THE VIRTUE LIBERTY

THE VIRTUE OF LIBERTY
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I thank the editors of the Public Affairs Quarterly, and Man, Economy, and Liberty, Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard for permission to make use in this work of some of the material that has previously appeared in their publications.
Preface
This book grew out of my Institute for Humane Studies Lectures which I have been giving since the summer of 1990 throughout Europe- Sweden, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, as well as in Paris and Aix-en-Provence.
My main objective in these lectures has always been to explain in plain terms- addressed often to undergraduate and graduate students from around the world for whom English is a novel and not fully developed language- the ideas underlying classical liberalism. Since there are several versions of this political viewpoint, the lectures explain these various versions. But I also defend, as the best of the classical liberal outlook, the natural rights perspective associated primarily with John Locke and the thinking underlying the political institutions of the United States of America.
A word about the title. "Virtue" is used in it to mean "that which makes for excellence." Not, however, moral excellence, since liberty, both in its metaphysical and political senses, is a capacity and precondition of human life, respectively, not an action guiding principle by which human beings ought to guide their day to day conduct--except in the sense that they ought to acknolwedge its role in their lives and the quality of their political communities. This work, then, examines the merits of (the right to) political/economic liberty and some of the problems surrounding the effort to understand those merits.
I have reworked the lectures considerably, and have added discussions that may help in dealing with certain prominent contemporary social and political issues and controversies. In this effort I wish to thank Douglas Rasmussen and Mark Turiano for the many hours they spent with me brainstorming these ideas and considering the numerous objections to them I wanted to anticipate. I also wish to thank the Department of English at the United States Military Academy- especially Colonels Peter Stromberg, Anthony Hartle, Paul Christopher, and Captain Ted Westhusing- with the members of which I had the opportunity, as visiting professor of philosophy during 1992-93, to air many of these views in a regular faculty seminar during the Spring 1993 term. Comments and objections by members of the department have helped me, I believe, to clarify some of the issues covered.
Tibor R. Machan
West Point, New York
May 1993
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: Varieties of the Freedom Philosophy
I Why Do We Have Rights?
II Liberty and Virtue
III The Right to Private Property
IV Morality, Liberty, and the Market Economy
V Environmentalism Humanized
VI Does the Coercive State Have Moral Standing?
VII Individualism, Naughty and Nice
Endnotes
Index
Introduction: Varieties of the Freedom Philosophy
As the number of those who are concerned to protect, revitalize, and preserve individual liberty has grown, so have the arguments in support of this effort. From Alcibiades and Lykophron to Locke, Mill, and Spencer and, finally, to Mises, Hayek, Rand, Rothbard, and others in our time, the arguments concluding with support for individual liberty have become numerous and varied.
Although this may appear to be good- "variety is the spice of life" and such- there are certain problems with such pluralism. True enough, the same conclusion can be supported by different premises. Thus the proposition, for example, that "all cases of theft are wrong" may be justified by reference to the effects of the theft upon the thief, the victim, the stability of the community, or God's opinion of the agent, some premises are better than others in that they are more likely to be true. It is generally a virtue of a theory that it has fewer problems with its premises than do other theories. And if a theory requires too many speculative premises or even false ones, its vulnerability is obvious.
In other words, while many arguments are interesting and sometimes helpful for research purposes, it would probably be best to have one good argument. For those whose defense of individual liberty is serious, and who respect other people's capacity to appreciate rational inquiry into human affairs, finding the best case for the classical liberal political order should be a concern. This does not have anything to do with the right to advance different arguments- of course, anyone ought to be free to do that. But for the purpose of securing a good case for a position, it may be useful to have one strong argument rather than many. (The same conclusion, of course, may be supported, from different premises, but not from contradictory premises, and too often the free society has been advocated on grounds that are not mutually consistent.)
Following the survey of major liberal or libertarian ideas in recorded Western thought, it will be possible to begin the discussion of classical liberalism in a more philosophical vein. Throughout this book I plan to call on some of the ideas discussed in this introduction, so we should start with them.
Let me begin with the earliest of hints in the record of Western philosophy that liberty has been construed as a value. Let us begin way back in ancient Greece.
Xenophon. In Xenophon's Memorabilia (i, 2, 40-46) we find the young Alcibiades in a debate with Pericles; here Xenophon records a lengthy argument in which Alcibiades pushes Pericles into a corner. The idea is that if law serves to protect against force, then law must not initiate force; thus any law that does so, is invalid. As Alcibiades puts it, "Isn't it lawlessness if a tyrant does not use persuasion, but instead enacts measures and forces the citizens to carry them out?" And he adds, "Would we, or would we not, call it force when a few in power enact measures for the people without using persuasion....isn't it force rather than law if the majority, prevailing over those who have money, make proposals and do not use persuasion?" This argument is of the reductio ad absurdum kind and is surely effective as a destroyer of some ideas of law. Its problem is that it provides no foundation for a better conception. At most it paves the way for constructive work.
Lykophron. The argument advanced by the sophist Lykophron, whose case is simply recited by Aristotle in the Politics, amounts to a mere assertion as to the purpose of law, namely that it is properly "a guarantee (or guarantor) of mutual rights." It seems, by the context of Aristotle's discussion, that Lykophron was advancing the idea of a limited government, assuming, of course, that the rights to be guaranteed were individual negative rights. But if we keep in mind that only negative rights can be possessed "mutually," that is, by all people at once, without conflict, then this assumption is reasonable and we find here a case of early libertarian political theorizing.
Hippodamus of Miletus. Hippodamus, however, seems to have had more to say, again, without any record of argument. He believed "that there were only three kinds of laws concerning which lawsuits should take place: laws against hubris (violent personal assault), blabe (damage, as to property), and thanatos (homicide)." I am here repeating the description offered by Fred D. Miller, Jr., in his highly informative paper "The State and the Community in Aristotle's Politics" (Reason Papers, No. 1). Miller discovers the evidence for this early libertarian school of thought in Aristotle's Politics (b37-39). Clearly Hippodamus is offering a very restricted scope for government action, one that Aristotle seems to find too limited.
Christian Theology. Biblical theology alludes to the importance of the human individual and to the individual's requirement of freedom so as to aspire to the salvation of his or her everlasting soul. In terms of some prominent Christian doctrines, one must choose to follow God's will, lest one earn no credit for behaving properly.
