In yesterday’s posting we raised the issue of people who
don’t know what they’re talking about when they start pontificating about
rights. There is massive confusion over
whether rights are, or are not “absolute.”
There is even a bit of confusion over what, exactly, a “right” is.
So, are rights absolute, or are they not absolute?
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| "And a good judge, too!" |
We can only answer that question by first answering the
question as to what a “right” is. As
defined in Black’s Law Dictionary, a
right is “a power, privilege, faculty, or demand inherent in one person and
incident upon another.” The definition
continues,
“‘Rights’
are defined generally as ‘powers of free action.’ And the primal rights pertaining to men are
undoubtedly enjoyed by human beings purely as such, being grounded in personality,
and existing antecedently to their recognition by positive law.”
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| No rights exercised here |
The most obvious thing we get from this definition is that a
right means that someone who has a right has the power to do something, or not
do something in relation to other persons. Is there a question of “rights” when it’s only
Robinson Crusoe on a desert island? No.
It’s only when Friday shows up that there is an “other” against whom rights can
be exercised — or (as in Friday’s case) whose rights can be taken away.
This is because Friday was Crusoe’s slave. A slave is someone over whom someone else
exercises absolute power. Black’s Law Dictionary defines a slave
as, “a person who is wholly subject to the will of another.”
In other words, a slave is someone against whom someone else
exercises rights absolutely — and this gets us back to our original point: are
rights absolute, or aren’t they?
. . . . and the answer is . . . yes. And no.
The fact is that rights both are, and are not
“absolute.” Whether you answer the
question about whether rights are, or are not, absolute depends completely on
which aspect of a right you’re talking about.
We see from the definition of a right in Black’s Law Dictionary that rights are
“inherent in one person.” Saying that
something is “inherent” is another way of saying that it is part of what it
means for something to be that thing.
A “person” is defined as “that which has rights.” Specifically, a person is “[a] man considered
according to the rank he holds in society, with all the right to which the
place he holds entitles him, and the duties which it imposes.”
Recall that when we reviewed Hohfeld’s analysis in
yesterday’s posting we learned that the definition is, in a sense, the
thing. If having rights defines someone
as a person, you obviously can’t have a person who doesn’t have rights. That’s an oxymoron, something that
contradicts itself. To say that you have
a person who does not have rights violates the principle of contradiction, the
first principle of reason.
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| Both absolute and not absolute. |
We therefore necessarily conclude that rights are
absolutely a part of what it means to be a person. Simply in order to be a person, someone (or
something) must have rights, or he,
she, or it is not a person. That is
absolute, by definition.
Furthermore, rights being inherent in persons, the State
does not grant them. People have rights
simply because they are persons.
Rights are absolute.
That’s the answer . . . right?
That’s the answer . . . half
right.
Now we come to the part of our analysis that confuses most
people. We have to distinguish between having a right, and exercising a right. These
are two different things.
Persons have
rights absolutely (natural rights, anyway).
No one in the history of the human race has ever exercised rights absolutely.
Even in the case of slavery, ancient law codes have always recognized some kind of protection for slaves, even
if only as somebody’s property. Someone
couldn’t do whatever he wanted to someone else’s slave.
The very fact that laws codes have existed for every human
family, culture, and civilization since the dawn of time tells us that, however
absolutely someone may have rights, rights
are never exercised absolutely.
It is an astonishing breakthrough for most people to realize
that rights can be absolute in their
possession, and not absolute —
limited — in their exercise.
Thus, when “liberals” claim that rights are not absolute, and “conservatives” claim
that rights are absolute, they are both right — and both wrong. The fact is that violations of the first
principle of reason, whether the principle of contradiction or the principle of
identity (whether you want to state it negatively or positively, respectively),
are rampant in today’s society.
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| Justice University? Now, there's an idea . . . |
This highlights the need for a project that CESJ has been
working on for a while: “Justice University.”
Frankly, knowledge and understanding of the basic principles of justice,
of right and wrong, to say nothing of their applications in the understanding
of rights and duties and the social structures within which people carry out
their daily lives, has reached a nadir.
Furthermore, the cost of what passes for a “higher education”
these days is all out of bounds. It
consists of extremely expensive training for jobs that don’t exist — another
topic we should address, but not today.
It’s time for education to return to its primary purpose of . . . educating.
#30#
