>Date: Wed, 13 Nov 1996 09:15:45 -0600 (CST) >From: Tibor R Machan [From Modern Age, Spring 1997] For Individual Rights by: Tibor R. Machan The Radicalism of Individual Rights When the United States of America was founded, a major political revolution occurred. The break with the past was far greater than we have witnessed since. The Russian Marxist-Leninist upheaval was minor in comparison. Russia became little no more than a revamped feudal dynasty, embarking on colonialism in the name of a kind of national destiny-to lead the world into a new era. Instead of kings, the USSR had dictators who behaved just like kings, only the wore much uglier clothes. In short, the great Russian revolution was just a putsch, a change of oppressors from czars to fascist dictators. What really made a big difference to people was the American founding. And its most vital discovery was the human individual. The world has been ruled by one or another collectivist ideal before and after the discovery of America, as it were. But for a brief period what reigned supreme on the political horizon of humankind was the notion that every individual human being is a sovereign, not to be governed without his or her consent, not to be made to serve any cause involuntarily, not to be made the subject of any crown or similar tyrant. That was a revolution. And its seed was the doctrine of individual rights spelled out in the political writings of the English philosopher, John Locke. Locke's theory of natural rights identifies every human individual as equal in his or her capacity to lead a morally responsible life. So that a society would accommodate everyone's moral nature, each person has certain basic rights. These basic, individual rights-which later found themselves expressed in the American Declaration of Independence and, at least partially, in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution-amounted to a border around every person defining his or her sphere of exclusive jurisdiction. The rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are nothing other than prohibitions all people must respect, prohibitions against intruding on the individual, against his or her consent. We still have a country in which some recognition of those rights the Founding Fathers and the framers, with the help of John Locke, discovered. But barely. The discovery of rights has fashioned many of our institutions, from the criminal law to our economic system. But the influence of that system of political ideas has been weakening so that by now little is left of the original idea. Rights in Trouble How did this happen? One development in particular, has helped erode the doctrine of individual rights. This is the effort of many who never believed in the theory to undermine it by using the concept "rights" for something very different from what it was used in the first place. As anyone who has paid attention to current political debates must realize, what we are supposed to have rights to are not longer Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness but to, among other things, a guaranteed security in old age, minimum wages, unemployment compensations, medical care, a risk free environment, job security, and, as one New York City public service ad announced, not to be lonely! Yes, we are supposed to be entitled, with the active protection of our various governmental bodies, to enjoy companions, to be safe from diseases, to have a good income, etc., etc. So, the right to Life-meaning that no one may kill us with impunity-has changed into the right to all the benefits that we might obtain in life. Only we are supposedly entitled to obtain these benefits whether or not we work at it ourselves, whether nature favors us with some luck, whether others are willing to help us when we need help.1 In short, the American revolution has by now been nearly voided! The prohibition against involuntary servitude has been lifted and now we can all be forced to serve our fellow human beings, regardless of whether this is our choice. Consent is no longer needed-doctors are forced to deliver services on the terms set by the government; business must employ workers on terms set by the state; indeed, under the guise of individual rights, all the original rights that help us identify our individual sovereignty have gradually been eroded. Just as Eastern Europe discovered how terrible it is to live under a regime that violates the rights of individuals in all spheres of life, our own politicians and intellectuals are slowly changing our own society into a grand collectivist experiment. We have not only perverted the idea of individual rights, but slowly embraced alien doctrines such as communitarianism, democratic socialism, economic democracy, and similar ideas that care not a whit for the choices of individuals, but promise universal salvation if only individual consent is sacrificed to the wisdom of some leaders or committees. What has happened to our free country? Is it in regression? Before we can assess this, we need to make a somewhat longish detour. We need to examine the case for the kinds of rights that identify the distinctively American polity. Natural Rights What is a natural rights theory? It is an answer that arises in connection with human community life; namely, "How, in the most general terms, should we (human beings) live with each other?" In particular, this answer rests on an investigation of human nature. The community in question embraces people who are unrelated-i.e., may not stand to each other as friends, colleagues, etc. The point is that among family members, friends, colleagues, and so forth, special narrower ethical principles could probably handle the problems a theory of natural rights aims to handle among human beings unknown to each other. But the situation of large human communities, with strangers as members, is familiar enough, so it isn't