The Middle Ages. Beginning in about the twelfth century we find a serious concern for natural rights, liberty, and property rights, in such writers as Jean Gerson, William of Ockham and others (see Brian Tierney's account in "Origins of Natural Rights Language," History of Political Thought, Vol. 10 [Winter 1989]). Ockham said that property rights are "the power of right reason." This may well mean that in order for one to be able to successfully exercise moral judgment, one must also enjoy basic rights, a sphere of moral jurisdiction. Generalized, this view is clearly libertarian- à la Nozick's doctrine of "moral space." Earlier writers, while they lacked a coherent and developed natural rights theory, nevertheless made extensive use of the language of natural rights, usually to indicate spheres of personal or subjective jurisdiction wherein it is morally neutral what the person might do. (See also Brian Tierney, "Villey, Ockham and the Origin of Individual Rights," T. Witte and F. S. Alexander, The Weightier Matters of the Law, A Tribute to Harold J. Berman, as well as other works by the same author investigating the origin of natural rights language, disputing, e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre's thesis that such language was invented around the sixteenth century.)
Hobbes. A radical individualism was developed by Thomas Hobbes who, though an absolute monarchist in his explicit politics, laid some of the foundations for the homo economicus approach to human social life. Hobbes saw us all as striving to seek our own self-satisfaction and thought that this would require the protection of those laws that made
self-satisfactory conduct possible. The only reason he favored a strong monarchy is that he never learned about public-choice theory and thought a strong state would best assure peace. Hobbes' psychological egoism became the cornerstone of the doctrine captured in Bernard Mandeville's dictum, "private vice, public benefit," whereby the pursuit of private or selfish objectives could result in the public benefit of widespread prosperity. This is certainly still one of the most prominent arguments for liberalism and the free market, especially with reference to the troubles of Eastern European societies. It is still the crux of the liberalism advanced by neon-classical economists such as Milton Friedman and Gary Becker.
Spinoza. Baruch Spinoza didn't quite defend a doctrine of individual rights but did argue that a good government will provide us with as much liberty as possible- especially the freedom to express our views.
Locke. The first modern philosopher with a full-blown libertarian political theory was John Locke. He held that each person is by birth a sovereign (when he or she reaches adulthood), with no natural rulers or natural subjects. Government is established to protect individual rights and the consent of the governed is required to legitimize government and limit its powers. Locke is also the first major thinker to give a prominent place to the right to private property as an extension of individual rights and liberty. In his Two Treatises on Government, Locke built his libertarian theory on numerous other concepts, or at least claimed to have borrowed from them. Let us see what argument we find here. Essentially Locke accepted as an alleged law of nature that each person owns himself, ergo his labor and whatever this labor touches of as yet untouched nature. There are some supporting elements to Locke's case that make it broader: for instance his belief that because nature inclines man toward seeking happiness, it is a law of nature to do so; and his assertion that political institutions should protect and preserve what the law of nature implies for human community life. The natural rights of Locke are, then, the proper conditions of human social life, the "libertarian constraints," as Nozick calls them.
Two brief points about this view. The idea that I own myself does not amount to a very clear position, since it implies that where we find an instance of numerical identity- i.e., I and myself are the same entity though designated differently for purposes of different grammatical contexts- we find also a two-term relation- i.e., between me, the owner, and me, that which is owned. While some rhetorical force may be attributed to saying that I own myself, the point doesn't make sense from a logical perspective. (It is different when I say that I know myself, since my mind, which knows, can stand in the relationship of know er to the rest of me, as well as to myself prior to when it knows.) As to the alternative case Locke offers, resting on some kind of ethical hedonism, this view is a mixture of plausible and implausible ideas. Locke seems to mean by his phrase "inclines toward happiness" a psychological fact about us, and he seems to mean by "happiness" something much closer to "pleasure" than to "self-esteem." If I am right, as the scholarship on Locke seems to bear out, then we have a false or incomplete basis for natural rights here. In the one instance Locke is wrong- lots of us aren't inclined toward pleasure; and if we are to take it that
we should pursue pleasure, Locke says nothing about why this is so. So while Locke says many informative, even brilliant, things about the central libertarian political principles, his support for them is weak, as was noted by Nozick even as he decided to accept Lockean rights in his entitlement theory.
Smith. Adam Smith was the first scientific economist, although he himself saw his own work in moral philosophy, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments as even more important than An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, his path breaking book in political economy. Smith defended the view that there is plenty and stable enough concern on everyone's part with advancing their own earthly well being that by securing for them all their natural liberty, the greatest chance would be established for establishing public prosperity. Smith did not stress individual rights, although something very much akin to a system of individual rights would underlie his system of free enterprise. Neither was Smith, as many charge, a crass egoist, quite the contrary- his moral psychology suggested that sympathy arises because of our natural feeling for others's well being. Furthermore, in his political economic work Smith did not defend individualism on grounds that everyone is entitled to strive for his or her own good but because such striving would best secure public wealth. Smith is among those most often targeted as a liberal ideologists, e.g., by Karl Marx, instead of taken to be defending a political-economic framework he thought would be genuinely sound for human community life.
Mill. John Stuart Mill argued in On Liberty that government may only interfere with individual liberty if its exercise harms someone other than the agent doing the acting. Mill, by no means fully libertarian, maintained this view on the grounds that in freedom the truth would win out, creativity would flourish, and, therefore mankind's progress would be assured. But there is no good reason to count on truth always winning out in a free debate, since people can turn off their minds at will. Creativity may indeed flourish, but why is this a good thing? Mill's answer, that such creativity will secure mankind's progress, is only of argumentative force if it can be shown that (a) it is true, and (B) mankind's progress is what we should seek via our political systems. But it is not even unlikely that some sort of creativity can destroy mankind. Nor is it clear that mankind itself, since it is not a concrete thing but a generalization or general term to designate a group, benefits from anything; only individuals can do so. Indeed, Mill's theory of value is largely responsible for the birth of the welfare state, since he advocated that political policy should be geared to securing the greatest (hedonistic) happiness of the greatest number of people, something that later was thought to be achievable not by leaving people be (laissez-faire) but by economic planning. At any rate, Mill's case for liberty rested on the importance of the collective, so it is not even libertarian in spirit. I am, of course, speaking of the essentials, not denying that Mill's words give eloquent expression to some of the ideals of the freedom philosophy.
