Your Rights Are REAL.

Know it. Love it. Shout it from the highest mountain. (DN 1.3)

Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |

(Part I) Why: 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3

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Chapter 1: WHY

1.3 — Getting Rights Right, Part 2

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You have rights. You know you have rights.

People can tell you until they are blue in the face that your rights are not “natural”—that you only have whatever rights government gives you—and something inside you insists they are wrong. Something deep and visceral, beyond all the reasoning. You just know.

Government could make slavery legal tomorrow, and you would know that slavery is still a moral crime. Your intuition screams it from the rooftops of your very being: slavery is a violation of…something.

Even if we struggle to define what “rights” are, exactly, we know that we have them. We know—as our classical-liberal forebears knew—that they are inalienable. We have them as a consequence of our very existence.

We arrive at this knowledge from many pathways…

We see the beneficial effects that respect of others has on human life, and we induce certain principles from our observations.

We see hints in the natural world—in the fundamental life-requirement of all living things to be free to move, grow, and acquire whatever they need to survive.

We also see in the life-requirement of property—something that even animals understand. The food you are about to put in your mouth, the physical space you occupy, the den in which you sleep, and the piece of property you farm—all these, and more, are essential for life.

We use reason—as Objectivists and Praxeologists do—to construct a theory of rights based on the fundamental needs and nature of man. Or we follow the path of the natural lawyers—from Cicero to Locke and beyond—and reason our way to the same conclusions.

Rights are beneficial. Rights are necessary for the continuance of life. Moral reasoning and emotional intuition proclaim their existence. Something tells us that rights are somehow woven into the laws of nature. A moral knowledge of them emanates from the very fabric of reality.¹

Yet rights are not something you can photograph or capture and hang on your wall. They are there, but they are not magic force fields, repelling violations like the Enterprise’s shields repels photon torpedos. We know they are real, but proof—the kind of proof that would satisfy a pure empiricist—is elusive.

The solution—to get as close as we can to that proof—lies in logic.

We already know—based on our demonstration above—that no one has a natural right to initiate coercive force against another. That gets us most of the way there. With a few more steps, we will have a complete picture.

The first of those steps is to recognize the reality of free will. 

There have been profound debates on this subject for centuries. Where does free will come from? How far does it go? Does it even exist at all?

We acknowledge those explorations, but we do not need to settle every nuanced question here. Our objective rests on a simple, fundamental reality:

Every individual has personal control over his thoughts, choices, and actions. 

Even when we acknowledge the impact of biology, upbringing, circumstances, external influences, and luck, the reality of choice always remains. Biology and upbringing are like the earth beneath our feet. External forces are like the sky above. In spite of these, each of us chooses how we move upon the Earth, and how we weather life’s many storms. 

An individual may be subjected to forcible compulsion by another, but no one can actually think, choose, or act for him. The range of available choices can be forcibly shrunk, and still, only the individual can actually do the choosing. Free will is thus naturally exclusive.

Since free will is a consequence of personhood, and no one’s personhood can be unmade, free will is also naturally inalienable. You, and you alone, choose for you. You are the captain of your ship.

So what does this mean, in a practical sense?

It means that you, and you alone, have dispositive decision-making authority over your own thoughts, choices, and actions. You control your own life, body, and being—exclusively and inalienably.

Dispositive decision-making authority…now what does that sound like?

Ownership. Dispositive decision-making authority is the defining characteristic of owning something.

We are not supposed to have to prove the concept of self-ownership (it is supposed to be “self-evident”), and yet we just did.

In fact, let’s make it official:

1. Exclusive, inalienable, personal control over thoughts, choices, and actions (free will) grants to each individual exclusive, dispositive decision-making authority over his own life, body, and being.

2. The primary characteristic of ownership is exclusive, dispositive decision-making authority.

.˙. Free will grants to each individual ownership of his own life, body, and being.

Boom.
Self-ownership.

You have self-ownership. It is a part of you and cannot be taken away. The only thing that anyone else can do is sever you from the enjoyment of your self-ownership. And that requires force of some kind: You would choose X but someone applies force such that X is no longer possible, or such that choosing X will cause other things to happen that you also would not choose.

For example…

You would choose to keep your money. A highwayman sticks a pistol in your face and says, “Your money or your life.” (Government does the exact same thing, except they don’t show you the pistol right away, and they call it “taxes.”)

You would choose to have your 18-year-old son continue living at home with you while he goes to college and works to save up enough for his first place. He wants this too. Someone comes along and kidnaps him against your will, and his. (Government does the exact same thing and calls it “conscription” and “your duty.”)

You are alienated from the enjoyment of your self-ownership by the initiation of coercive force. And we already know that the initiation of coercive force is morally impermissible. So, let’s make this official too:

1. Self-ownership is violated by the initiation of force.

2. No one has the ontological authority to initiate force upon the unwilling

.˙. No one has the ontological authority to violate the self-ownership of the unwilling.

Each individual human thus has license to engage in any thought, choice, experience, or action that does not violate the self-ownership of any unwilling other.

This is the basis of rights. A right, in essence, is anything you want to do that does not initiate force upon another.

That does not mean that anything and everything that a person wants to do is necessarily “good.” But so long as it does not initiate force, it is his right. (Naturally, this also raises the question of what exactly constitutes force in every circumstance. A punch to the face obviously is. We will deal with pollution, accidents, manipulation, and other marginal questions a bit later. For now, the basics are enough.)

Ontologically—that is, as a fact of reality—you do not have any right to rule another, initiate force against another, or impose anything upon another to which he or she did not consent. Doing so constitutes a moral transgression. 

This means that self ownership, and all the rights that emanate therefrom, constitute a just moral claim. Rights are exclusive prerogatives, the violation of which is morally impermissible.²

Rights are not granted by government. They are not simply the result of wishful thinking. They exist. They are an outgrowth of natural facts. They are woven into the fabric of everything. They are yours.

Eventually, we—as explorers here, and as a species—are going to have to grapple with a difficult question:

If it is morally impermissible for individuals to initiate force against unwilling others, why isn’t it morally impermissible when a group of individuals calling themselves a government does the same?

And then we will have to wrap our minds around the reality:

It IS just as morally impermissible when a government does it.

But for now, just enjoy knowing that your rights are yours, all the way down to the foundations of the universe.

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For the cost of the occasional cup of coffee, you can help me keep this train rolling!

1. The nature, source, and reality of rights is discussed in much greater detail in the middle chapters of my book The Freedom Scale: An Accurate Measure of Left and Right. Next installment: Chapter 6 of 20.

2. Some may complain that this is a violation of Hume’s Guillotine. We are not (according to Hume, at least), supposed to derive an OUGHT from an IS. But everyone has a sense of morality—of what ought to be. If they are not deriving what ought to be from what is, then where are they getting it? From what isn’t? How can we derive what ought to be from anything other than what we see in, and reason from, the world around us?