The Core of all Natural Rights theory
The core of all basic rights theory is the "right to own one's self."
“Every Man has a Property in his own Person. This nobody has any right to but himself.” [see: Full Quote from John Locke Two Treatises on Government]
Yet many of us are wage slaves, our country still allows people to sell themselves into various kinds of literal and figurative bondage. And all that directly contradicts the principles we claim to base ourselves on.
“there is something important at stake in the choice of terminology when discussions and interpretation of “self-ownership” obscure the political implications of “ownership.”
The Ultimate Inalienable Natural Right
To me this is the ultimate illustration of an inalienable right. We humans can be oppressed, suppressed, enslaved, yet we "cry for freedom" even from the depths of despair. Nothing displays the human spirit more graphically than the soul of the wrongfully imprisoned person, who's inward freedom remains. It fits the definition of a Natural law:
- “they cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws”
And it fits the definition of inalienable used by Hegel:
“The right to what is in essence inalienable is imprescriptible, since the act whereby I take possession of my personality, of my substantive essence, and make myself a responsible being, capable of possessing rights and with a moral and religious life, takes away from these characteristics of mine just that externality which alone made them capable of passing into the possession of someone else. When I have thus annulled their externality, I cannot lose them through lapse of time or from any other reason drawn from my prior consent or willingness to alienate them.” [Hegel's Philosophy of Right]
Rights can be alienable or inalienable. Not all rights are inalienable. However, alienable rights, derive from more fundamental inalienable ones. The difference between an alienable right and an inalienable one is that "alienating" an inalienable right damages the person for whom a part of their person is being detached. One can claim that the "right to own ones self" is alienable but the effort to alienate part of the self destroys the self. Can one really sell oneself? What remains if one does? One can gift from ones self. But that only makes the self stronger and the soul stronger. One can share from oneself, but the self remains. No matter how much we give away of ourselves, we remain ourselves. Losing ourselves in love or agony is something figurative. The self remains. Even in death. When we die or lose integrity, it is then that we are alienated from our selves. But that is death. Only when the person perishes does the right even quit. And for some people the ownership of their ideas is nearly eternal.
Misrepresenting Rights
Concepts like rights, can be (and often are) deliberately misrepresented. When rights that ought to be subordinate to even higher priorities (higher rights) get cast as "inalienable", the rights they are subordinate to often get infringed. When rights that are clearly inalienable are cast as alienable and an effort is made to deny, abridge, infringe or simply put, alienate them -- the result is oppression and dysfunction. Because infringing an inalienable right is like cutting off a hand or foot. The person who it is cut off from is harmed. If a right can be separated from its possessor with no real harm to the former possessor, it is an alienable right. If it is subordinate to, necessary to, some other right, then the boundaries of that alienation reflect the boundaries where that parental right applies.
Examples with the Right to Happiness & Others
The Right to happiness might not exist, but the right to pursue happiness is inalienably part of human needs. Alienate that right and a person is simply no longer autonomous. The right to defend one's home, live autonomously, are related to the right to own one's own self. The right to own ones self is the fundamental right. The right to "pursue happiness" may seem too abstract to measure, but attributes of misery are all too measurable. The Right to "own oneself" is not in any way an abstraction for those who have experienced all the myriad ways that people degrade and dehumanize each other. Alienation isn't simply some Marxist term for some historical development in the formation of classes. Alienation is the severing of what makes a person whole. If one cannot own the components of one's own life, then one is not autonomous. One doesn't own oneself. It is possible to alienate people from owning themselves. But it is oppression.
Alienable Rights Versus Inalienable
A lot of confusion starts when alienable rights are treated as inalienable or vice versa. When laws infringe on inalienable rights, without rational cause, they are oppressive and absurd. When people are enabled to "pursue happiness" and live as "Nature's God" intended, they do better.