difficult to imagine why our question would arise. The question to which natural rights theory responds has been answered in very different ways, for very different reasons. I won't canvass all the different ways and reasons, although it is probable that most people have some familiarity with them. How we should answer political questions is a vital issue in connection with the study of politics. Indeed, numerous questions that arise in the various areas of human inquiry have a bearing on the study of politics. This shouldn't really be surprising, since politics concerns the basic principles of human community life, something that certainly is complicated by all sorts of factors about human beings, their relationships, their environment, their sustenance, their goals and purposes, etc. Political theory subsumes virtually all other fields of inquiry. Let's see what the natural rights approach is to answering our question. First, one needs to ascertain some points about reality and our knowledge of it. Then we need to explore how we would best understand what is meant by such judgments as "We should act so and so," "He should not act so and so," "This is good," or "This is evil." The reason is that in politics we are, after all, concerned with how we should act, what institutions we should support, and so forth. Se we need to consider how to approach such questions. Having made clear the meaning of "should" ("ought") utterances, their application to human conduct and human institutions needs to be explored. First, we need to investigate personal moral life-the realm of ethics or natural law, and whether it is even possible to speak of what individuals morally should do in their own lives. Then, we will consider public or political conduct, mainly the conduct that would be appropriate, first of all, toward other people as such, as a bare minimum. From this, I will come to some sort of technical topics of natural rights theory, our main point of interest. Some Basic Issues First, existence cannot be inherently confusing-we may be confused about it, but it cannot fail to make sense once closely studied. If this is denied, then all bets are off, not just in human affairs and the studies of them, but in all realism of inquiry. The words we speak, even as we affirm or deny anything, will lack clear and unambiguous identity and the meanings of our concepts will be indeterminate. This will include whatever we ourselves might wish those meanings to be as a matter of our intentions. For example, as we state that by "rights" we only mean social devices invented by us, we will have to admit that these devices may or may not be what we want them to be. If reality is itself something in a total flux, all the way to its most basic structure, our statement that this is so, cannot be depended upon. It will mean nothing firm or stable. And, not insignificantly, in the realm of ethics and politics that will tend to imply that the powerful-by virtue of their power and not the clarity and truth of some ideas that justify some conduct-must rule and not check on them, based on what is really right and wrong, if possible. So, insofar as we admit that we can make sense of even the minimum of our lives, we affirm that reality hangs together in a reasonably orderly fashion, at least at the most basic level.2 Moreover, let us also make note of the fact that we can know the above well enough. And, we can also know a lot more than that, if only we work hard to find things out. Knowing reality isn't impossible, as some people have claimed. From what we have already learned, we can infer that we can learn about reality. The task is one of finding out about it, through extensive and hard work.3 Among other areas of reality of interest to us is human nature itself, that is, what we are as human beings, quite apart from our individual identity, our special origins, sex, race, professional competence, etc. These can be crucial in some contexts, but for now what concerns us is human nature. The reason for this concern is that we are interested in how human beings should conduct themselves toward each other qua human beings, and that cannot be answered without knowledge of what human beings are, simply as human beings. Once we have got a glimpse at human nature, as it were, we can then ask how considerations of "should" apply in the case of human beings as such. And that provides us with the basic material needed to determine the norms of interpersonal conduct, that is, the norms of political life. The point about the general integrity of reality is complicated but perhaps a clue or so would suffice so that it can be understood without much difficulty. Everything that exists abides by some very minimal principles, namely, those that pertain to existence itself. That is just for being something, anything at all, whatever exists abides by certain principles, namely the principles of existence. Those principles are, as might be suspected, very general in character, since they apply to everything, past, present, future, and even the possible. (The very possibility of the existence of something involves these basic principles.) And, because of this generality, these principles have to be extremely broad in scope, but limited in content, in what they imply. This is because although all existence is existent, there is a great deal of variety in existence. The most basic principle of existence is that what exists must be something specific, something definite. A chair must be a chair, a table a table, a dog a dog, a person a person, an act of justice an act of justice. This sounds terribly broad, even "empty", but that is because the point bears on everything whatever, so it cannot include very much in the way of variations. Things are what they are, and this is true about everything. Contrary to what may appear to be true; however, there is quite a lot embedded in