The Philosophy of Freedom

by Caleb Nelson

  Q10: Why is deception a form of force?

  Chapter 3: Rights

  The concept of individual rights is relatively new to humankind. It is another key part of the foundation of all the spectacular advances in human civilization in the last three hundred years—and when this concept has been ignored, evaded, or twisted, the results have been the greatest horrors in human history. It is imperative in the cause of freedom to fully understand the origin, meaning, and application of the concept of rights.

  A right is “a moral principle defining and sanctioning man’s freedom of action in a social context.”

  [33]

  (Principle in this sense means “A fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.”)

  Rights do not come from God or government, nor are they inherent or “natural” to mankind. They do not physically exist so they can’t “come from” anywhere. They are concepts. Where they “come from” is from a rational mind that recognizes what man requires in order to live. They are moral principles based on the objective requirements of man’s nature within a social context. They describe the requirements for our existence in relationship to other people.

  The foundation of knowledge required for understanding rights is:

  1. You exist.

  2. Principles govern your pursuit of life and happiness.

  3. To follow those principles of happiness, you must be free to act on your rational judgment.

  4. The only thing that can stop you from doing so is the physical interference of others; therefore, rights describe how you should be left free from others’ force.

  5. Rights provide the link between ethics and politics, between personal principles of action and social principles of interaction.

  The concept of individual rights was the core political philosophy of America’s founding. It was recognized that rights are not created by human laws. As William Blackstone wrote in his Commentaries of the Laws of England, rights do not need human laws “to be more effectually invested in every man than they are; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared by the municipal laws to be inviolable.”

  [34]

  A major cause of America’s problems today, however, was a failure by the Founders to explicitly define what these rights are and what constitutes a violation of them. Thanks to the hindsight of history and the work of many people before us that oversight can now be corrected.

  THE BASICS

  The three basic individual rights were expressed by George Washington in 1786 prior to the Constitutional Convention, “Let us have [a government] by which our lives, liberties, and properties will be secured.”

  [35]

  Life—You are here, and so you have license to continue to be here. No one should try to take your life from you, and you shouldn’t try to take anyone else’s. How long do you have this right? As long as are alive (and don’t murder anyone). You may have the right to exist, but it is your job, and your job alone, to maintain your existence by providing for your necessities. (Unless you are an infant or child, in which case it is the responsibility of your caregivers until you grow up.) This is the only basic right, all other rights stem from this one.

  Liberty—Maintaining your life takes work, so you need to be free from other people beating you up and stuffing you in lockers and the like so that you can go about the business that will keep your heart pumping. Remember that your tool for maintaining your life is your mind, thus “survival requires that those who think be free from the interference of those who don’t.”

  [36] Your right to liberty includes liberty of conscience, and of religion, and the right to pursue safety and happiness. Basically, it is the right to do whatever you want to do unless that action would infringe on the rights of others.

  John Adams

  [iv]

  Property—If you want to stay alive, which is a process of self-sustaining and self-generating action, you’ll need food, shelter, clothes, water, and all the rest—that means you have a right to own, or control, things. Using your brain and your freedom, you can go about getting these things by working, creating, and exchanging with others for what you want. If you plant raspberries on your property, then if you want you can harvest and eat them until your stomach explodes. Your time is also yours; you are free to trade it to an employer for whatever pay you both decide is fair. Anything you earn is yours. If you trade your time and work for anything, that “anything” is yours to keep. You can share if you want, or consume it all yourself; it belongs to you, it is a product of your labor, and that means you have a right to control it.

  John Adams put it this way, “All men are born free and independent, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.”

  [37]

  Despite Adams’ clarity, there is still much confusion in defining rights. But let’s not take his word for it. It is best to make a fresh start, and rebuild our entire conception of rights from the ground up using only observable and self-evident facts of reality. That way, we can be sure we are on firm ground.

  How do you prove that these are natural human rights? Think of it this way: the fact that you are alive implies that nature declared you “existable” and you have the right to continue to be so. You have a mind and body independent of all others. You and you alone have direct control over your mind and body—no one else has that. Therefore, your life is yours to do with as you please.

  You have the right to continue living on your merry way, free from anyone interfering with your existence. By this we mean people physically acting against you. Fall in a volcano, drown in a flood, get struck by lightning, have a heart attack, or be trampled by an elephant, that’s “natural”—sad, but natural. The natural laws of causality have unfortunately revoked your life card. Getting shot, raped, or punched in the face—that is “artificial.” It is not a natural condition or result of existing, it is a willful interference against your life which you did not choose, made by a person who lacks the prerogative to do so.

