Phil Elmore: Individual Authoring Services

Manifesto of the Mind: Natural Law, Rights, Property, Government
By Phil Elmore

[Editor's note: These ideas are not original. I have gleaned them from a variety of sources, including texts discussing Natural Law and the writings of Objectivist David Kelley. I present them here as a means of thinking virtually aloud.]

Many political and philosophical discussions revolve around the concept of rights and whether one’s rights have been violated. It’s time we discussed exactly what rights are, and what rights human beings have.

The writings of the Founding Fathers indicate that they accepted, and based the United States government on, the concept of natural rights. For the purposes of this discussion it doesn’t matter if you believe in God or not. Most deists or theists believe rights are God-granted, while others believe natural rights come from nature. (What matters is that you recognize natural rights exist.)

Since not everyone can agree on the Divine, I’ll approach the issue from a secular and atheistic standpoint. Your natural rights are a direct result, and the logical conclusion of, two different aspects of your being: the fact that you are a discrete biological entity, and the fact that reason is your means of survival.

Because you are a discrete biological entity, you are an individual. There is no such thing as the collective; there are only quantities of individuals. Because no human can be another human, no one can live another’s life. By virtue of your nature as an individual, you are born with the inalienable property right to yourself as a person. This means that no human being has a claim on your time, or your effort without your consent.

Your property right to your person extends to a general right to possess legally-acquired property, for no human can exist without property of some kind. This does not mean you have an automatic claim to someone else’s property by virtue of your need for it, however. This means that you have the right to possess property if you can indeed acquire it. Claims to the contrary made by Marxists, collectivists, and socialists of every stripe are empty.

Most property today belongs to someone. But let’s say it did not; how do we go about obtaining property that does not yet belong to another person? Your property right to your self and your effort can be used to obtain rights to real property (land). He who first "mingles his labor with the land" earns a property right to it. And what of land (or other property, for that matter) whose acquisition is disputed as being illegitimate? The longer an illegitimate claim goes uncontested, the more the passage of time legitimizes it, because the passage of time increases the possibility that an attempt to correct the illegitimate acquisition would harm parties who themselves have acted in good faith and committed no immoral actions.

What is the alternative to this right to possess property if one can acquire it? What is a property right, anyway? A right to property is the right to its use. Because land is scarce -- there is a finite quantity of it -- some method must be used to determine who may use or possess the scarce commodity (be it land or any other item of property). If property belongs to no one, we have none, which contradicts the necessity of property. If we say all property belongs to everyone, we have a problem -- because we would then only be able to use property with the mutual consent of every member of society. Since this is impossible, some delegation of humans within society would have to make this determination -- and it would then be those people, not all people, who hold the property right.

This points to a critical issue concerning rights. Either you recognize that you have sole dominion over your person, as does each human, or you do not. If you do not, you are saying either that all of society -- the Collective, the State, whomever -- has first right to you as property, or that some other person does. Let’s take the latter first. I’m willing to bet that few people will admit to believing in Plato’s theory that a select Elite of societal guardians should have command over the rest of us. By what rationale does one human being presume to own another, when he cannot live that human’s life? By what rationale does a human initiate force against another? (We’ll get to that, too.)

As to the former, we run into the same problem of all humans belonging to the State as we do when all property belongs to the people as a collective. Since we cannot gain the mutual consent of all of society’s members in exercising property rights over the individual, we must choose a delegation of people to do this -- and we’re back to the latter Platonic problem again.

These points touch on the rights conferred by your nature as a discrete biological entity. You have other rights that stem from the fact that reason is your means of survival.

You have no choice but to use reason for long-term survival. To be a rational being is to embrace reason, the faculty that integrates the data of your senses into concepts, as your only means of knowledge. Only knowledge can provide you with the means to survive, for you are not born preprogrammed. You must choose to be rational, and as a result you are a creature of volitional consciousness. You may think there is some other means of knowledge, but this is not true. Psychic insight is unreliable. Religious revelation is similarly sketchy. Instinct tells you that you need certain things, but not specifically what they are or how to get them.

Once you make the choice to be rational, you accept that you do not have the right to initiate force. All force has a physical component, but this does not mean all manifestations of force are some form of striking or restraining someone. Theft is force, because it deprives people of assets rightfully theirs. Fraud is force, because it is a form of theft. All manifestations of force are, essentially, the demand that a person act against his or her reason. Humans can resolve conflict in only two ways: reason or force, persuasion or coercion. If you cannot persuade someone through reason and you force them to comply with your wishes, you contradict the recognition of reason as your means of survival.

As a result, you cannot initiate force. To do so contradicts a fundamental principle of survival as a rational being -- and this action can also be coupled to our previous discussion on your biological nature. If you cannot live another person’s life, you cannot presume to force them to comply with your wishes. Your inalienable right to your person and the results of your labor is violated when force is initiated against you.

This does not mean, of course, that you cannot use force morally in your defense. When force is initiated against you, there is no other recourse but to use force in response. By definition, you cannot reason with someone who has rejected reason. You must therefore respond in kind.

Now that we’ve discussed from where rights come, what are they? What is a right? A natural right is a right to action, not a claim to the assets, labor, or time of others. Your rights are violated only when another person initiates some manifestation of force to prevent you from acting. Thus it is not true that you have a "right not to have force initiated against you." Rather, you have a right to enjoy the product of your labors, and you have a property right to your person. Any person who initiates force thus violates that right.

A right is, by definition, unquestionable, and not dependent on some responsibility on your part. Many times, those who support some infringement on your natural rights will appeal to the idea that "With rights come responsibilities." This is not true. A right carries with it no concomitant responsibility, because it is, by definition, inviolable. Responsibilities, by contrast, are accepted, not imposed.

You are born into society accepting, by virtue of your existence, exactly one clause of the "Social Contract" -- the agreement not to initiate force against your fellow human beings. Humans who operate in this manner obtain what they require from other humans through exchange to mutual benefit. They are traders, giving value for value received. No human being has a claim to your life or your assets simply because you are born into his society. Your property rights to your person remain intact and inalienable regardless of the circumstances of your birth.

The price to remain within a given society is that you must accept responsibilities. These responsibilities correspond to the laws of that society. Either you abide by them, or you will be killed, cast out, or imprisoned -- but in any case you will be a part of society no longer. Accepting the responsibilities that are the price to remain is not the same as blindly agreeing to any infringement on your property rights to your person. You can (and you must) speak out and work against the enacting of any law that violates your rights, such as compulsory national service or conscription, schemes for redistribution of wealth to achieve egalitarian ends, and so forth. If laws violating your rights are passed, it is indeed your responsibility to comply or leave -- but that does not make enacting those laws right, nor does it mean that the "social contract" is the source of those claims on your person.

If we agree on what I’ve said up to now, particularly regarding the use of force and the inability of one human to live another human’s life, it stands to reason that government is evil. What is a government, after all, but a means to force humans within society to comply with certain demands? Government, however, is a necessary evil, because there is no other means to protect individual rights. (A society with no government whatsoever invariably devolves into feudal tribalism, which destroys individual rights by empowering mobs.)

That is the only legitimate role of government in a free society: the protection of individuals’ natural rights. That is why governments are instituted among human beings - or at least, that is why they should be.