this point. The main thing embedded in it is that no contradictory situations can exist in reality-that is, it cannot be the case that something both is a table and is not a table. Perhaps a quick example will show how deeply we all require this point in our understanding of reality. Thus, when in a court of law, some testimony is subjected to cross-examination, if the testimony is shown to contain contradictions-e.g., someone is found saying both that he was in New York on June 4, 1988, and that he was not in New York on June 4, 1988-then we have found something terribly wrong with the testimony. The same would be the case if he said that he had a hat on yesterday afternoon and that he did not have a hat on at that time. Or that he is married to Susie as well as that he is not married to Susie. This is all wrong, because such things simply cannot be. Now this and some related considerations about reality inform us of the absolute requirement of keeping our understanding consistent. There is a lot else we need, but this minimum requirement is entirely indispensable. Everything else about our way of dealing with reality requires that this central point be adhered to.4 That is why, for instance, if a theory, say of natural rights, contains a contradiction, it cannot be considered every possibly right, let alone true. The same is clear of any scientific theory, a legal contract, or a plan of action. Reality does not tolerate-i.e., embody-contradictions, i.e., facts that are of one kind and not that kind all at once in the same fashion.5 From the above, just a few points, already noted follow: Knowledge may not involve contradictions or inconsistencies. This general point about knowledge follows the general point about existence, because knowledge is our correct awareness or identification of existence, whatever else it is. The way we obtain knowledge differs from one sort of case to others-e.g., in history memory and others' memory and their records of that memory give us knowledge; in biology experimentation with members of the same species of living beings, and our awareness of differences and similarities in the behavior of these members and their various parts, will provide us with knowledge; in sociology, the careful observation of how groups of people behave and the interpretation of this observation by reference to our knowledge can be found in each case of knowledge, some in only a limited case, depending on what it is we study. This is important because sometimes it is thought that unless the knowledge in one field of inquiry abides by the standards of knowledge in all others, it is impossible that we have knowledge in the former.6 That is why some people think that we can have knowledge only in the physical sciences, because they believe that knowledge must always and exclusively rest on our awareness of physical properties and attributes. Here is why empiricism is so popular-because knowledge that is guided by the dictates of the empirical sciences is taken to be the only kind of knowledge. But then we would exclude dogmatically all knowledge of whatever lacks strictly physical properties. And that would be a prejudice. Such prejudice is encouraged by theories of knowledge that require that all cases of knowledge be exactly like all others. There is no justification for this, although it is a widespread view. (The same effects our problem with beauty or moral goodness-a theory demands that all things beautiful or morally good be identical, and we cannot confirm this, so it is concluded that beauty or moral goodness is purely relative, even subjective.) Yet, just as there can be trees, equally healthy, that are very different yet still trees, so there can be knowledge, equally sound, yet different and still knowledge. What is it to Know? We have argued that we human beings can know the world, and if ethics and politics are part of the world, we can know those features of it as well. But, what would such knowledge be like? First, to know something is to have correctly concluded on the basis of the relevant evidence that something is the case (even if this means only that something is probably so and so, or that something is possibly so and so). Second, the evidence involved is something we may obtain by various means at our disposal-e.g., simply looking; looking and touching; looking, touching, and hearing; looking, touching, hearing, and comparing to something else, and so forth and so on. The minds we have, and sensory organs we have, working together by our direction, are how we obtain knowledge. And even if we don't get knowledge immediately, but get only well supported beliefs, even good or educated guesses, it is by way of the mind in its highly complicated ways of operation with the senses, that we get this much. Basically, when we attempt to obtain knowledge, we aim to know what is what; how something becomes (or became, or will become) another thing; why this has occurred and not that; where things have occurred, etc., etc. In all our efforts, we need to recall that contradictions are prohibited and that different kinds of evidence may have to be used to discover different facts about the world. Normative Knowing The above is extremely brief but necessary to ground rights theory. From there we can take a very long jump to advance to something much closer to what interests us here, namely, politics. What we need to turn to is a consideration of the place of norms in existence. We are familiar enough with knowledge about facts concerning inanimate and animate existence-rocks are hard, dogs often bark, penicillin can prevent disease, governments often wage war. These kinds of facts can be known without much debate about them, although very soon after we have come to admit that we know something along these lines, we find that other matters we might think we know are extremely controversial. But, that is not