What are "rights?"
Force and law...
Rights are claims on the actions of others: if I have a right, I can expect you to act to support or honor it
That is, I can expect you to do, or refrain from doing, some action
A friend recently said, in a conversation about aging: “My son will have to take care of me”
My friend was assuming that he had a right, as a parent, to care and support from his child. But are there parental rights?
There is a difference between expectations, or obligations, and rights; even actions or practices that are culturally approved or familiar, such as care for children or parents, are not necessarily rights
Rights must be established and enforceable in law
This definition of legally enforceable rights is a recent development in human history
Thomas Jefferson asserted in the 1776 Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…”
Writing these words, Jefferson assumed there to be rights with which humans are “endowed by their creator”
Note that there are four such rights in the text: equality, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness
But Jefferson also assumed that only men had the rights enumerated; in fact, exclusively white, property-owning men; that is, the only people who were recognized as full citizens in the fledgling United States
Nevertheless, the declaration was intended to force the British crown to accept the independence of the American colonies; the Declaration is historically unique because it created legal rights, where before rights had to be granted by some authority; theoretically, a god, but in practice a monarch
Because the British held that their king had the right to govern their colonies, they had to fight to defend that principle; the revolutionary war was a battle to enforce legal rights in place of those authorized by a king
So Americans came to develop a society based upon law rather than upon royal whim or decree; this is still a unique achievement
How is it that the citizens of the British colonies had the right to create a constitutional government—a society based upon laws?
The answer is that they did not; they created the right by asserting and defending it
The insight here is that rights have to be enforced
The photo above is of the fortifications above the town of Foix, near the Pyrenees in southern France; I stood on the parapet about ten years ago; I was in the city to take part in an amateur bicycle race called the Ariegeoise
Foix is flanked by the Ariege River; centuries ago it marked the boundary between lands to the north devoted to crops and the mountainous land to the south on which herds were grazed; cropland differs from grazing land in that it is traditionally fenced into fields
So the farmers to the north came into conflict with the herders of the south…
As I stood on that parapet, it occurred to me that most of human history had been devoted to carrying rocks!
Most of those rocks were used to build fortifications against others like ourselves
In other words, our longest tradition has been enforcing a right to rule by means of warfare…
[Part II to follow…]