by Matt Barr

Natural rights

Jon Henke at Q and O posits that they don't exist, because you can see or smell them:

"Your rights do not exist unless your fellow men agree that they exist. ... it is empirical reality".... I still await verifiable, physical proof of the existence of "rights". If they are natural, surely there should be evidence, no?

Yes! It's a myopic mistake to ask whether the people in the room, (garage,) state, country, or even world, living today, agree you have natural rights to life and liberty. There is no consensus worldwide that you do, and no incentive other than self-preservation that would encourage another to recognize that you have the right to your liberty.

The empirical evidence of a right to liberty is in observing how men and civilizations prosper in proportion to liberty being acknowledged and guaranteed. Has a system of ordered liberty, assuming a combination of resources and markets enough for the society's maintenance, ever failed to prosper and become wealthy?

A blank-slater may step back even further and argue that there is no objective reason to assume wealth and prosperity are indicia of a "good" outcome; there have been perfectly happy serfs living under tyrants throughout history. You do have to reject that counterintuitive argument, and assume that long life, wealth, happiness, security, tradition, family, industry and creativity are leading indicators of a "successful" outcome.

If you do, and you measure (however you might do this) liberty and these indicia, you will find an irrefutable correlation. Liberty, then, is unquestionably a necessary, whether or not sufficient, condition of prosperity. The aggregate of people currently alive may not realize this, but the evidence is mounting, and in time all men will recognize that everyone's liberty is in everyone's interest. Science has the term "deep time": that's what's necessary to this thesis, and what's missing from Henke's.

UPDATE: Henke responds:

Barr is engaging in the (very common in the "rights" discussion) argumentum ad consequentiam fallacy -- an appeal to consequences. That is, he is arguing that a "proposition is true because belief in it has good consequences, or that it is false because belief in it has bad consequences". If such an argument was valid, then we'd all have to believe in whatever religion offered the most beneficial outcome. After all, if we believed anything else, we'd be giving up all those wonderful, supernatural goodies!

I'd like to believe that rights are a fact of nature, and not a result of applied power. Unfortunately, all of history indicates otherwise.

I don't doubt that my answer can be read as "it must be true because if it's true that's good," but I was getting at something else. Henke mentions "survival of the fittest" in his original post, in the context that that is the law that governs everything, and natural rights advocates would exempt human beings and say they're governed by some other law. In fact, my answer has to do with "survival of the fittest."

If it is true that a condition is necessary (as I argue above) for the prosperity of a system, then in order for the system to prosper, its component parts must not act to suppress that condition. Others do have the option of suppressing it, in me or others or even themselves (assuming someone else willing to dominate them), but they should not. That's the character of a right: You could, but you ought not. The "right" to free speech: You could suppress my speech, but you ought not. The "right" to contract my labor out: You could suppress my contractual options, but you ought not.

A right to life and liberty, I would argue, is "natural" in character because it is a condition of being human -- being born -- that to the degree we have liberty, we may (personally) or will (in the aggregate) prosper. Flipped 'round, as liberty is suppressed, the race moves closer to extinction -- the extreme opposite of prosperity.

Henke's comparison to insects is inapt because a right involves a choice: You have the "right" to something only if you can choose to exercise it or not. And there is another reason argumentum ad consequentiam doesn't apply here, and it's in Henke's own post: There are many valid rationales for a belief in and commitment to liberty. My belief that life and liberty are rights inhering in every human because it is necessary for the survival and prosperity of the species does not lead me to any better, warmer, fuzzier result that cultural evolution or social contract.

Browse books from Amazon.com: