Flirting With Relevance

Do you have rights? Of course you do. What are they?

I’m not asking for a lengthy enumeration of each individual right that you believe you possess, but rather a definition of the word. When you speak of a right, what exactly are you talking about? When you speak of an automobile, you are referring to a (usually) four-wheeled vehicle powered (usually) by some form of internal combustion. In that vein, what are we actually discussing when we speak of our “rights?”

There are many kinds of rights, of course. We have property rights over that which we own. Creative people have copyrights on everything they create. Parents have parental rights regarding their children. All of these are merely areas over which we exert control. The disposition of these things is subject to our discretion.

If I own a piece of land, it is largely up to me what, if anything, is built upon it. There are restrictions, of course, limits to my rights. I cannot erect a private nuclear power plant in the middle of a suburban subdivision.

In other words, “rights” are expression of personal powers, spheres of personal self-determination and responsibility. They are meant to be domains over which we are the masters. They are also, virtually by definition, limits upon the powers of others. If we possess power over a thing, than others cannot, unless we choose to let them.

Many rights can be given up, taken or lost. Our right to possess are car or home can be lost if fail to fulfill our promise to pay back the money we borrowed to purchase it. Our rights to be involved with the lives of our children can be curtailed if our marriage ends in a way not favorable to us. Copyrights expire (although the Disney Corporation wouldn’t prefer that they do not).

These are all “legal” rights. They can be created, transferred, denied and even destroyed. Another subset of legal rights are what we call civil rights. These are rights created by the law enjoyed by all persons living under that law. The law in question may be the Constitution or international law and treaties, but may go all the way down to Federal, state and local codes.

These may overlap with the more broad category of human rights. Civil rights are assumed to exist so long as the law that created them also exists. Human rights can be defined as those rights intrinsic to every person the moment they are born. They cannot be destroyed but they can be denied. The assumption is that human rights are those rights that it is fundamentally immoral to deny them to any person. Despotic government deny them all the time, of course. That’s how we know they’re despots.

A reasonable list of these intrinsic human rights (and then some) can be found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, endorsed by the United Nations in 1948. I said “and then some” because, while the first twelve articles are indisputable, the other eighteen are a mixture of solid reasoning and wishful thinking. I’ll point out the flaws in their reasoning a bit later. It’s not they are bad things for people to have (and any decent society should do its best to ensure that most of them are true), but it’s a bit of a stretch to describe them as “rights.”

Even more fundamental are what some would describe as “natural rights.” These are those most basic rights that underlie all of the other rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration and our own Bill of Rights. The founders of this country, when they penned the Declaration of Independence, put it most succinctly when they defined the natural or intrinsic rights of human beings as “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Of course, to some of them, the pursuit of happiness including treating other humans as property and liberty didn’t include participation in the democratic process if you weren’t a landowning white male. But just because the Class of 1776 got a big part of it wrong is no reason to discard what they got right.

The ordering of these natural rights was not accidental. You can’t have liberty if you’re not alive and it difficult to “pursue happiness” without liberty (and damn near impossible if, again, you’re not alive).

In the context of human rights, liberty is freedom not only to believe according to one’s conscience and express that belief but to do so free of any external duress, either from one’s government or those acting like a government. The pursuit of happiness implies not only the right to own property but to pursue whatever one defines as a prosperous life.

Once you attempt to define what is a right, you naturally come to the edge of the map and have to define what is not a right. Here I will take issue with some of “fuzzier” articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Article 23 states that:

Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

This is a lovely sentiment, of course, but I take issue with the concept that everyone has an intrinsic right to a job. It is certainly a violation any basic definition of human rights to deny someone a job based on arbitrary standards like race, gender, religion, sexual orientation or any other trait that does not impact one’s ability to perform the functions of that job.

However, the right not to be denied work does not create an obligation on anyone’s part to provide a person with a job that person is not qualified for and is not willing to do with the full measure of his enthusiasm. To suggest that the basic human right not to be arbitrarily denied work creates an obligation to provide jobs to the unqualified and unmotivated is to suggest employers do not have the right to staff their enterprises with the persons best able to assist in achieving the company’s goals. No one’s “right to work” should be interpreted to trod on anyone else’s right to earn a living of their own.

Article 25 of the Universal Declaration states that:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

Again, while it would fundamentally wrong to arbitrarily and systematically deny these things to people based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation or any other similar trait, any such right does not create in any other party or institution, public or private, any obligation to provide such thing. It may be extremely beneficial to society provide these things to the most vulnerable among us, but that does not entitle any party to compel others to surrender their property, usually in the form of taxes, to provide them to those who have failed to provide such things for themselves.

To compel any party to involuntarily surrender their property, whether or not it is for the sake of others, violates that person’s rights under article 17 of the same declaration.

The other side of the equation that many never consider is freedom is not simply a lack of constraints on belief and behavior but acknowledgment that the individual, and not the state, has the ultimate responsibility for outcome of a person’s life. A government can’t take away your right to think, speak or participate in the democratic process, but neither can it compel us do so. A government can’t seize our goods or property but neither can it make us rich or even prosperous.

In short, the outcome of our life, other than death, is not guaranteed to us, but rather the result of our own talent, industry and luck. We may have the right to pursue happiness, but happiness itself is a greased pig with infinite stamina. Catching it is hardly guaranteed.