Spencer. Herbert Spencer, on the other hand, started as an individualist, but his case was fully deterministic, based on Lamarckian evolutionary theory. He believed that evolution, which governs all of existence, led toward differentiation- just the opposite of what B. F. Skinner and Marx believed. And for human beings this means that the highest stage of community life would have to be laissez-faire capitalism. In his ethics he argued for rational utilitarianism or a version of rational egoism, but in the end this ethics was no ethics at all. For an ethics to be bona fide- i.e., a genuine ethical theory- it must be true of it as a minimum that what is said to be right by it people could
choose to do or not to do. But in any determinist theory this is precluded, so determinism, including evolutionary theory that proposes mechanistic development and motion in human affairs, is incompatible with ethics or politics. Thus Spencer is unable to argue that we should respect one an others liberty. (Still, Spencer's discussion of ethics, once we omit the problems with its foundation, is brilliant.)
Mises. We come now to Ludwig von Mises' freedom philosophy, most comprehensively presented in his book Human Action. I should note that Mises was not a fully consistent libertarian. For example, he believed in conscription and some other statist measures, at least for certain emergency circumstances. Essentially he defended the free market on grounds that the achievement of one's goals is far more likely when people are left free than when they are not. Central planning renders the market defective in the function of enabling its participants to organize their lives in line with what they want to do. The price mechanism is destroyed and information becomes distorted. Mises shows in his book Socialism that central planning leads to an irrational economic order, contrary to all those alleged rational planners. But Mises never defends the view that people ought to be free to do what they want. He believed that value judgments are subjective, so he could not argue for the value of liberty. He did seem to believe that since no one else could defend a denial of the value of liberty, liberty, as a condition for choosing between alternatives that can have subjective value, should prevail. As all subjectivity or relativist arguments in support of something, this one is self-refuting. Indeed, we can see today how many people right and left denounce the classical liberal stance of value-subjectivity and propose some of the most detestable notions of what is right and good, simply because classical liberalism left a vacuum for all sorts of mystics and statistics to fill.
Hayek. F. A. Hayek's approach- which also supports less than a fully libertarian polity, since Hayek accepts some kind of welfare safety net- is a bit more complicated. Hayek advances his view most successfully in The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago, 1961), as well as many later works. Although he learned a lot from Mises, Hayek's views have changed, too. It is not safe to treat Mises and Hayek as interchangeable. Essentially, however, Hayek argues for liberty on grounds that central planning leads to suppression of creativity, growth, development, and progress. Problem- solving proceeds best when the rules of conduct are minimal and spontaneously generated. One can know only the most general principles of conduct, e.g., the rule of law; but the more particular these are, the more difficult it is to identify the proper solution to problems ahead of time. In his semi-Kantian fashion Hayek wishes to accept only general categories as reliable, leaving all other knowledge for free people to develop in free association with each other. Hayek is not a purist libertarian and has said that some regulation, some welfare, some statism in general cannot be ruled out a prior. On the whole, however, he is the libertarian version of the conservatives' Edmund Burke. As such he does not admit of natural laws or natural rights, nor of any objective moral standards. He is enamored with the evolutionary and mechanistic conceptions of science to the extent that he refuses to defend human free will. And he has said that his defense of liberal political institutions does not rest on, and is incompatible with, an ethical point of view. Here, too, we find the same faults present in Spencer's case for liberty, although as in all the thinkers discussed, there are numerous points in Hayek's political and economic theory that serve to lend strong support to various libertarian analyses of political and social affairs.
Nozick. Robert Nozick's case for the freedom philosophy- advanced in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), but abandoned in one of his later books- is based on a so-called transcendental argument: what principles should we adopt so that our political affairs will make the best sense? Nozick proposes that by accepting Lockean natural rights as the limits to action, we will develop a state of nature from which rational and rights-respecting conduct will, by an invisible hand, generate the limited government form of libertarian political order. He takes Rothbard's anarchism as a serious challenge and holds that it can be overcome by noting that people are afraid of arbitrariness, so they will establish a monopolistic defense agency. Once this limited state exists, nothing can justify enlarging it, except perhaps some instances of repairing past injustices. Nozick's argument rests on certain methodological assumptions, among them that people will act to overcome their fears, to abate them by instituting certain procedures, such as government. But Nozick fails to show that they are right in doing this, that it would not be better for them to refuse to yield to their fears and remain outside civil society. Rothbard and his students have been attacking Nozick on this point, as have a number of those who share his views but would ask for greater scope of government power. Nozick's failure to develop a moral theory on which his Lockean natural rights might have rested- e.g., rational egoism- has led to the spectacle of a wholesale intellectual dismissal- left and right- of the first libertarian book to have achieved some modicum of recognition across the intellectual spectrum. Ordinarily the dismissal of the arguments of a libertarian could be consigned to prejudice, but here Nozick simply deprives himself of a good defense.
Friedman. Milton Friedman, a brilliant Nobel Prize-winning economist, did not provide an extensive philosophical case for liberty in the book where he plays out his general political position, namely, Capitalism and Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 1962). As a concerned citizen and pundit he frequently touches on philosophical issues as he points to the neglect of liberty across the world. When he does so he tends to invoke the argument from skepticism and ethical subjectivism. This is not uncharacteristic of defenses of individual liberty advanced by classical and non-classical economists. The argument alleges that no one knows what is right and wrong, either generally or in the case of some particular person, institution, policy, and so forth. Therefore nobody should force anyone to comply with one's own baseless beliefs about right and wrong. Friedman believes that if we did know right and wrong, and we learned that we could stop someone doing wrong, we would have an obligation to stop him. Friedman appears to have a view of virtue as producing some good, as driving toward some intrinsic good thing, e.g., the greatest happiness of the greatest number. That would explain why he believes that knowing that A does something wrong entitles B to stop him. For that to be true, it would have to be true also that B is obligated to advance the chances of the realization of some intrinsically good thing. If the doctrine of moral goodness assumed here is mistaken, then it does not follow that knowing that A does something wrong requires B to stop A. A's doing something wrong that does not interfere with B's doing what he chooses cannot have relevance to B in the way that would justify interference (defense), not if A's doing wrong is wrong for A, i.e., is a violation of principle that A should abide by, which means that A should choose to abide by. B cannot improve A's character, or A himself, by forcing A to do what A should have chosen to do. But this point is difficult to make without entering into a lengthy discussion of the difference
between various theories of virtue and goodness. For someone who believes that all viable ethical theories rest on intrinsicist theories of the good, it would have to be either that we should all act as paternal leaders of the fallen, or that we cannot know what is good or how to achieve it. Yet if so, then there seems to be no reason to advocate liberty either, since such advocacy assumes that it is good to refrain from doing what one has no basis for doing, or that it is good to refrain to act from ignorance. But why is this good? Friedman can have no answer to this without undermining his own defense of liberty.
