Certain unalienable rights
There are rights, and then there are rights
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.— excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
In the last edition we considered the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence, including the idea that we are endowed with “certain unalienable Rights.” This time we’ll take a closer look at the idea of unalienable1 rights.
What is a right anyway?
First, let’s think about what a right is. It’s a word we hear and use often, but what does it mean to say something is a right?
The simplest way to think about it is to say that a right is a claim. It can be a claim to receive or control or use or possess something, and that something can be either tangible (property) or intangible (freedom of speech).
Another way to look at rights is to say that a right is almost always a claim to compel or prevent others from taking certain actions. Most rights can be described that way.
Say, for instance, you bought a ticket to see a movie on Friday night. One way to think about that is to say that as the holder of the ticket you have purchased the right to be admitted to the theater, have a seat, and watch the film.2
That might be a trivial example — we don’t usually think of Life, Liberty, and a Seat at the 8:00 pm showing of The Avengers. But you get the idea. The ticket give you a (limited and negotiated, and subject to terms and conditions) claim on the theater to admit you at the appointed time.
A more substantive example would be your rights as a property owner. Let’s say you own a house and some land. One of the first things law students learn in Property class is that the basic right of property ownership is the right to exclude others from that property. As the owner you have the right to say Keep Out — to require someone to leave your house or stay off your land. So that’s another example of a claim to compel or prevent others from taking certain actions.
We could go on for days about the fine points of rights, but you get the basic idea — it’s a claim. And you can see that rights always exist as against other people. In other words, your rights define how other people (in our examples, the theater owner or a trespasser) are expected, even required, to act in relationship to you.3 If a right is a claim, there has to be someone to make that claim on.
Where do rights come from?
All men may be created equal, but all rights are not. Different rights have different sources. In our theater ticket example, your right to be admitted to the movie screening was privately negotiated when you bought the ticket.4 When we talk about someone’s rights under contract — an employment contract, a sales contract, and so on — those are privately negotiated rights that only apply to the people who are party to that agreement. Again, not on the same level as “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” but we use the same word right to describe the claims you have under a contract.
Other rights that apply to everyone, or to broad categories of people, come from laws that legislatures or other lawmaking bodies have passed. So when we talk about shareholder rights, patent rights, your rights to certain compensation when your flight is delayed or the airline loses your luggage, your rights when there are fraudulent charges on your credit card, or your “rights as a consumer” in general — those are all rights granted to you by operation of law. These legal rights are granted by the government when it enacts certain laws.
Most of what we often call civil rights (such as the right to vote) would also fall under this heading — they are sourced in a statute or constitutional provision, but are not inherent in all people. For example, by law, only citizens of the United States have the right to vote in U.S. federal elections. That is not a natural right anyone anywhere can claim.
However, privately negotiated rights and legal rights and even civil rights are alienable. Meaning they can be “made alien” from you or by you.
The contract can be amended. The law can be changed, and the rights you had under that law either expanded, reduced, or eliminated entirely. You can can negotiate away some rights and waive others. But the rights discussed in the Declaration of Independence come from a higher source. They are not rights that come from an agreement between people, their source can’t be found in a law that can be amended or repealed, and they are not granted by the government.
A higher source
That, at least, is the Declaration’s assertion — that there exist certain rights that come from a source higher than and superior to any human institution. Spoiler alert: the Declaration doesn’t leave you guessing. People’s rights are endowed by their Creator.
Your own religious, philosophical, or metaphysical beliefs may or may not allow for the existence of a Creator, but that’s beside the point. The framers of the Declaration accepted the existence of a Creator who is the source of and authority behind certain rights that all people have. And the Declaration is the foundational document of the United State of America, so that’s where our theory of government starts, with a rights-giving Creator.
As we discussed last time, the Declaration expounds a theory of natural law, so if you want to fuzz things up, you can say these rights are derived from Nature or even Reason. I’m not here to quibble with you. The key point is that the rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness are not derived from the government or from the discretion or benevolence of any human ruler. That’s the Declaration’s claim.5
And these rights can’t be taken away or amended, or even voluntarily given away. They are unalienable, which means not capable of being taken, transferred, conveyed, or separated from us. The rights to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness — and whatever other unalienable rights we have6 — are inherent in our very existence as human beings.
Claims against whom, exactly?
We said above that rights are claims. And in footnotes7 we said that rights only exist in relation to other people — your rights are a claim to compel or prevent others from taking certain actions. So whom, exactly, are the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness a claim against?
I would say — and this is just me spitballing — that your rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are a claim against literally everyone who is not you. So against the government, yes. But also against your fellow citizens, against non-citizens, against anyone anywhere.
Why? Because these rights are endowed by our Creator (or Nature, if you prefer) so they apply everywhere and against everyone.
Of course, everyone else has the same claims of right against you. So don’t get a swollen head. Anyway, we’ll get into the specifics of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness another time.
Those are my thoughts on unalienable rights. I hope you enjoyed this discussion and found it informative and thought-provoking. If so, please click the heart icon to like this post. And please share this issue with someone who might be interested. You can forward the email or click the Share button below.
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See you next time! Conquer the day!
A Faithful Subscriber asks what the difference is between unalienable and inalienable when speaking of rights. There really is no difference. The words are interchangeable. If anything, inalienable is more common. I’m going with unalienable here because if it’s good enough for Thomas Jefferson, it’s good enough for me.
It is a limited right, of course. If you show up at the box office drunk and shirtless and shouting profanity while waving your ticket, the theater has the right to refuse entry. I can almost guarantee the fine print on the the ticket says something about reserving the right to refuse entry or eject you. In this example, your ticket purchase really represents a contract between you and the theater and the claims each of you have on each other — you, to see the movie, the theater, to require good behavior on their premises — are defined in that agreement.
If you were the only person on Earth, rights would be a meaningless concept because there would be no one to either respect or violate your rights. Rights only exist in relation to others. Of course, in that situation you’d probably have more important things to think about than the mootness of rights.
It’s not much of a negotiation, in that you don’t usually haggle with the theater over the price of the ticket. But if they offer the ticket at a certain price and you accept that offer and pay that price — that’s technically a negotiation. Just a very short one.
Yes, I said essentially the same thing in the last newsletter. It’s an important point that bears repeating.
Other examples of widely, though not universally, recognized unalienable natural rights include the right of self-defense, the right to own private property, the right to work and enjoy the fruits of your own labor, the right to think freely (freedom of conscience), the right to engage is worship in the religion of your choice, the right to refrain from worship in religions not of your choice, the right to travel freely within your own country, the right to leave your country, the right to control the care and education of your own children, the right to be secure in one’s own home. And many more. (Notice that most of these unalienable rights are routinely violated by communist regimes. That’s because communism is evil.)
You are reading the footnotes, right?