  Since life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generating action, the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generating action. You have the right to take all the rational actions required by nature to support your life, to further your life, and to enjoy your life.

  A right only means you have freedom to act. It means freedom from compulsion, or force, by other men. A right gives moral sanction to your voluntary actions and imposes no obligations on others except to abstain from violating your rights.

  For instance, while the right to life means the right to keep yourself alive, it does not place the burden of your own survival on anyone around you. It does not mean that other people must give a man food when he is hungry, medicine when he is sick, or a job when he is unemployed. It does not mean that others must provide him with a community swimming pool, high-speed internet, or a recreational trail network.

  Samuel Adams, often called the Father of the American Revolution, observed that man’s rights “are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.”

  [38] This means that your right to life is the one fundamental right to which all other rights are corollary. The first corollary of your right to life is your right to liberty. Your right to life is meaningless unless you also have the liberty to take the actions necessary to preserve that life. Your right to liberty means your right to dispose of your life as you see fit and pursue the activities you desire with only the restriction that your activities and pursuits do not physically harm, deceive, or coerce another human being. You have the right to life and the liberty to use that life, but not the liberty to infringe on the lives and liberty of others.

&n
bsp; The most controversial right, the right to property, is the only means you have to implement all other rights. Without property rights, no other rights are possible! Your nature requires you to be free to think and perform those activities that will preserve your life. You must be free to work and to keep the product of your labor. This is the third basic right of man—the right of property. To deny it is, in effect, to deny that man has a right to life.

  Everyone on earth begins life with a particular form of private property—their body. Man has the freedom to do with his body what he pleases, so long as it does not infringe on the rights of others—which means so long as he does not initiate physical force against others. Since man must sustain his own life by his own effort using his own body, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others take his product is a slave. The man who acts on the belief that others should, against their will, provide for his needs and wants is a tyrant.

  The right to property does not mean the right to be given property by the government, but to produce and thereby earn it.

  [39]

  Simply put, if you have no right to keep the product of your work, you have no right to liberty. If you have no right to liberty, you have no right to your life, because what you choose do with your liberty and property is what your life consists of. Those who argue that property is not a right have said that having only some of your property taken from you does not impact your right to life—you are, after all, still alive. Technically you could be locked in a cage and fed just enough to keep you from starvation, but your right isn’t just to be alive, it is to live! To live your life, and it isn’t your life if you don’t make your own choices.

  Those who believe property is not a right would argue that even if some of your money is taken away, you still have your freedom to dispose of the rest of your property, but the range of possibilities open to you have been reduced. By the unwanted and arbitrary actions of others, your possible options have been reduced and your liberty has been restricted. The highwayman’s ultimatum, “your money or your life” does not leave your freedom intact merely because you still have the choice to be robbed or murdered. When the actions of others limit your choices, you lose the ability to do what you might have done. Paths that you may have chosen are now closed to you. Your ability to buy that special anniversary present, to save more for retirement, to pay off your home early, to go on that trip, to start a business, to give more to your charity, or anything else you might have done if you had the money cannot be done now. Your judgment has been overruled by another. You may eventually be able to do those things you wanted to do, but you have lost time, and time is the very currency of your life. Your life’s potential and accomplishments have been quashed, and your pursuit of happiness shackled. Hence, your life is inexorably tied to your right of property. To the extent your property is taken away, your choices are limited, your liberty is restricted, and thus the right to your life is curtailed.

  We have discussed the three fundamental human rights—life, liberty, and property. There are numerous ways to uphold, exercise, and enjoy your rights, but only one way to have them violated—physical force. Each of these rights is related to the right to act on our own judgment. But if someone holding a gun orders us to do anything from giving them money to not crossing a border, then we cannot act on our own judgment. In order to live we must act on the gunman’s judgment—this is not freedom.

  This is true with any form of force, even if it is as apparently small a matter as being required to pay taxes for a new city park with our alternative being a fine or even imprisonment. Our liberty has been restricted, and infringed upon by others.

  Thomas Jefferson named these “unalienable” rights, meaning they cannot be changed; they are not granted or revoked by government, but are essential requirements of man’s nature.