Spooner, Stirner, and LeFevre. Some other defenses of liberty might be mentioned here very briefly. Lysander Spooner, whose ideas so many libertarians embrace, thought that natural law tells us our moral responsibilities and the extent of our liberty, but he never demonstrates this. He assumes a Lockean analysis of personal autonomy, and objects to contracts made in our name on that ground, but the point strikes home only within the context of the American political tradition, something we are not entitled to assume in this discussion. Other anarchists have been used to give backing to libertarian ideas. For example, Max Stirner is sometimes cited, because he advocated a subjectivist egoism in terms of which each person is a unique, unclassifiable entity whose business is to inject himself into the universe as powerfully as possible. Stirner thinks that talk of natural rights is spooky, and this is because he construes the nature or the essence of a human being as something mystical, ideal or otherwise mythical. But this view begs the question, nor does it make sense to deny human nature while still talking about what each person, each individual, everyone, or every ego should do. Who is being addressed? The paradox is obvious. There is also Robert LeFevre's case for liberty in terms of which any retaliatory use of force, as in punishment or defensive injury, is a case of aggression. LeFevre also denied that any such concept as "justice" makes sense and his views imply that only the present can be taken care of, only by oneself, with no possible planning on criminal procedure or authorization of agents to act in one's behalf. Since this view is without foundation, and since LeFevre admitted to being a subjectivist about moral principles, his view must be regarded as a personal testimonial.
Rand. Ayn Rand's case for liberty- presented in her novels and such non-fiction works as The Virtue of Selfishness (Signet, 1961) and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (Signet, 1964)- derives from her rational egoism. Since each person should live by striving for happiness or success as a human being, and since this requires that persons initiate their own conduct in line with their own judgments, in a social situation it is wrong to prevent anyone from exercising those choices and decisions that do not prevent others from exercising theirs. Natural rights are the conditions proper to living a human life among others, and adjudicating disputes that arise among people in terms of the recognition of these rights will lead to justice. The right to life means that each person should act by one's own judgment, that none should govern without personal authorization, implicit or explicit, from those subject to government. Since one is not a disembodied soul but a rational animal with requirements to be satisfied in regard to both central aspects of one's life, the freedom
of each person in society must imply the freedom to judge and to act. Since to act requires space, things with which to sustain oneself, etc., the right to liberty implies the right to acquire what nature places before human beings. The natural right to property means the natural right to take those actions that will lead one to use and dispose of things in moral security from others (that is, with moral justification). Granted that not all acts of acquisition are right, still all acts of acquisition that do not violate others' rights are politically permissible- i.e., they do not authorize anyone to prevent them. In Rand an entire philosophy underlies the ethics and politics, although Rand herself has only outlined her objectivism and today a number of people are taking up the task of elaborating and modifying it. Essentially in Ayn Rand we have the robust philosophical treatment of politics we find in Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, and Kant, something not available from many libertarian sources today. There is an explicit ethics that provides standards for private conduct and moral evaluation, and there is a political system in which the liberty of each person to give guidance to his own life is established as rightful, even if on moral grounds alone such individuals might have to be condemned. Thus Rand detested pornography, could not stand homosexuality, and had no kind words to say about current art, yet formulated a most powerful, principled defense of liberty in terms of which such practices can withstand anyone's alleged authority to ban them.
In my view Rand's position is largely sound. I lament only her bad manners, occasional thoughtless rush to judgment where her knowledge did not qualify her, and her unwillingness to give credit for ideas she learned. Her refusal to enter philosophical debate amidst her complaint that no one paid her the respect she deserved was also disappointing. Successful philosophizing is not achieved primarily in novels, nor in self-published magazines. Unless one makes oneself available to the inquiring community, one will not be discussed and one's long-term influence will be correspondingly minimal. Philosophical disputation is not always pleasant, nor do all those involved in the discussion deserve to be taken seriously. But to abstain completely is to allow those with catchy ideas to carry the day, even if their catchiness is not the function of their soundness and truth but the cleverness and perseverance with which they have been promulgated.
In these few paragraphs I have tried to outline several roads to the freedom philosophy. I have not defended a number of my comments, and much more could be said about these various positions. It may simply be useful to become aware of the schools of thought that have given what one values in life some measure of support. One can orient oneself about how best to make one's own values live longer, acquire greater strength, and maybe win some major battles, even wars, in the course of one's lifetime.
I
Why Do We Have Rights?
There is a famous sentence in the U.S. Declaration of Independence which states: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." In this chapter I want to reflect upon that remark. I will discuss why we should still believe that human beings do indeed have these rights, contrary to what many intellectuals argue in our time.
Let us begin by noticing that the statement isn't that these truths are self-evident, only that we hold them to be self-evident. Now, in any particular context there are a number of facts, claims or propositions that one can hold to be self-evident. If you go out and play football, soccer, baseball, or whatever game, you probably hold the law of gravity- that it exists - to be self-evident. Clearly one doesn't try to prove it right there on the spot but takes it for granted. We can assume that the Founding Fathers of the American Republic took it for granted that the rights they mentioned exist and then wanted to build a society based on that. Just because they took them for granted and held them to be self-evident doesn't mean, however, that we all do or even that we should.
Certainly in the field of political philosophy the proposition that human beings have individual rights, amongst them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness or property or any other rights, can't be held to be self-evident. Such an idea is mostly the product of a great deal of reflection on ethics, politics, nature, God, human life, and so on.
I will now embark upon a discussion of where this assumption of individual human rights, or natural rights, comes from in various political philosophies throughout history.
It is clear that the prominence of the idea of basic or natural rights didn't occur until later in Western intellectual history, somewhere around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There were intimations of such rights in earlier times. As we saw already, there is a passage in Aristotle's Politics where Aristotle refers to a sophist philosopher named Lykophron, who is proposing that the only function of law "is mutual guarantee of rights." It is quite clear that Lykophron was about as close to what is now regarded as classical liberal or libertarian, as one could be, given discernible conceptual developments in politics at the time. He was basically proposing a very minimal content to the law. Aristotle opposed this on the grounds that the law ought to encourage virtue and shouldn't be just a mutual guarantee of rights. Nevertheless, the mere fact of the existence of that dispute demonstrates clearly enough that the concept of rights, as limitations on what people- especially governments- may do to one another, had already been present in Aristotle's times, contrary to what has been proposed by some scholars, such as Alasdair MacIntyre.1 A good deal of ancient Roman jurisprudence contained concepts that could be most felicitously explicated today in terms of basic rights that individuals possess. But the issue here is not the nature of legal or positive rights but the content of political theory. And for that we need to move several centuries past Aristotle, all the way to William of Ockham, before we can detect the sort of discussion of rights in any sense of the term similar to how we talk about it now within liberal political thought. A right in our own political vocabulary tends to designate some area of exclusive jurisdiction. "Area" doesn't have to be taken literally to mean some land or space- it concerns here some sphere of jurisdiction. It could involve one's authority concerning the sale of one's poems or musical compositions, whether one can use the laboratory at a particular institution, or the use of one's property, one's body or person, and anything else of oneself.