It is our human task to lay out the outlines of what is actually right and wrong. Whatever may be commanded from God, can be affirmed in His creation. If it is not echoed in the real world, does it really come from God? Alienating a right that is inalienable destroys the connection of that thing to the thing that the right protects, and degrades or destroys the thing protected by that right. Once one sees that a right is inalienable, then one sees that taking that right away is a major wrong except when that infringement serves an even higher principle of right.
Infringement on Inalienable Rights Is Oppression and Violence
Thus Infringing on inalienable rights is by definition oppression and violence. A Person without freedom or liberty is a prisoner. People denied the right to property in oneself finds themselves enslaved and dispossessed. This is analogous to when the guilty are found innocent and the innocent found guilty. These truths are illustrated by their infringement.
Alienating an Inalienable right destroys the Person
When an inalienable right is denied or infringed, the result is suffering and failure. The very effort to infringe, deny, or sell inalienable rights just creates "evil", harm and even death. It damages the person, so harmed.
Denial Illustrates inalienability
Thus Denial illustrates why those rights are inalienable. The denial of the right to property in one's own self produced the obvious miseries of slavery. In prior ages denial for the right to property in one's own conscience produced the absurdity of people forced to lie in order to survive. As illustrated in the previous posts (Justice, Injustice and Legal Fraud", and The Fraud of Renting Labor) denying inalienable rights result in legal fraud and absurdities. That is why this is an important subject.
Harmonizing Deontology and Teleology
The Real Core of All Natural rights theory is the epistemology of where practical reality meets moral imperative. It is where deontology meets teleology.*
The Deontological viewpoint
Natural Rights theory sounds deontological; (duty-based), where the moral duties of natural rights are self-evident, having intrinsic value in and of themselves and needing no further justification.
“deontological ethics or deontology (from Greek δέον, deon, "obligation, duty") is the normative ethical position that judges the morality of an action based on rules. It is sometimes described as "duty-" or "obligation-" or "rule-" based ethics, because rules "bind you to your duty".”
Deontology also premises that duties are commanded from above. They don't have to have a logical basis. One has to do them because they are commandments. From a Deontological perspective Rights are inalienable because Natures God commands them to be. However, the deontological perspective requires justification from a teleological perspective, and in the case of inalienable rights, earns it.
The Teleological Perspective
In contrast Teleological perspectives often posit that the ends justify the means they posit theories of morality that:
“derives duty or moral obligation from what is good or desirable as an end to be achieved.”
Teleological morality expresses in "Utilitarianism", "pragmatism" at its best and in Machiavellian and ruthless "moral" systems at worst. From a Teleological perspective, rights are inalienable because damaging them destroys the utility of the person damaged, and by inference of the social and economic systems the person lives in.
Mapping the Abstract to the Practical
The abstract has to map to practical realities, to measurable attributes, or it remains purely abstract. Without a grounding in experimental, experiential, consequential reality idealized beliefs become unhinged. Or worse, as happened with Marxism, they become attached to idealistic and unrealistic objectives.
Ends and Means are inextricably linked
But the reality is that ends and means are inextricably linked. A child is taught Deontological rules, commandments; "Don't touch the fire! You'll get burned" because he/she is not ready yet to perceive the causality of a stove. The argument that the rightness or wrongness (teleological perspective) of actions is based solely on the goodness or badness of their consequences is in some kind of conflict with the deontological view, is a false choice. Likewise, there is a reason for commandments. At worst, one follows rules because rules order ones individual and collective behavior and make it easier to function in a society with other beings, conflicts and limits. Humans need their rituals and routine. The more chaotic the world, the more they pine for them. One might accept such rules on an approach of "this is my duty", but one keeps them when one realizes that those rules enable integrity, set boundaries or link one socially with others. Moral theory has to map back to cause and effect to become something effective. And at some point moral theory has to involve commandments to do something or it is mere abstraction. [Deontological/Teleological]
The Absurdity of Alienation
Professor Ellerman's table illustrates both justice and injustice. wrote some things that really, really impressed me and I want to summarize some of what he's saying that is relative to me. Starting with the Following Table, which expresses the truth table on the subject of justice and injustice:
This post discusses basic principles of human rights, "alienable", "contract" & "inalienable rights." Libertarians and so-called conservatives, are big on some of these arguments but they often misrepresent them and conveniently so.
This post follows on material discussed in:
Self Ownership vs Right to Property in One's self
Pateman argues against what she calls “contractism” in her paper on "Self ownership" noting that:
“If rights are seen in proprietary terms – the standard view of rights, Ingram argues – then it follows that rights can be alienated. ” [Self-Ownership]
Alienable Versus Inalienable
If a right can be alienated then it is conditional or can be separated from the person enjoying it. “It can be subject to "contract"” exchanges or it's applicability limited in other ways. Rights can be alienable or inalienable. An alienable right is contingent on some related right. One has an alienable right to own arms for self defense. For example Samuel Adams called the right to “have and use arms”
“ Auxiliary and Subordinate to the rights to personal security, liberty and property.”
The right to have and use arms is alienable. A lot of people don't understand this.
One has an inalienable right to pursue happiness. One doesn't have an right to use those arms to rob a bank to achieve happiness. The right to pursue happiness is inalienable. The right to keep and use arms to defend oneself is inalienable. The right to keep and use arms to carry out a robbery is not. But even more as she explains: She explains:
“ ” [Pateman]
The Law is only just when the person who is held responsible is actually in fact responsible. That ought to be tautological, but in our corrupted times, both type one and type two injustice are common, sometimes due to failures in the discovery process for seeking the truth, but also because modern governments employ oppressive and/or Fruadulent legal theories. David explains the table as:
“analogous to Type I and Type II error in statistics”
Those advocating Inequality claimed it was Consensual
And notes that:
"Historically, the sophisticated arguments for slavery and autocratic government were consent-based in terms of implicit or explicit contracts. And the legalized oppression of married women was based on the coverture marriage contract."
Modern Liberalism fought:
“sophisticated arguments for slavery and for non-democratic forms of government based on consent. The advances in anti-slavery arguments and democratic arguments based on the inalienable rights arguments of the Reformation and Enlightenment were made against those liberal defenses of slavery and autocracy based on consent.”
John Locke Stated very plainly:
“Every Man has a Property in his own Person. This nobody has any right to but himself.” [Pateman]
However, Locke also treated this "property in one's own person" as alienable;
“The grass my horse has bit; the turf my servant has cut; become my property. The labour that was mine ... hath fixed my property in them.” [Pateman]
The property in their labor is the masters property. Because he owns the servant and the horse. He owns their labor. The notion of the inalienability of labor from the person would require further delineation. Locke was making a political argument. Regardless of who morally owns the fruit of his or her labor, that property belonged to the owner of the labor.
Language, and interpretation of language has been a tool in this fight from the beginning. Historians misrepresent the difficulty of advancing rights for all people when they downplay this. Carole Patemen notes that:
“there is something important at stake in the choice of terminology when discussions and interpretation of “self-ownership” obscure the political implications of “ownership.”
Inalienable Rights Versus Oppressive Consent
David explains that:
“the critiques developed in the abolitionist, democratic, and feminist movements were not simply arguments for consent as opposed to coercion, but arguments against certain voluntary contracts, e.g., in the form of inalienable rights arguments.”
These inalienable rights arguments focused on the fact that labor cannot be divorced from either personhood or capital. The abolitionists argued successfully that labor cannot be alienated from personhood but is inseparable from it. Thus Alienating a persons labor from his personhood degrades the person and is oppression, infringing on the very basic rights of the persons enslaved. Moreover, this is true even if the person agreed to the sale.
Legal Fiction of Consent = Fraud
Unfortunately:
“under the intellectual hegemony of classical liberalism, the historical arguments tend to be simplified”
The doctrine of the inalienability of a person and his labor was replaced with the “legal fiction” of selling (or renting) labor, replacing the rights argument with the patently fraudulent argument that a voluntary sale of a persons labor to the master, is a voluntary "sale" with "consent. Reducing the rights argument to an argument about:
“consent versus coercion.”