what is at issue-controversy is a social problem that anyone who wishes to tell others what he knows (claims to know) will encounter; but first we need to find out whether there is anything we know about controversial topics. Such a topic is the topic of norms, principles of human conduct. That Napoleon should have prepared his men better for the battle at Waterloo, or that Teddy Roosevelt should not have led the U.S. into war, or that President Bush should fight against inflation by refusing to print more money, or that I should respect the wishes of my wife when we consider where we move our home-all these are facts or alleged facts about which much controversy arises. Yet that is not the issue, but how we might come to know about these matters. The natural rights theory (which I find sound) answers this question by noting, first, the considerations of what one should or should not do pertain to considerations of what is good and evil. That which is good (and possible) for one to pursue is something one should pursue, and that which is evil (and possible) for one to pursue one should not pursue, to put the matter plainly. But this just shifts our problem. How do we come to know what is good? Here we need to consider what "good" means. It means the fullest realization of some particular thing as an instance of its kind-e.g., a good peach is a fully realized peach or a peach that has most fully completed the nature of being a peach. A good tennis game is a fully realized tennis game that has fully reached the crux of a tennis game. The idea is not a very simple one, but whenever we appraise tomatoes, peaches, apples, chickens, parking lots, or whatever, we can learn whatever we should praise it or criticize it by reference to the fact that the thing (or activity or whatnot) in question has more or less fully reached its distinctive nature in the given case at hand. This tennis game is a good one if the players play by satisfying the central ingredients of tennis and whatever those ingredients imply for the particular game at hand. (The particular game at hand may require realizing the game somewhat differently from another particular game.) A good skiing slope or a good knife or a good source of light-all these pertain to how fully some particular case realized the essence of what it is in its own instance. We don't always talk of a good this or a good that, or a bad this or a bad that; but such expressions as "great," or "neat," or "swell," or "far out," or "fantastic," and numerous others (I no longer remember) make the same point for us, as do "lousy," "rotten," "poor," etc. When we consider what "good" is most generally, it has to do with whether something has realized its nature in the case at hand. The nature of something-what it is that makes it the kind of thing it is-e.g., a tennis game, a golf ball, or a Christmas tree-is the place or category it occupies in the most rational way of classifying existence-e.g., trees, chairs, furniture, balloons, time, days, weeks, months, space, field, meadow, galaxy, mind, memory, imagination, idea.7 There is nothing mysterious about the point that everything has a nature, since everything that exists is most successfully classified as one kind of thing or another, and it must be so classified for us to understand it and for it to be anything at all. (This follows from the previous discussion.) In the case of human beings, this all leads to the issue of the relationship between their action and being good. Being a good human being, like a good anything, requires the fullest possible realization of human nature in the particular case of a given person. Thus we need to know what human nature is so we can tell what it is to be good at being a human being. Human Nature What then is a human being as such, that is, what is human nature? This is where the naturalism of natural rights theory comes into full focus. Natural rights theory can produce an understanding of the rights human beings have by reference to an understanding of human nature. That is why they are called natural rights-rights someone has (or we are justified to ascribe to someone) by virtue of his or her human nature! Human nature is the set of facts that are true of human beings just insofar as they are human beings, nothing else (e.g., not as students, mothers, Germans, and those 25 years old, or as animals, objects, geometrical figures, etc.). What is that set of facts? Without repeating may earlier points, it includes that human beings are animals (with a biological nature and all of what that involves) and capable or rational thought (that is, having the capacity to think in terms of principles, to think at the level of general ideas or concepts and what these imply). The ancient idea that man is a rational animal is still sound, although some of it, and what exactly it implies, has had to be modified in the light of our greater understanding of some of the issues involved. Still, the crucial point is that human beings are by nature animals and capable of rationality. A good human being would then be one who, speaking very generally indeed (with all the very important details left out deliberately, so this can apply to everyone), is biologically healthy and mentally fully alert. As to what this implies about how we should conduct ourselves personally and in public, we come to this next.8 Ethics The first normative area we're concerned with is personal ethics-i.e., the code or laws of nature that pertains to how we should conduct ourselves. By nature, we live a most fully human life by being rational. We thus achieve well being on all possible levels (which excludes any interference that we cannot control). But, here is the rub. To the best of our knowledge, the bulk of the animate world behaves as guided automatically-e.g., instincts, drives, reflexes, and so forth (given the environment surrounding it). Human