To have a right means, then, to be authorized to exclude others and be one's own decision-maker about some course of conduct. If I have a right to the use of a tape recorder or some eyeglasses then I can destroy them, use them, or give them away or hoard them, or whatever, and no one is authorized to stop me. In other words I am the one who is in authority, I am a sovereign.
This is the central sense of the term rights, even in political philosophies that are not individualistic, nor even natural-rights based. When people talk about group rights, they mean that if such groups have rights, others may not deprive them of the authority to do something, to have something, and so forth. That is about as simple an understanding of rights and universal as we can get. Rights involve a certain delimitation of jurisdiction within which a person may decide what to do, and where no other person may stop him, regardless of whether he decides well or badly. Now, the concept of natural rights is, of course, more complicated and is embedded in a broader theory. That theory is an answer to the question "Where do these rights come from, how do we justify these rights, how do we show that they exist?" When we talk about natural individual or human rights, the designation "natural" is really what is metaethical, that is, of prior concern to the actual content of rights. It refers to the justification or the source of justification for these rights.
One might have conventional, special, legal, institutional, and potentially all sorts of other rights. Whenever one designates rights by such an adjective, one is indicating the source or type of justification that is to be given for those rights. In the following few passages I will mention some of the people who have provided various ways in which basic rights might be justified.
William of Ockham described natural rights as the power of right reason. It was probably the very first well-publicized indication that to have a right means to have power or authority to do something and to bar others from intruding upon oneself as one carries out the action.
The next major proponent of a rights- oriented political philosophy takes a slight detour. Thomas Hobbes in the sixteenth century developed a theory of natural rights in which having these rights meant the following: To have a right to do something, the rights possessor exercises certain natural powers- to do the normal, regular expected thing .
Animals, according to this conceptualization, could have rights, although Hobbes didn't say anything about animal rights in the context discussed in some circles today. He argued that human beings had rights in the state of nature. But for him that didn't mean that human beings had an area of choice, but that human beings had an expected, regular power that was observable by reference to how they behaved. Hobbes seemed to be saying that the way people may be expected to act- because they are driven to behave this way by their motive of self-preservation- is what they have the right to do in the sense that this is consonant with the kinds of things they are.
There is another thing that is peculiar to Hobbes. His is perhaps the most unfamiliar of the rights theories that we will be considering. Because Hobbes was a materialist and a very convinced determinist, some refer to him as the first scientistic philosopher. He was the first major philosopher who took some of the propositions of the newly emerging natural sciences and extrapolated them into a total philosophy of nature. He extended the scientific outlook into the area of moral and political
reflection. Hobbes looked at nature, saw certain laws exhibited and then applied them to human life and human political organization.
According to Hobbes, human beings behave the way the rest of nature behaves. Ultimately the laws of human behavior are nothing other than the laws of the behavior of anything else. Human life is simply a more complicated version of the behavior of molecules, atoms, planets, or anything else. According to Hobbes, when human beings are in the state of nature- outside of civil society that has come to be governed by positive law - they are propelled to move in whatever directions they take so as to sustain their motion, something that's referred to nowadays as the instinct for self-preservation. But for Hobbes self-preservation didn't have any further meaning than to continue in motion and to succeed in carrying forth with one's motion. He was in that sense one of the major reductionists in philosophical history: someone who believed that you could take all complicated phenomena, even thinking and perceiving, and understand it in terms of the laws of the science of mechanistic physics.
This is a very influential outlook, one that even today has its distinctive impact on many schools of the social sciences. Earlier this century behaviorist psychology, for instance, was almost purely Hobbesian. It had as its goal the reduction of the understanding of the behavior of living- including human- organisms to the ways in which we understand the laws of matter in motion. Economics, too, once held out the hope that its principles could ultimately be reduced to those of physics. Hobbes was the major philosopher who laid out this kind of physicalistic, scientistic outlook, and so it may seem peculiar that he would have a theory of individual rights. Indeed, his conception of rights, unlike those of later thinkers, meant a power to behave as one would regularly be inclined to behave, not the moral justifiability of being free to act in certain ways.
According to Hobbes, when people gathered into civil society the necessity of developing legal systems became evident to them- because in the state of nature the constant exercise of one's powers gradually put them into conflict with more and more numerous other people. Ultimately they reached the point where the exercise of one's rights- i.e., the constant behavior commonly expected of a living being in a condition of little antagonism from one's environment- became self-defeating. Laws (or commands of social behavior) had to emerge so as to coordinate behavior in the way traffic laws have to be introduced when there are too many cars in a vicinity. According to Hobbes, one actually forfeited one's rights- gave them up to a monarch (or to civil government)- to enhance one's self interest, so as to make progress in life. All these rights- which, Hobbes said, we have in the state of nature, prior to civil society- were supposed to have been forfeited and those who had them put themselves under the authority of civil government. The only exception was that if civil government became a threat to one's life, one could reassert and protect one's right to life against the state. In other words, the power to live, the movement forward, trumped any delegated authority.
There is already an intimation in Hobbes that government is explained as a means to protect people's rights. He didn't do it in as clear a way as we understand it following the teaching of John Locke or other classical liberals. Yet there is already this suggestion that the function of the state is not so much to lead or set out a path for everyone but (even though it has great authority) to serve individuals so they can live and flourish. Hobbes, of course, still believed- not having the benefit of James Buchanan's public-choice theories- that, by delegating all of one's personal authority, one could make this protection most efficient. Later this individualist viewpoint gradually gave rise to the erosion of the scope and power of the state, as soon as it became evident- e.g., via Adam Smith- that delegation of wide and extensive powers to government was actually impeding human well-being.
