Our friend Bill Vallicella quoted this, from Michael Anton, on Independence Day:
For the founders, government has one fundamental purpose: to protect person and property from conquest, violence, theft and other dangers foreign and domestic. The secure enjoyment of life, liberty and property enables the “pursuit of happiness.’ Government cannot make us happy, but it can give us the safety we need as the condition for happiness. It does so by securing our rights, which nature grants but leaves to us to enforce, through the establishment of just government, limited in its powers and focused on its core responsibility.
Bill approves, and adds:
This is an excellent statement. Good government secures our rights; it does not grant them. Whether they come from nature, or from God, or from nature qua divine creation are further questions that can be left to the philosophers. The main thing is that our rights are not up for democratic grabs, nor are they subject to the whims of any bunch of elitists that manages to insinuate itself into power.
I agree all round. I hope that my recent engagement with Mr. Anton about the ontology of our fundamental rights did not give readers the impression that I doubt for a moment the importance of Americans believing they possess them, or of the essential obligation of government to secure them (or of the people to overthrow a government that won’t).
My concerns are whether the popular basis for this critically important belief is sustainable in an era of radical and corrosive secular doubt (and continuing assault on those rights), and whether the apparently irresistible tendency of democracy to descend into faction, mobs, and tyranny was in fact a “poison pill” baked into the nation at the time of the Founding. I am inclined to think it was, but historical contingency and inevitability are nearly impossible to parse with any certainty.
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“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”
Lysander Spooner
Rights as a concept just seems played out. They seem to be nothing more than a function of power and, ala Ockham’s Razor, why even bother talking rights when one can talk power.
When people talk to me about “rights” I just tell them they are babbling idiots (although I tend to use far more abusive and dismissive language than that). The left may have begun the corrosion process a couple hundred years ago but that process can cut any which way. As long as the left even exists it seems rather pointless to talk about “rights”, at all.
My nephew insists he has the right to ice cream before dinner. I assure you, he does not. “Rights” is political philosophy for five year olds. Empirically speaking, “rights” are very much subject to the whims of anyone with the power to deprive one of what they consider a “right”.
Look, either “right” is normative or it is descriptive. If descriptive, then “right” is logically just synonymous with power. If normative, then it requires a locus of origin external to the realm of rational analysis, e.g. God. The source cannot, logically speaking, be nature because nature is subject to rational analysis. And the recourse to “nature’s God” is just a rhetorical sleight of hand for those psychologically uncomfortable with the notion of a God with a personhood.
The left owns the word “rights”, it is the left’s property. Any time you even use the term “rights” in any remotely public setting you are advancing leftism, that is what you are doing regardless of your intentions. That is the reality and there is currently no possible configuration of rational argumentation that can overcome the ownership the left has of that particular concept.
Don’t fight the corrosion, accelerate it.
c.i.r.,
Nevertheless, it exists, though tattered. Will you consign it to the flames? What then? What are you hoping for? What do you think your life will be like in those days?
Asher,
Did you understand the reference in the title of this post?
Ultimately, yes, all is power. (An errant asteroid, after all, has the power to put an end to all of our little squabbles, including this one.)
Perhaps so, as I pointed out in this recent post — although Aristotelians may disagree. But that doesn’t mean that men cannot establish workable systems of society and governance by compact, custom, and convention; power can limit itself for the sake, if nothing else, of stability. The ultimate ontology of rights doesn’t really matter as long as we have some way of ascribing reality to them in our beliefs and behavior, and this is what makes it possible for like-minded people to enjoy a life together that is not solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
But commonality is of critical importance, as the Founders well understood, and as The Gods of the Copybook Headings are now teaching us once again.
I always say that rights exist in the same way as the value of a dollar exists: by mutual agreement. In the case of dollars, that they can be exchanged for goods. In the case of rights, that the community won’t brook their infringement. Most pretended rights, by this measure, are shams.
What should we agree to as rights? Whatever it is that should so appeal to us, in the bones, is due to evolution.
Malcolm,
No, I did not catch the reference in the title. But I do agree with you that any meaningful and coherent notion of “rights” is purely conventional, in that they exist where they are generally agreed upon. That said, the vast majority of references I see are using a notion of the term that clearly is categorical, not conventional.
Lately the idea of ‘rights’ has become so watered down that it may as well mean whims, fantasies, wants or even indulgences. There are individual rights, group rights, sub group rights and as soon as a group can find a way to sub divide itself farther…then rights for them too. There are, I’m guessing much to their astonishment, even animal rights.