Filed under: Natural rights
The concept of natural rights is a topic that I have wanted to address for some time now. It all started when my friend Jacob Hedegaard challenged me to address the rational behind the concept without referring to a deity in the end as the source for the natural rights. The quick and dirty definition of natural rights is the right that human beings have that are not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs of any particular culture or government, and therefore universal and inalienable. Therefor natural rights are something that any given person can claim regardless their status in society. Some examples of classical natural rights would be ‘The right to not be enslaved’ and ‘ The right to not be killed’. Natural rights in contrast to legal rights should always be stated as negative rights because only then can they truly be universal and not contingent upon others. For example, if we sad that ‘All human being has a right to life’ instead for ‘the right not to be killed’, then it would be implicit that society then should preserve every human beings life or else they would violet their rights.
In an effort to answer the question of where human beings does get those rights, philosophers tent to end up by pointing to either a deity or some type of social contract. But do we need a deity to argue for natural rights? Well Murray Rothbard tried to solve this “problem” by pointing too property rights. He’s reasoning goes to something like this: ‘I own my own body, and therefor it would be theft to either kill or enslave me’. At first glance, this only postpone the question to ‘Why do you own your own body?’ or to ‘Whom have given you your body?’ To the question of why Rothbard would say that ‘I own my own body because I am inalienable from my own body’. To the question of who bestowed human beings their body we again end up at either a deity or at Nature, and therefore not solving the dilemma.
The reason for why we can’t solve this dilemma of the need of a deity, I believe, is because we deliberate the issue of natural rights as an ontology issue. When rights are analysed as an ontology issue rights become an object that can be transferred between subjects. One individual can give some rights to another individual. This might be the affirmative way of addressing rights when we are talking about legal rights, where society, thought the laws, provides individuals with rights. Therefore, I suggest that natural rights should not be considered form an ontological point of view but rather from an epistemological point of view. By doing this, natural rights become a matter of knowledge, a matter of something that can be judged to be either true or false. And we don’t need a deity to enlighten us with what is true and right, and therefore neither what our natural rights are.
An epistemological reasoning for natural rights could be something like this:
‘I am a human being’
‘I find it to be true that I have the right not to be killed’
‘Therefor I find it to be true that all human beings have the right not to be killed.’
First, I wanted to call this post, ‘What is the distinction between freedom and liberty’ – but as I started to think about it a better question seems to be is there a distinction? There is not much help to get from the Oxford dictionary since it defines liberty as: “the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s behaviour or political views.” And freedom is: “the power of self-determination attributed to the will; the quality of being independent of fate or necessity.” Judging by those two definitions if there is a distinction between freedom and liberty it seems to be a semantic one. But, I am not satisfied, so lets look beyond the words themselves. Freedom consists of the word free with the abstract suffix ‘-dom’ indicating that is it a state that an individual is or is not in. This means that a given individual is either in a state of freedom or not meaning, I would argue, that freedom requires an active act of judgment in a given situation to determine if that individual is free or not. Since the individual can preform this active act it would stand to reason that the individual should actively claim his or her freedom, given that there is no external force hindering this. Based on this argumentation I am of the conviction that freedom is something that the individual needs to claim. Now lets deliberate liberty. Liberty comes from the Greek word eleutheros. A ruff translation would be ‘belonging to the people’. We cannot be sure about this translation, but if this translation is correct then liberty is something that belongs to all freemen/people, and therefor we have a strong argumentation for the philosophical concept liberty being a natural right, something that all individuals have, because they are alive. Philosophers like Hegel and others have determents those rights as being an inalienable, meaning that the individual cannot discard those rights. The consequence of this is that Liberty, unlike Freedom, does not require an active act on behalf of the individual meaning that liberty should be contemplated to be passive. This leads me to conclude that there is a distinction between freedom and liberty; freedom is something that requires the individual to make an active choice where liberty is a passive right that is granted to the individual because he or she exists. For a more inept etymological argument, I can recommend Joseph R. Stromberg - Freedom vs. Liberty
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