The next major figure in the evolution of the theory of individual natural rights is, as we saw earlier, John Locke. Locke is a peculiar figure in political philosophy because in crucial ways his general philosophical outlook- his epistemology, his reflection on human nature, his explanation of how we come to learn ideas, and what ideas are and how they relate to the world of things- was very similar to Hobbes'. He, too, was under the influence of physicalism or materialism. For example, he believed that perception occurs through the bombardment of the senses by emissions from the material world. Ideas are basically copies of these bombardments, once one has enough of them.
He was an empiricist and in his philosophic writings he was somewhat of a determinist, and a subjectivist in ethics. He believed that the good is that which gives you pleasure and the bad is that which gives you pain and that was all there was to good and bad. Like Hobbes, Locke was a psychological hedonist who believed people automatically do what pleases them and avoid whatever does not.
When it came to his political philosophy, Locke made a big leap. Actually, there is an ongoing scholarly controversy over that- some argue that the leap between Locke's general philosophy and his political thinking isn't large. In any case, in the context of his political thought Locke maintained that people are born free, independent, and equal in the respect that, at least to start with- prior to giving their consent- they are not the servants or masters of anyone else. At the point of their initial entry into the human race, which usually means when a person becomes an adult, everyone is equally independent, a sovereign.
This is the beginning of the Lockean political philosophy. Everyone comes into the human race, at least at the point of maturity, as an equal, without justified power or authority over other people's lives. This equality was already present in Hobbes' political thought to some extent. In Hobbes' reductionism one of the things that is given is that nobody is any better than anyone else. If you were really consistent with Hobbes' complete philosophy, then pebbles and human beings are really all the same. Just as to some psychologists the rat and the human being are not different except in complexity (but not in kind), the same goes for Hobbes.
Locke, however, tried to give different reasoning for this equality from what Hobbes argued. It was Locke's view that everyone is in a way morally neutral in the beginning. There was something in his theory of knowledge that already suggested this, the doctrine of tabula rasa- the clean slate- with nothing written on the human mind, with no inclination either for good or for bad, either for inferiority or for superiority. When one then reasons further and examines what kind of a political society would be appropriate, it certainly precludes the notion of a natural slave or natural superiors or of a divine right of some people to rule others. The suggestion emerges, instead, that we all come into the world as fundamentally equal as regards good and bad (not, however, as regards tall and short, fat and thin, ugly and pretty, and a lot else that we may care about). When it comes to whether we are morally better or worse than our fellow human beings, we start from the same position. On that score alone we all come into the world as equals. (It is arguable that precisely this moral equality also figures heavily in making any other equality impossible to enforce.)
That is the first step in Locke's analysis of the idea of natural rights. Given our human nature and given the fact that it consists in this kind of basic equality- a basic freedom from the attempted mastery or rule of others- we are warranted in ascribing to people certain basic rights. That is, their human nature justifies that they must be treated in a certain way and if they are not, they may retaliate against those who do not abide by this point. That's why we call these natural rights.
What are the natural rights that all human beings have because they are human beings? The first natural right is that each of us is the governor of our own life and others may not take over this role unless we consent. We are the owners of our persons and estates. Each is individually the sole, sovereign, ruler or master of his or her life.
One can see that point in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. There is a clear intimation of this Lockean idea that all
human beings were created equal and they all have these basic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of their happiness. Locke argued that one owns one's life, as well as what one has chosen to produce in the course of it by means either of one's labor or through voluntary exchange, namely, one's property.
Now in connection with the topic of property Locke's theory gets a bit complicated. According to Locke's political writings it is God who gave all property to humankind. Individuals may take out of this common pool some amount by means of mixing their labor with it and they may make it their private property. This is the famous labor theory of property. By mixing one's labor with the common, unowned natural world, one becomes a proprietor of a portion of this natural world. Thus one has a natural right not only to one's person but also to one's estate, one's usable values around the world.
According to Locke there may be some exceptions to this process. The so-called "Lockean proviso" states that one may acquire things out of the natural world, make them one's own and have a natural right to these things, provided enough and as good is left for others. Many people have read into this proviso a major qualification concerning the absoluteness of Locke's endorsement of the right to private property. Yet, even though Locke enunciates this proviso, there is no consensus at all on just what its practical import is. Are there exceptions to the right to property? Why? Or should we understand the proviso to mean something else? Of course, Locke may have been wrong in suggesting the proviso. It may help, therefore, to explore briefly one approach to certain aspects of the right to private property, specifically the rare prospect of absolute monopoly in goods or services that nature contains and for which human beings may have a vital need.
Classical liberals argue, in the main, that when property is made private, processes are encouraged that in fact increase and indeed improve what is left for others. In other words, the institution of the right to private property will tend to lead to the kind of actions on the part of property owners that enhance the value of what they own. And their subsequent commerce will confer this value on many others. So by protecting private property via the legal system, the Lockean proviso- that enough and as good as was there in the first place remain for all- is most adequately fulfilled.2
This seems to be a valid inference, given certain assumptions about human beings that are as old as one of Aristotle's comments about the merits of private property rights. Here is how Aristotle makes his point, one to which I will return again in this essay:
That all persons call the same thing mine in the sense in which each does so may be a fine thing, but it is impracticable; or if the words are taken in the other sense, such a unity in no way
conduces to harmony. And there is another objection to the proposal. For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill; as in families many attendants are often less useful than a few. (Politics, 1261b34)
The movement toward privatization throughout the world today is often justified along similar grounds. If things are privately owned, it is argued, the people who own them will deal with them in much more responsible, productive, and protective fashion than they would if things were all owned in common. Thus the institution of the right to private property results in greater prosperity.
So even though the Lockean proviso has been invoked by some so as to undercut the universality and the absoluteness of the doctrine of private property rights, it can also be interpreted as supporting the right to make private property more widespread, to extend it into virtually every possible sphere and to treat it as an absolute right, never to be compromised. Ergo, privatization.
Yet in certain emergencies it may also be understood that Locke would have wanted property rights to be temporarily disregarded. Thus, in dire straits, stealing to survive may be at least morally excusable, even if not something that should be enshrined into law.3
Locke also believed that government is to be established so as to secure for us our natural rights. We do have these rights in the state of nature. In other words, we ought to enjoy a sphere of individual sovereignty, we ought to be our own masters already in the state of nature- whether or not civil or legal society has emerged or touches us in any way. We have these basic rights as a matter of the proper moral condition of human interaction, quite apart from whether the law or our fellow human beings recognize it. That is Locke's position.
