and the assumption that God exists as an entity has, in intellectual and popular circles, been largely dismissed. When you remove God, who is to guarantee our rights? No longer is there an absolute grounding for our rights, and as a result it becomes difficult to claim that an individual has a right to anything. As the original thesis of divine guarantee is tossed aside, the antithesis that there are no fundamental rights looms. There have been synthesis, and many of them, attempting to reconcile the Lockean Enlightenment ideals with acknowledgment that God is not there, but they have been doomed to failure. We arrive at the point of moral relativism.
The ideas of Locke are still popular in this godless form, largely the result of continued popularly of American and French Constitutionalism, but putting the constitution aside one is greeted by a void. A gaping maw of nothingness: nothing guarantees the right to life, liberty and property except the pieces of paper proclaiming them and the coercive forces lurking behind them, they being fueled by almost mystical belief that there is something special about these particular rights. Unalienable rights rested on the assumption of the divine, but modern rights rest purely on the ability of those who hold the power to proclaim and enforce them.
As such, which 'rights' hold sway in a given location is based on power, and these rights are alienable by their nature, they can be enforced by the police, but they can also be enforced by a conquering or revolutionary power. In fact, some of the so-called rights of the United States were dead on arrival, such as the right to liberty, because the United States at the time of its independence was full of slave-owners and hereditary landholders, violating both the spirit and the word of the Lockean ideals on which they were supposedly based. Look at this point from the perspective of a post-US Civil War (former) slave-owner, who had the right of owning another individual because they were conveniently considered subhuman, and who then had his right taken away by a conquering foreign state (the Union). Was his right to property absolute even in the time of absolute property?
Our rights in the liberal democracies, as they stand, are largely the result of these Enlightenment traditions taken to their logical extremes during the nineteenth century and propagated ever since. Because these rights are grounded in coercive power rather than grounded in science or in logic, we should consider ourselves lucky to be living in states which continue to guarantee them. We cannot, however, consider ourselves entitled to any right or set of rights in particular, vigilance is required to ensure that the rights that we desire are those rights that we have, lest we end in a position where we are as individuals, not as societies, required to defend and take those rights which we feel entitled to.
Robert Nozick, the American philosopher, and many others, believe(d) that the only function of the state ought to be the protection of individuals from each other in cases where they violate one another's rights. The assertion is that the only natural monopoly is the monopoly of coercive force and that all others are merely artificial monopolies. Tentatively accepting this, we need not accept that there is a particular goal or idea toward which this coercive force ought to be directed, at least there isn't an objectively correct answer. Certainly some social organizations lead to better results than others, and some are rooted in historical or material conditions of their times, but there is no reason to believe that the guarantees of life, liberty or property are the proper or only rights to be upheld by the coercive monopoly or that any other rights ought to be upheld either. There are no unalienable rights.
No comments:
Post a Comment