beings, however, are not compelled by their inner drives, instincts, etc., to behave as they do. To put the matter plainly, they are able to choose between genuine alternatives. Maybe some animals can, too. Those cases are rare enough not to pose a problem here. Human beings may also have some instincts, but this too is negligible. The point is that people in maturity are able to choose what they will do. (In short, we are not discussing childhood, even adolescence, although a fuller discussion would have to consider those stages, as many other things.) Now it is central that human beings enjoy the freedom that other animals lack just in the area of thinking. Human beings, unlike other animals, cope with reality mainly through the medium of ideas, theories, principles, concepts, etc. To live, even to the minimum degree of viability, a solitary adult needs to figure things out; and then can he take the actions his life requires for sustenance. An adult, of course, can choose to whither away, to die, not to live, in which case thinking is not required of him. But we are not concerned about those human beings who do not choose to live, thus have no interest in the principles of human conduct, of human action, of human living! The norms we are interested in have application for us because we haven't got innate drives, etc., to guide us in living; but if we will not live, then the norms are beside the point.9 The first point, then, about basic moral norms is that they are required only for the living. But this is inseparable-in the case of an investigation of the human good-from the fact that our capacity for thought needs to be initiated or put into effect by us. If we don't put thinking into effect, we merely coast or float about-usually on the opinions of others-voluntarily at the disposal of others. In the morality underlying natural rights theory, living requires thought, rational observation, reflection, consideration, recollection, assessment, evaluation, comparison, etc. Without choosing this kind of activity, we in fact also reject the requirements of human life, and to the extent that we fail to engage in rational thought, etc., we are failing in the commitment we make when we choose to live, namely, to live as fully as is possible to us.10 For a rational being to choose life is choosing a rational life, and one that isn't rational just now and then. This is a choice one can renege on, but to that extent one will be less than a morally good human being. Not living in accordance with one's nature is to fail to choose to be good, which is immoral. The requirements for being morally good, then, include, first and foremost, the exercise of one's rational faculty, something that human beings must do by choice. To put it differently, moral goodness requires being as awake to the world with one's distinctive form of awareness as one can possibly be, and to be guided by the fruits of this wakefulness. It now seems clear that goodness is being in full accord with one's nature. Thus, given our human nature, namely, being a rational animal, it is possible to understand what being a good human being is.11 It is to be in full accord with the requirement of rationality and biological health. It is clear from an understanding of human nature that one's capacity for rationality, one's distinctive humanity as it were, is kept in force by choice. So the first moral responsibility of any human being who has chosen to live is to be mentally alert, to think rationally, and to act accordingly.12 This is a responsibility of each individual person. It is a matter of personal choice that one does what one should do, otherwise it makes no sense that one should do it. What one cannot help but do cannot be something one should do. Choice is of the essence of moral responsibility. Paternalism vs. Moral Individualism But this is not all there is to it. To live according to our nature is the human moral good. But only the individual human being can take the initiative or neglect to take it so as to achieve or forego the human moral good. Others cannot do it for them. All that can be done even for children is to provide them with good examples and shield them from gross errors. In the end, what is so unique about human life is that it is laden completely with individual moral responsibility. This is what is so tragically forgotten in our time! Alongside our universal moral responsibility to live human life rationally, there are endless diverse details. They are less crucial for now because they can vary. What will be rational for one person at one time need not be for another. Numerous general principles are pertinent outside the norm that we should think and act rationally. For example, it is generally rational to be honest, productive, generous, prudent, well integrated, and courageous. These are the virtues one will find articulated by most moralists, more or less intact. What they differ on is what comes first and why. Suffice it to summarize that human life requires that a person live rationally because that is what living the life of a human being amounts to and that is to what a person commits himself when he chooses to live. The natural rights theory outlined here is based on an ethical view in terms of which the morally good human life consists of a person living rationally. Success, excellence, or happiness (in the sense of full flourishing), as a human being, is best pursued by living in accordance with the requirements of one's nature as a rational animal. Politics, Rights and the Moral Life of Individuals What, if anything, does this tell us about human community life? That only a human community, the fundamental organizing principles of which incorporate the basic facts of human morality can be said to accord with human nature, be conducive to human moral goodness and thus be characterized as just. Just communities are not those populated only by good human beings.13 That could come about by way of accident: people might accidentally gather together and all at once be at their best, regardless of the organizational characteristics-constitution-of their community. A good human community is such that is makes moral goodness more than accidentally possible, indeed, enhances human goodness. This is where natural rights surface. The just political community is what it is because it accurately reflects the requirements of human nature within the context of community life-that is, it meets the requirements of morally sovereign individuals by means of respecting and protecting individual human rights to life, liberty, and property. These rights are the standards of justice for the organization of a human community-the criteria for how to establish, maintain and promote justice in community life. That these negative rights can be the foundation of justice is disputed often on the grounds that justice requires activism, not merely protection from untoward acts. A just state or government would, accordingly, engage in certain promotional activities-legislate appropriate conduct, further the good behavior of its citizens, repair past social wrongs, etc. How, then, could the administration of a system of basically negative rights-i.e., protecting against murder, assault, robbery, fraud, embezzlement, kidnapping, and the adjudication of charges of the commission of such deeds-count as the maintenance of justice? If one appreciates, however, that adult human beings possess a moral nature, whereby it is crucial that they make decisions within their sphere of authority, circumscribed by their negative rights, then one can see why a just political and legal system would provide primarily protective rather than active or legislative policies. Given the naturalist basis of this idea of justice and given the idea of human nature that makes the best sense, it would appear evident that a just system must be engaged in securing peace and the respect of negative rights rather than promote certain ends or objectives, something only individual choices may facilitate.14 Consider, in contrast, Harvard philosopher John Rawls' conception of "justice as fairness". The central difference between the Lockean individual rights perspective and that offered by John Rawls is that for Rawls, human beings are cast into situations from which they cannot extricate themselves of their own free will-even their moral character is determined by luck. Accordingly, it is not possible to envision human beings as autonomous, sovereign and morally responsible 15 and, therefore, in need of what Nozick has called "moral space."16 Rather all persons are in the same boat of having been cast into a situation quite apart from their choices or best alternatives. So as to remedy the unfairness that is experienced by them, justice is needed via the establishment of equality of circumstances.17 This involves the active promotion of certain states of affairs, ends or objectives, as the substance of justice. However, the very influential Rawlsian conception of human nature is unjustified. It is unable to explain the enormous advances human beings constantly make on their own lives, their successful creative accomplishments, even the philosophic and scientific innovations that characterize so much of human living. The kind of passivity ascribed by Rawls and his followers to all of us does not even square with how Rawlsians behave, namely, as creative political partisans of the down trodden, the poor, and needy. Individuals Have Initiative Instead of this passive conception, a constitution of political community should rest on an accurate view of human nature. This is that human beings are by nature (except in circumstance cases where political justice is not possible, e.g., in the midst of an earthquake or when they are crucially incapacitated) creative, free agents. The range of their creativity may not be identical, but in normal circumstances, each person has ample opportunity to initiate the effort to advance his or her own life, to become more able to cope and to succeed at the innumerable tasks that may provide fulfillment to human individuals.18 Within the present framework, however, basic negative rights are the standards or principles of just human interaction that arise from nature. Of course, conduct in line with these standards can give rise to rights that arise from contract, promises and familial relations. A child has rights which parents or equivalent agents must respect, and parents, too, have rights children must respect.19 Rights then are those principles which govern some of the basic relations between human beings, but their source may be varied. The most basic source of rights, however, is human nature which implies moral requirements for community life such that every person may be forced to abide by certain principles: It is everyone's natural right to be respected for what one is, namely, a human being, capable of choosing to live, to think, and to act rationally, and to interact by respecting the rationality of all others. Our Basic Rights The rights to life, liberty, and property state these points somewhat cryptically, meaning: (1) Since it is one's basic nature to be able to choose to live, one's life (as the outcome of one's essential human choice) is something no one other than the agent is permitted to terminate or take (except once the person is refusing to respect the life of another and elicits self-defensive action that may kill); (2) since the choice to live entails the commitment to think and act rationally, it is unjustifiable that others who have explicitly or implicitly20 joined a community would be authorized to subvert one's liberty to make this choice (it would be the negation of another's humanity to subvert his choice between rational thought and action or irrational