What are "rights?"
Part II
You’ll recall that “morals” and “ethics” both mean “customs”
The formation of customs is a human necessity, because we do not live entirely by instinct; we have to create rules to manage our social life, for society is necessary to be human
And because we ourselves create these rules or customs they necessarily change over time and history
To conceal this changeable character of social rules, we describe them as divinely ordered, or traditional, etc.
“Rights” are identical sorts of social rules: we ourselves create them, but traditionally attempt to conceal their origin; after the enlightenment (14th c.) rights began to be called “natural,” as if they were implicit in being human
In the late 18th c. the English philosopher John Locke [1632-1704] proposed that the human rights of “life, liberty, and property” arose from our unique ability to change the world around us by our work; (Locke’s list was the origin of Jefferson’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” it also shaped the interpretation of human history by Karl Marx [1818-1883])
So our conception of human rights as originating with human effort became central to the American invention—in the Declaration and later in the Constitution—of guaranteeing rights by rule of law
Locke thought of human work as physical labor, such as fencing off a field for your crops; American life has also been shaped by this old picture of the world as an empty field to be made to yield to my work on it…
(Just an aside here: note that the Hebrew scripture Genesis describes “work” as one of the curses inflicted upon the original human couple…)
…So it happens that almost all our laws are about property; indeed “owning property” was the basis for having rights when the Constitution was written; and only men had the right to own property
Of course, human beings were among the kinds of property Americans could “own,” until the Civil War was fought to guarantee rights to all humans
Well, not quite all: even the 13th & 14th amendments to the Constitution did not imagine women to have rights!
It took all the way to the 19th amendment to extend human rights to women…
All this history shows is that “rights” are human creations and are therefore always undergoing change; they can be sustained—as our history also shows—by agreeing to laws governing them, and us, as well as agreeing to their enforcement by legal means: codes, courts, litigation, police, and so on…
If and when any of us refuse to abide by law, there remains only force to ensure the survival of our rights
The advantage of law over force is that it can be sustained indefinitely, but even so it is fragile, depending as it does upon each and all of us renewing our commitment to its survival by daily action…
(The photo above is of Maya Lin’s sculpted field in northern New York; it evokes the wave-action of the sea on a piece of land: another way of showing how we add our work to the earth…)