#moral_philosophy

The question of whether a society is just hinges upon whether it protects or violates people's rights, so it makes sense to start any such discussion by defining those rights.

For purposes of this post, "rights," only refers to inalienable human rights, not the civil rights that may arise from a particular implementation of law.

Rights are:

Universal. Everyone has them, and they are the same in all societies.

Timeless. They are and have always been the same. While our understanding of them may change in the same way as our understanding of the laws of physics, new technology and new forms of social organization cannot change them.

Equal. Nobody's rights take precedence over any other's.

Negative. A right can only impose upon another an obligation NOT to do something, never an obligation TO do something. For example, a "right to health care" as most people mean it would impose an obligation on others to pay for your health care if you could not pay for it yourself, meaning there is no such right.

Good. Societies prosper when, on top of the other requirements for the rule of law (to be discussed in another post), they minimize the frequency with which rights are violated.

Individual. They belong to "natural persons," not groups, firms, or governments.

So what are these rights? It's hard to enumerate them because they're more of an amorphous blob than a discrete list, but we can start with the classical liberal ones: life, liberty, and property. The negative phrasing for these would be "freedom from murder," "freedom from force and fraud," and "freedom from theft." These ones seem simple and obvious, but there is a lot of complexity there and there is controversy about what they mean, so I'll give my own definitions.

Life seems like it should be obvious and controversial, but think of the phrase "right to life." Does a fetus have rights? Does a zygote? An embryo? As I said earlier, rights can only impose upon others obligations not to do things. Your right to life doesn't impose on anyone else an obligation to keep you alive. A mother is not obligated to carry a fetus to term. But at the same time, the right to life could impose an obligation upon her an obligation not to go out of her way to eject the fetus from her body. So this really comes down to who has rights, but I'm not going to cover that in this post. Hah, you thought I was gonna solve the abortion debate here, huh?

We include life in the list because when people's lives can be taken willy-nilly, they spend all their time on self-defense and don't invest in anything else. Society crumbles.

I think liberty in this context is actually much broader than most people interpret it to be. Liberty means you can do whatever you want as long as you aren't violating another's rights. Anything. A society that stops you from doing something that doesn't violate another's rights is an unjust society. And this paragraph is about all you need to know to derive the rest of my political views.

Property is a right I don't even have a full handle on. To me, it's a right that derives fully from the right of liberty, though it's not obvious enough that one can avoid naming it explicitly. The right of property imposes an obligation upon others not to take the fruits of my labor away from me, because to do so would be the same as enslaving me. The fruits of my labor include improvements to land and minerals I extract from the ground, too.

The thing that makes property kind of fuzzy to me is the ownership of land. I can imagine a situation where I could only own the improvements I've made to a piece of land, the minerals I extract, and the food I grow, without anyone's owning the land underneath. And maybe that's the answer: nobody "owns" land as a human right, but that doesn't mean others can tread on my corn field.

On the other hand, full use of a house, a field, or a mine also requires that I have predictable access, predictable clearance, predictable privacy, et cetera. So while land ownership could be limited to a small exclusion zone around improvements, it does seem pretty clear to me that some land ownership arises from the right to property, which means that a just society must provide some consistent, fair means of providing for land ownership that will maximize people's ability to apply their labor to the land. It must also avoid arbitraily changing what people are allowed to do with their land, because to do so is essentially theft, because a person may build a house expecting to be able to use or sell that house, only to find after they've made that investment that the rules have suddenly changed underneath them. I'll cover this idea in greater detail in my post about the rule of law.