  NOTE: In the Declaration of Independence, the traditional right of “property,” is substituted by “the pursuit of happiness” as a broader, more sweeping term. However, most people at the time recognized that “property” was the right being referred to. As early as 1690, the philosopher John Locke claimed that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Only two years before Jefferson’s Declaration, the first Continental Congress’s Declaration of Rights and Grievances made reference to “life, liberty, and property . . . secured by . . . the unchanging laws of nature.”

  [40] In the same month that Jefferson was penning the Declaration, Virginia passed its own Declaration of Rights saying, “All men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights; . . . namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” (It has been suggested that Jefferson altered the traditional wording so as not to imply that slaves, which were considered property under the law, should be considered a right.

  [41] This helped pave the way to the abolition of slavery due to the inherent and fatal contradiction between slavery and individual rights.)

  The Founders thought it was self-evident that property was a necessary requirement for any man’s pursuit of happiness. The protection of these rights against infringement by others, Jefferson says, is the reason “governments are instituted among men.” “To secure these rights” is the only proper purpose of government.

  Respect for human rights is more than a political idea; it is a philosophy of peace. Every other philosophy might claim brotherly love as its ethic, but still reserves the use of coercion and theft against those supposedly beloved brothers. Consider for a moment what a wonderful place it would be to live where everyone respected the rights of their neighbors, where “Do no harm” was the underlying theme of all action, and the only commandment was “Thou shalt not initiate force against another.” Where the inevitable, but rare, infractions of law have simple legal recourse, and where government was never the aggressor wielding deception, theft, and coercion as tools of state, but only an impartial arbitrator and protector of all.

  There are some additional principles to keep in mind regarding the right of property:

  THE ORIGIN OF REAL (LAND) PROPERTY RIGHTS

  · The origin of real property lies in its use and control;

  · Private property includes intellectual property;

  · Freedom requires private property.

  There are some who express concern over the origins of real estate ownership or real property rights (the right to own land). Where does such a right come from? Are all land claims valid?

  John Locke identified labor—whether of the mind or body—as the source of land rights when that labor was exercised upon what had previously been unclaimed, or “common,” to all mankind: “Thus labour, in the beginning, gave a right of property wherever anyone was pleased to employ it upon what was common.”

  [42]

  The primary basis for the concept of land ownership comes from control. Without an advanced government to record and protect the ownership of various tracts of land, a primitive people would have only one basis for such ownership—control. If an individual, family, or tribe could maintain control over a portion of land then it was theirs, whether a government was there to give them a deed or not. If the land was too large to protect effectively, portions of it might then be lost to neighboring peoples. Land might be acquired morally (received in fair trade) or immorally (stolen in conquest and invasion, or acquired through deception). Or it might simply be acquired and kept because no one else wanted it.

  Eventually, when an advanced or new government rose up over the area, the owners/controllers experienced one of two scenarios. They were either given title and legal right to use the land protected by objective government arbitration, or else (if the government was more despotic) had it appropriated from them and subsequently issued “legally” to another party. (Recall that “legal” is not synonymous with “moral.”)

&nb
sp; Why is this important today?

  It doesn’t matter by what method a stretch of land was originally acquired in the recesses of history. It was either taken from nature or taken from others. If it was taken from others it was either voluntarily or through force. It doesn’t matter today because the principle of control operated until it could be replaced with objective government recognition and protection of ownership.

  Whether land was ceded through war or traded for trinkets, it does not matter who owned the land hundreds or thousands of years ago or how they lost control of it. The principle to concern ourselves with today is the protection of property rights in a modern society which, finally in the history of mankind, uses objective means of determining, protecting, and maintaining such control.

  Still, there are people today who, for some reason, are concerned with wresting control of land from its current owners and somehow “giving it back” to descendants of some native tribe. Generally, those who operate with this goal in mind aren’t even consistent enough with themselves to ask how that ancient tribe acquired the land themselves (what if they stole it from someone else?!). These people do not care for, and understand even less, the aims of freedom and the consequences of the violation of rights. They fail to see the consequences of such impossible actions. Should the island of Manhattan be stolen away from the current owners to be given to a group of the descendants of those who traded it hundreds of years ago? You can see the absurd impracticality of such an idea when the original owners are long dead and since their time a government has been created which protects property. Two wrongs would make a quagmire, and certainly not make a right; thus the only principle to worry about now is current ownership.