mental life and behavior)21 ; (3) since rational choice may lead one to interact with others, who also may find it rational to associate with others, the association of individuals and the results of such association (e.g., cooperation, competition, trade, bequeathal, and so forth) may not be violated. All told, then, the rights to life, liberty, and property-not to be murdered, not to be assaulted or coerced, and not to be robbed or have one's property expropriated-are natural rights. They emerge because we are human beings, we have the power of choice, as such, to live and to flourish, and we should do so in societies. The crucial point is that natural rights theory rests on the moral nature of human life, on the requirement of each person to choose life and flourishing for himself. The main complaint against this idea is that if another lives badly, neglects his life or suffers misfortune, help may be forced upon or demanded of him. But this is to destroy the human dignity of the person, however needy or earnest he or she might be. Nor may others force someone to engage in the sort of conduct often deemed to be honorable, namely, charitable conduct, since coerced charity is not charity but robbery. Those who urge such measures fail to observe the requirements of human nature. That failure only appears to be useful, helpful, necessary, moral, nice, unavoidable, etc. Once these matters are carefully considered, the alleged welfare-state is not really one that promotes welfare at all. It is impossible to be of value to human beings-promote their overall welfare-if one acts out of accord with human nature (except, perhaps, entirely accidentally).22 The Crux of the Rights Position Let me summarize my points. First, natural rights theory aims to address the central question of political life, namely, what norms should guide us in our basic relationship to other human beings? Natural rights theory aims to answer this basic question by consulting nature, specifically human nature. It adheres to certain fundamental points about reality and our knowledge of reality, and it has a certain view about what goodness is, namely, the flourishing of something in accordance with its nature. With respect to ethics or how we should morally conduct our lives, the question is what human nature amounts to and how it may be fully actualized in an individual human being (which is to say, by an individual human being who possesses the capacity to realize this human nature consistently in his or her case). By choosing life-and-rationality, one conducts himself in a morally proper manner. A community is good-a just community-if its principles are in accord with the moral requirements of human (personal an social) life. The libertarian political stance stresses the primary significance of human freedom or liberty ("negative freedom"), that is, the foremost significance of each person's right to liberty of conduct in the context of social or interpersonal conduct. Respecting the rights-and taking measures to resist its violation-is warranted on the basis of the natural rights theory outlined in this discussion. Can Rights be Abandoned? Some have wanted to dispense with rights, especially in the wake of so much corrupt rights talk in our political and legal arena. But, dispensing with rights is not so easy as one might think. Professor Heather Gert, among others, has recently argued for this on grounds that supposedly each case of rights violation can be reduced to a case of injuring or harming someone. So rights talk is superfluous.23 Yet violating rights is not the same as injuring or harming someone. I may violate someone's rights by depriving him of the chance to make a bad choice, thus not hurting, but in some sense helping him. I would (paternalistically, perhaps) impose on him something he ought to be free to decide whether to accept or not. But doing this may not injure him or harm him in any usual manner at all. To take a choice away from a person does not always result in harming him. Yet it is the major ingredient of violating his rights. Thus, if as an act of good Samaritanism, I prevent a person from committing suicide, I may have benefited him, but, I have, nevertheless, violated his rights. Furthermore, rights are not the kind of moral concept that is involved mostly in personal ethics or morality, not even in small scale social morality. Rights are general organizing norms for a just community-they belong in a constitution! They serve to establish "borders" around people, to secure for them a sphere of personal jurisdiction or authority, sovereignty. From within those borders, they then are supposed to make good judgments as to how to live, including whom to invite in and whom to join on the outside. There are many other criticism or rights theory, but I will leave these aside for now. Lacking full backing What damaged the idea or natural rights is that no full backing for it had been articulated to start with. It rested on good insight but lacked thorough support. And even in our time, the most prominent defense of our right to freedom merely asserts them and argues that they are going to make us prosperous. Human beings need more than this to sustain confidence in their community in the face of both domestic and international adversities. The distinctive American polity is one that respects the moral nature of human individuals. It does not, as so many other communities in human history, submerge, by force, threat and intimidation, the role an adult human being must play in his or her life. This is the point of our republic that is now being combated by reactionary forces. And while this reaction is understandable-personal responsibility is often feared by people, and others are easily tempted to take advantage of this fear-it must be resisted by all those who want justice and prosperity for human beings here on earth. Endnotes: ??