But Locke also argued that we are not powerful enough to repel those who refuse to acknowledge our individual sovereignty, those who want to conquer or master us- criminals. Some of us are unable to resist the invasion, intervention, or incursion of other people, in their efforts to regulate or regiment others. So we ought to institute some ways of making sure that such violation of our rights does not happen. Simply because certain boundaries ought to be instituted among people, it doesn't necessarily follow that it will be done. Whether it will be done also depends on whether we have the power, the force, and the will to achieve such a state of affairs. (Here is the assumption of free will in Locke that his broader philosophical system does not support!) A way to accomplish this is by hiring agents who are specialized in the task of protecting our rights- i.e., to establish governments. These agents themselves, of course, would be bound by these rights. As an analogy, if we hire a bodyguard, the bodyguard can only work for us (a) if we did in fact hire him, (B) if it was through the observance of our basic rights that the relationship between the bodyguard and ourselves has been created and © if the actions he carries out in our behalf are ones we ourselves would be justified in performing.
So when Locke argued that a government should come about so as to protect us in our natural rights, he also made very clear that government must arise through the consent of those who are governed, through the voluntary relationship between the governed and the governors. And so
government- as was already intimated in the political thought of Hobbes- once again was envisioned as the employee of individual human beings with rights that need protection and whose rights were to be observed and respected not only by everyone in society but also by those employed to protect them.
The problem with the Lockean rights theory, to some at least, was that the beginning point, this doctrine of the moral and political equality of all people in what was called the state of nature, was not proven. It was not demonstrated, only asserted. Locke said that human beings were equal, independent, and free, and from that he could show that they had certain rights, including those to their person, property, and estates. And he could argue from there that government has the function of protecting these rights. But the starting premise needed demonstrating because many people did not believe that people were indeed equal, independent, and free. And thus there was a lack of foundation for natural rights. Even the Founding Fathers, in saying we hold these truths to be self-evident, dodged the issue, at least in that document. This is not surprising, since that document was largely a political decree, not a philosophical treatise. And there was in it a suggestion that, while we believe in these rights, we lack sufficient arguments to show that they exist.
Accordingly while a good deal of subsequent philosophy followed Locke in his epistemology and his theory of mind and many other areas, it didn't follow Locke when it came to his political philosophy. In other words, British empiricism weakened rather than strengthened the doctrine of natural law. It is thus suggested that if we are to accept the philosophical foundations of empiricism then this strong natural individual-rights position cannot be maintained.
Let me make a little excursion here into philosophy. From a purely empiricist position (which says that all knowledge must come from our sensory contact with the world) you run into some problems. One is that in the end all you can know is what is in your mind and not what is "out there," because what you know consists of sensory impressions in your consciousness, but you don't really know what they are impressions of. As I look at any object, I know that my mind is receiving all these little bits and pieces of sensory input, but can I really go outside of my mind and check whether this stuff I am receiving signifies something out there? As a result, the very idea of an independent nature, with its laws, principles, and specific characteristics, begins to be wobbly. A kind of uncertainty about the nature of things results.
Bentham and Mill, who also were liberals in many ways as well as empiricists, were not enthusiastic about the doctrine of natural rights. When we get to Karl Marx, the doctrine of natural rights becomes characterized as a convenient myth invented for rationalizing political rule, and lacks objective validity. This is how the doctrine of rights evolved. Although it did have a serious
impact on constitutional and common law and other political developments, in philosophy where the most fundamental justifications are sought, the doctrine of natural individual rights took a severe beating. Jeremy Bentham ridiculed it as nonsense upon stilts. Mill only gave it a kind of instrumental support. In On Liberty where Mill develops a very strong case for many of the institutions of liberalism- including a free press and separation of church and state, free markets, especially a free market of ideas- the idea of individual rights is expounded as a means rather than as a firm foundation. What became popular is what people sometimes call in philosophy a ``consequentialist" justification of natural rights rather than a ``deontological" or ``principled" justification. In the end Mill himself makes certain concessions on the doctrine of natural rights; for example, in advocating certain kinds of redistribution of wealth because the greatest happiness of the greatest number might in fact be enhanced through that redistribution. He does not believe in the firm principle of natural rights, so that even for the sake of charity, generosity, and compassion one may simply not (with impunity) engage in expropriation of property. The utilitarianism of Mill isn't firmly committed to individual rights- especially property rights- in a legal system of a just society, compared to the Lockean doctrine. This is probably because the Lockean doctrine at least suggested, but didn't prove, that the basis for rights is human nature, which assumes that we can know human nature.
But the empiricists didn't think you could really know human nature. You could only know human experience and the future may be very different from the past and so any kind of a firm, transcendent, ongoing, and stable nature was only suggested by experience. But experience can be overridden by the future and thus the idea that human beings have these rights might also be overridden by future experience. In contrast, for Locke the suggestion was that there is something stable about human nature that lasts no matter what else happens; by virtue of this stable human nature we have these basic rights.
At some point we pass the era where rights really are not treated as important, or are regarded as myths, as in Marx. He believed, for example, that the right to private property, with the resulting high level production, was a convenient belief of a certain phase of humanity's development. Although the production would often be trivial and wasteful, like MTV, pet rocks, and tie-dye shirts, it would establish powerful processes. For Marx and others, the structure of such production is not a fundamental principle of human life, only a sort of temporary and variable phase.
Once we took this turn in philosophy in the early part of the twentieth century, little support for natural rights remained. This is because the last three hundred years has really been dominated, though not exclusively ruled, by empiricism, by the doctrine of what you see is what you get. This was made into a very prominent, well-developed, precise, and technically proficient philosophical doctrine called logical positivism. In Anglo-American philosophy, and also in continental philosophy through the influence of existentialism, the idea of a stable nature (which outlasts and which indeed governs experience) was dropped. Indeed the world was supposed to be known only through the logical manipulation of sensory experiences.