This argument, being slippery justifies alienating labor from capital and labor from personhood. Just so long as a contract exist and the infringing party ("the employer") has a contract that presumably is voluntary. The result is that:
“The older arguments against certain contracts, even if perfectly voluntary, have been largely overlooked, ignored, or lost—perhaps for an obvious reason. When these older arguments are recovered and restated in terms of the underlying norms of ordinary jurisprudence, then the arguments clearly apply against the human rental or employment contract that is the basis for our present economic system.”
Historical Illustration
The history of abolition and post abolition forms of wage slavery, company store oppression, share-cropping and virtual slavery of wage laborers illustrates that the "legal fiction" of renting labor is a fraud.
The Tory thinker, Lord Eustace Percy, put the fundamental task as follows:
“Here is the most urgent challenge to political invention ever offered to the jurist and the statesman. The human association which in fact produces and distributes wealth, the association of workmen, managers, technicians and directors, is not an association recognized by the law.”[Ellerman]
“The association which the law does recognise—the association of shareholders, creditors and directors—is incapable of production and is not expected by the law to perform these functions. We have to give law to the real association, and to withdraw meaningless privilege from the imaginary one. [1944]”[Ellerman]
“With the renting of persons abolished, each firm would be “the association of workmen, managers, technicians and directors”. Labor would be hiring capital, instead of the owners of capital renting the people working in “their” firm to appropriate the (positive and negative) fruits of their labor.”[Ellerman]
“Each firm would be democratic community of work, an industrial republic, with the industrial cooperatives in the Mondragon system in the Spanish Basque country being an existing example.”[Ellerman]
“The vision of abolishing the wage system in favor of a commonwealth of cooperatives was a goal of the 19th century Labor Movement.”[Ellerman]
There is a lot more to this argument. But I wanted to cover this particular topic as well as I could.
Further Reading
To Read Professor David Ellerman's draft papers:
- http://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/case-based-on-ordinary-norms.pdf
- https://cosmosandtaxis.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/ellerman_ct_vol5_iss3_4.pdf
- Neoabolitionism: http://www.ellerman.org/neo-abolitionism-and-marxism/
- Property & Contract in Economics: The case for economic democracy. Basil-Blackwell, 1992. Downloadable
- Carole Patemen:
- http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/pateman/Self-Ownership.pdf
- Full quote:
- Samuel Adams quote: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch3s4.html
- Deontology meets Teleology was inspired by a throw away line of "the riddler" in one of the recent episodes of "Gotham."
- http://rhchp.regis.edu/hce/ethicsataglance/DeontologicalTeleological/DeontologicalTeleological_01.html
Samuel Adams maintained that
“the right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defence.” is an “auxiliary subordinate right” whose purpose is to “protect and maintain inviolate the three great and primary rights of personal security, personal liberty and private property”
He continues:
“having arms for their defense is a public allowance, under due restrictions, of the natural right of resistance and self preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.”
Sources: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch3s4.html
John Locke
- For more information on John Locke and his relationship to other people read any of these posts:
- Spencer Versus Locke and Henry George
- Edmund Burke Versus John Locke
- Locke Talked of the Importance of the Collective
- The Concept of Commonwealth as Antidote to Tyranny
- Commonwealth According to Locke
- The Real Right to Property is Contingent on Reason
- Common Property and the Commons
- Rights Come from Below
- Ayn Rand Argues against the Enlightenment
- John Locke on the Virtues of Liberty
- Tyranny Definition - John Locke
- Hegel:
- "George W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, T.M. Knox, trans., New York: Oxford University Press, 1967 (1821), section 66"
- http://www.inp.uw.edu.pl/mdsie/Political_Thought/Hegel%20Phil%20of%20Right.pdf
- ₽
- Written in January 2019. For some reason not posted then. Sorry
