The Right to Life

The Principles of Politics: Rights, Government Functions, and the Moral Foundation of Society

Politics defines the principles of a proper social system, including the proper functions of government. Living in society is a value to man if it is the right kind of society.

There is only one standard to guide a thinker in defining the “right” social system: man’s code of moral values, i.e., the principles of ethics. Politics rests on ethics (and thus on metaphysics and epistemology); it is an application of ethics to social questions.

Politics, therefore, is a conclusion drawn from all the fundamentals of a philosophic system; it is not the system’s start or any kind of primary.

The question becomes: what type of society conforms to the requirements of man’s life?

Today I will clarify the philosophical foundations of our current political system.

Rights?

Rights are a moral concept that serves as the crucial link between individual actions and societal relationships, bridging the gap between a person's ethics and the legal framework of society.

The Philippine Constitution

ARTICLE II - PRINCIPLES

SECTION 5. The maintenance of peace and order, the protection of life, liberty, and property.

ARTICLE III - BILL OF RIGHTS

SECTION 1. No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

The Bill of Rights regards the individual as an end in himself, and society as a means to the peaceful, orderly, voluntary coexistence of individuals.

All previous systems held that your life belongs to society, that society can use you in any way it pleases, and that any freedom you enjoy is yours only by favour and with society's permission.

The opposite of acting by right is acting by permission. If someone borrows your pen, you set the terms of its use. When he returns it, no one can set the terms for you; you use it by right.

The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most humans have not grasped it fully to this day. In accordance with the two theories of ethics, the mystical and the social, some people assert that rights are a gift from God — while others believe that rights are a gift from society. But, in fact, the source of rights is human nature.

The source of human rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity: A is A = That which exists has a specific identity = Humans live by our rational nature. Rights are conditions of existence required by human nature for our survival and flourishing.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

There is only one fundamental right. All the others are its consequences or implications: a human’s right to their own life. 

Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action — which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. 

The concept of a “right” pertains only to action — specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other people.

• Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive

  • His freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. 

• As to his neighbours, his rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.

Right to Property

The right to life is the source of all rights — and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. 

Since an individual has to sustain his life by his own effort, the person who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. 

The person who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.

Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. 

It is not a guarantee that an individual will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. 

Government as an Agency to Protect Rights

To violate human rights means to compel him to act against his own judgment, or to seize his property and there is only one way to do it: by the use of physical force.

There are two potential violators of human rights: the criminals and the government. The great achievement of the constitution was to draw a distinction between these two — by forbidding to the government the legalized version of the behaviour of the criminal.

The Declaration of Independence laid down the sole legitimate purpose of a government is to protect these rights, primarily by shielding individuals from physical harm.

Thus the government’s function was changed from the role of ruler to the role of servant. The government was set to protect individuals from criminals — and the Constitution was written to protect individuals from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed against private citizens but against the government — as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power.

The result is the foundation of a civilised society, where the use of physical force in personal interactions is prohibited. In this society, the government functions as a police force, authorised to use force only in retaliation and solely against those who initiate its use.

More “Rights” = Less Rights

Observe the precision of the right to the pursuit of happiness — not of the right to happiness. It means that a you have the right to take the actions you deem necessary to achieve happiness; it does not mean that others must make him happy. 

Any alleged “right” of one person, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right. Therefore no one can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another person. There can be no such thing as “the right to enslave.”

You do not have a “Right” to be made happy.

Inflating the concept of rights is like inflating currency, devaluing real rights through an overabundance of 'made-up' rights. The game our political leaders are playing is the switch of the concept of rights from the political to the economic realm.

Property rights and the right of free trade are your only “economic rights.” Which are, in fact, political rights.

There is no such thing as “a right to a job” — there is only the right of free trade, that is: a persons right to take a job if another chooses to hire him. There is no “right to a home,” only the right of free trade: the right to build a home or to buy it. There are no “rights” to a particular salary level or a particular price on goods if no one chooses to pay it. There are no “rights” of voting blocs, there are no “rights” of motorists to be paid for by the unwilling pedestrian, of employers at the cost of unwilling employees, nor of employees at the cost of their unwilling employer. 

A single question added to each of the above clauses would make the issue clear: At whose expense?

Jobs, food, clothing, recreation, homes, medical care, education, etc., do not grow in nature. These are man-made values — goods and services produced by individuals. Who is to provide them and by what coercion must they be made to provide it?

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

A Monopoly on Force

The fundamental difference between private action and governmental action—a difference thoroughly ignored and evaded today—lies in the fact that a government holds a monopoly on the legal use of physical force. It has to hold such a monopoly, since it is the agent of restraining and combating the use of force; and for that very same reason, its actions have to be rigidly defined, delimited and circumscribed; no touch of whim should be permitted in its performance; it should be an impersonal robot, with the laws as its only motive power. If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled.

Under a proper social system, a private individual is legally free to take any action he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others), while a government official is bound by law in his every official act. A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.
Remember, rights are moral principles that define and protect freedom of action without imposing obligations on others. Private citizens are not a threat to one another’s rights or freedom. A private citizen who resorts to physical force and violates the rights of others is a criminal — and individuals have legal protection against him.

Now observe the process by which that protection is being destroyed.

The process consists of ascribing to private citizens more and more “violations” such as homosexuality, divorce, business permits, driving restrictions, etc. thus returning the citizen to the position of requesting permission to act, and giving government a legal justification to extort property (life) from its citizens.

Governments, holding the monopoly on legal force, pose the greatest threat to rights when they overstep this principle.

Criminals are a small minority in any age or country. And the harm they have done to mankind is infinitesimal when compared to the horrors — the bloodshed, the wars, the 

persecutions, the confiscations, the famines, the enslavements, the wholesale destructions — perpetrated by mankind’s governments. Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to human rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

Extras

An aside on rationality because it is often misunderstood

Humans are generally rational, as in we try to live according to reality, to say otherwise, you likely don’t have a good understanding of what rationality entails or could not exist on Earth for very long because eating (being self-sustaining) would be “against your nature”. for example, even the drunkard staring down the bottom of a bottle is partially rational in that they are trying to avoid feelings of self-loathing after hitting someone with their car. Is he fully rational, as in taking his whole life into perspective? No, he’s still behaving mainly irrationally. But is he basically trying to reduce negative emotions and pursue positive ones, then partially, yes, he is trying to be rational, if in a less-than-appropriate way.

Why govern a social system?

If a man lived on a desert island, there would be no question of defining his proper relationship to others. Even if men interacted on some island but did so at random, without establishing a social system, the issue of rights would be premature.

When men do decide to form (or reform) an organized society, however, when they decide to pursue systematically the advantages of living together, then they need the guidance of principle. That is the context in which the principle of rights arises. If your society is to be moral (and therefore practical), it declares, you must begin by recognizing the moral requirements of man in a social context; i.e., you must define the sphere of sovereignty mandated for every individual by the laws of morality. Within this sphere, the individual acts without needing any agreement or approval from others, nor may any others interfere.

On Howard

Just as man can’t exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reality—to think, to work and to keep the results—which means: the right of property. The modern mystics of muscle who offer you the fraudulent alternative of “human rights” versus “property rights,” as if one could exist without the other, are making a last, grotesque attempt to revive the doctrine of soul versus body. Only a ghost can exist without material property; only a slave can work with no right to the product of his effort. The doctrine that “human rights” are superior to “property rights” simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others; since the competent have nothing to gain from the incompetent, it means the right of the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle. Whoever regards this as human and right, has no right to the title of “human.”