This view actually led, for about 60 years of the twentieth century, to what some theorists called the death of political philosophy. From the time that A. J. Ayer wrote his Language, Truth, and Logic in the 1930s, drawing on the philosophical speculations of what is called the Vienna Circle of the 1920s- up until about the time of John Rawls (except for Roman Catholic philosophers and such thinkers as Ayn Rand, who was of course outside of academic philosophy), very few people had the confidence that political knowledge is even possible, let alone that it was based on human nature and individual rights. Even though legal institutions and our political rhetoric and political movements still made room for this language, a good deal of the language was itself changed from discussing natural rights to human rights. "Human" is a somewhat vague term and doesn't require any ascription or acceptance of a doctrine of stable nature. Partly as a result, all kinds of new rights began to be thought of- suddenly we were supposed to have the right to read, to have vacations, a fair wage, medical care, and so on. On U.S. radio stations one hears even of "a right not to be lonely," which logically suggests that one can get a slave as an exercise of this right. Because the doctrine is so loose, what kind of rights can be accumulated through this vague notion of "human"? Practically anything you want, anything you like intensely enough, and certainly anything you can convince people that you need, can become a basic, politically protected right. The United Nations charter of human rights is practically a wish list of such rights. It is like a fantastic Christmas: you write down the things you believe people ought to give you and you call them your rights. There is absolutely no check on it because we no longer know what human nature is. We only have what in Anglo-American analytic philosophy used to be called an ordinary conception of what it is to be human. Such a conception of what it is to be human is of course influenced by ordinary stupidity as well as ordinary wisdom. You have this hodgepodge of ideas called rights and by the time you get to the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s this loosely politicized, non-philosophical discussion of rights and individual rights lets you want or desire anything and call it a right. Practically everyone around the world uses the word right in this human right sense actually to express what they very strongly desire.
There is a lot of intellectual history that one could enter into here and explore. Let me just speculate a little bit before I move on to continue demonstrating the normative classical liberal position.
Around the time of the American civil rights movement and when the American involvement in the war in Vietnam became controversial, people got very upset about the positions taken about those issues. The notion that what is politically right couldn't be known- that moral judgments were really merely emotional expositions or ejaculations or expressions as Language, Truth, and Logic maintained- finally gave way to popular pressure. Young men and women, who went to march for blacks in the early 1960s, or who wanted to protest or defend the Vietnam War, went into the classroom and heard that all their protestations were no more than saying hurrah, or boo. One side had one emotion and the other side had another, opposite, emotion. Many of the professors took this kind of protestation seriously and "went back to the drawing board." John Rawls' intuitionist defense of the welfare state, which aims to lay some modicum of an objective foundation for political judgments, is a result of that disenchantment with the emotivist, logical positivist approach to politics.
Still, there was no serious academic talk about individual natural rights. Yet there emerged a flicker of hope that some kind of foundation for moral and political judgments might be provided through the discipline of philosophy. With Rawls, that foundation in the end was intuition. Rawls, in his 1976 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association, explicitly said that we must remove moral philosophy and politics from the rest of philosophy. We can't wait for the rest of philosophy to come up with some sort of foundation for political reflection. We must trust our intuitions. An intuition means a kind of knowledge the origin of which is unknown. According to Rawls, intuition
is the only kind of foundation that we can depend upon when it comes to our moral and political reflections.
Rawls did not develop a robust doctrine of rights although some room for rights exist in his political philosophy: a right to liberty, and to welfare. There are some other political philosophers who also contributed to this. For example, Alan Gewirth at the University of Chicago began to develop a kind of Kantian justification of rights. There are similarities between these views and those of some libertarian rights theorists such as Roger Pilon and Jeff Paul. The Kantian approach isn't a natural rights doctrine, but one in which rights are derived from the idea of being human, not by reference to human nature in any objective sense that one could know nature. Even Robert Nozick, who was perhaps the major critic of Rawls- he wrote his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia three years after Rawls published A Theory of Justice and discussed Rawls in it at great length- didn't maintain that we could demonstrate that individuals have rights. He also approached the matter intuitively. He argued that we should begin by assuming that Locke was right and people have basic rights to their lives, liberty, and property. Let's treat them as firm assumptions and see if we reason from them what kind of society would arise. Would that society accord with our moral and political intuitions. In other words, when we imagine libertarian society, would its workings please our moral gut reactions more than what Rawls came up with?
The concept of rights has by now lost its function as a clear guide to political justice in a free society. In the late 20th century what are called human rights are not linked to an individualist idea of human nature- as I explain in a later chapter- but to human beings conceived of as members of groups. So we have women's rights, rights of African-Americans, students, gays, workers, artists, and so forth. And the rights in question are usually not negative rights- rights not to be invaded- ones identified in the classical liberal, Lockean framework. Instead, these are positive rights, that is, rights to some kind of provision or service from other persons. Thus we all are supposed to have a basic right to health care, never mind that this could well require compelling doctors to serve us or other people to pay the doctors who would try to heal us.
There is still, of course, a fairly sizable contingent of thinkers- philosophers, legal theorists, economists, political scientists- who consider the Lockean, negative rights approach, especially one spoken of as natural rights, sound. It was Ayn Rand, the Russian born American novelist-philosopher who placed that tradition back on to the public agenda and whose students are developing this position within the context of contemporary political concerns. Such philosophers as Eric Mack, Douglas J. Den Uyl, Douglas B. Rasmussen, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and myself have worked out similar, although at times slightly varied, arguments showing that because of what a human being is and what it is to live among other persons in an organized human community, it is vital that basic rights to life, liberty and property will be respected and, if need be, protected in law for everyone. This view has it that there is a stable enough human nature- not in the form of a timless Platonic ideal but as a kind of most sensible categorization of the phenomena that human beings represent in nature- with a distinctive moral aspect to it. And by virtue of this fact, all human beings but the crucially incapacitated have these negative rights and no one has the authority to violate or compromise these rights, including governments, especially in their efforts to provide those rights with proper protecetion. And, in consequence, a human community needs to avoid coercive force in the solution of its problems, a project that would seem to be, in the long run, the most sensible hope for making human life a success here on earth.
So we have here a brief account of the history and meaning of the concept of rights. Essentially, to have a right means to be in authority to decide to do something and to resist efforts by others to stop one from what one has decided to do. The Declaration of Independence claims we all have certain rights- to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness- because we were created equal. This means that by virtue of our human nature, which is that we are all equal moral agents with the task to make sound choices in our lives, we have the full authority to make choices as to our lives, our conduct, and the goals we strive to achieve.
These days this outlook is not very prominent. Robert Nozick, a philosopher at Harvard, provided it with some measure of prominence back in 1974, when he wrote Anarchy, State, and Utopia, although even he recanted later and embraced a version of the welfare state, on grounds that the
classical liberal, libertarian polity lacks heart, fails to give sufficient expression to human compassion. Although nothing could be further from the truth- nothing gives as solid an expression to human virtues than the belief that free men and women can best be counted upon to choose them over vices- Nozick's change of heart has left the academy without a star quality advocate of the distinctively American political vision. The support for it will have to come from those who have a much harder fight on their hands. We will see in the rest of this book how their position might fare. Indeed, the reader will be the judge of that.