…that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Welcome back (again)
Welcome back! Yes, it’s been almost a year since the last edition, but we’ll pretend that it hasn’t and pick up where we left off. Previously we discussed the self-evident truths asserted in the Declaration of Independence and the concept of certain unalienable rights and rights in general.
Let’s wrap up our fly-by of the Declaration by considering some of its most famous words: Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Of all the unalienable rights with which we are endowed by our Creator, these three are mentioned first. That might because they are the most important. So let’s dig in!
Life
This one seems simple. We have a right to continue living and not be unduly deprived of our continued existence. Other people have no right to kill you. That’s not complicated.
But we’re human beings, so of course it’s complicated. What about killing in self-defense? What about killing an enemy soldier in time of war? Are you violating someone’s right to life in those instances? What about capital punishment? What about euthanasia or abortion or throwing the switch on some fiendish trolley track1?
And if any of the above are justifiable, can we truly say we have an unalienable right to life?
Actually, yes, we can. I’ll take the easy instance, self-defense. If someone is actively trying to kill you and you, in the course of defending yourself, fight back and end your attacker’s life, have you violated your assailant’s unalienable right to life?
It depends how we define the contours of a “right to life”. If by that we mean “no one may deprive you of your life under any circumstances whatsoever, no matter what you do, even if you are in the act of attempting to deprive another person of their own life” then, sure, you violate someone else’s right to life if you kill them in self-defense.
Don’t be absurd
But that sounds absurd, doesn’t it?
And since our unalienable rights are endowed by our Creator and our Creator is presumably not absurd, it seems any natural right would not be absurd. So this absurd way of characterizing the right to life is probably wrong.
Remember, in 1776 Thomas Jefferson (who did most of the drafting) and the Continental Congress were not writing a treatise on natural law or unalienable rights or defining those rights in depth. They were referencing these ideas as arguments supporting the main purpose of the Declaration of Independence.
Which was, unsurprisingly, declaring independence.
Locke this way
If we want to understand the contours of what they meant by a right to life, if we want to get into the sticky details, then we have to look elsewhere. Or Locke elsewhere. Because, as it happens, someone did write a whole treatise on the topic.
Meet John Locke2: “John Locke (1632-1704) is probably the most representative thinker in the whole Anglo-American political tradition. Often called the theorist of the English Revolution of 1688, he was also a main source of the ideas of the American Revolution of 1776.”3
And why is that, you may ask? Because “he gave clear and reasonable expression to beliefs that were the product of centuries of political experience and the stock-in-trade of liberty-loving Englishmen and Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”4
Jefferson read Locke. Franklin read Locke. Adams read Locke. They all read Locke. If you want to understand the Declaration of Independence and what the drafters meant when they talked about rights and forms of government and all the rest, you need to read Locke.
Murder before there was law
In Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, first published in 1690, he discusses, among many other topics, this self-defense question. In the chapter “Of the State of Nature,” Locke describes a hypothetical state of nature before men agreed among themselves to have any kind of civil government.5 That is, there are no governments and no manmade laws, only the law of nature -- the natural law that we mentioned in an earlier edition.
In Locke’s conception of a state of nature, while no one has the right to “take away or impair the life” of another, anyone who does so places himself in jeopardy of losing his own life because by “transgressing the law of nature, the offender declares himself to live by another rule than that of reason and common equity … and so he becomes dangerous to mankind, the tie which is to secure them from industry and violence being slighted and broken by him.”
Which is a wordy 17th century way of saying if you murder someone (or try to) you’ve placed yourself outside the natural law’s protection. Locke goes on to say that it is lawful for one whose rights are being violated to defend that right in proportion to the offense intended. So, if someone is trying to murder you, then you may lawfully kill your attacker to defend your own life. Not only that, you may lawfully kill someone who is trying to murder someone else. That is, you may come to the defense of others.
But wait! There’s more! According to Locke, “[E]very man, in a state of nature, has a power to kill a murderer” both to deter others from committing murder and to remove the threat of a murderer going about murdering people.”6 So you've really done it now.
The shape of our rights
What our “right to life” protects and doesn’t protect is a long discussion, with lots of nuance — and that’s my real point here. So let’s step back and use the right to life as an example for how we can define and think about our natural rights more broadly.
We should remember that most of the time the substance of a right, or what I like to call the contours of the right, its shape and meaning, can rarely be reduced to a bumper sticker or tweet-sized slogan.
Previously, we talked about a right being a claim against others or imposing an obligation on others, usually for them to either perform or refrain from performing certain actions. So your right to life imposes an obligation on others not to deprive you of your life.
But, as we’ve seen, there may be situations where someone’s right to life is not a valid claim. For instance, you are not obligated to refrain from taking the life of someone who is trying to murder you.
Thus, a person’s right to life is not "a right to have no one deprive you of your life no matter what” but more like “a right to have no one deprive you of your life so long as you aren’t trying to murder someone or haven’t previously murdered someone or [and so on, with any other circumstances where your right to life isn’t applicable].”
You can think of this as a default situation of you having a right to life but with various circumstances existing (such as trying to kill someone) by which you can forfeit that right.
Reading the fine print
But I don’t think that’s quite right.
To me it seems more accurate to say your right to life has built-in limits that define it. In may be an unalienable right, but it isn’t an unlimited right. There are bounds. There are terms and conditions that come with it, like the click wrap agreement on an app. By accepting the Creator’s gift of life and the unalienable right to continue in it, you agree, among other things, to not go around murdering people.
And if you do engage in murders, then your would-be victims have the right to kill you in self-defense, if necessary. Not because you’ve “forfeited” your right to live — that right is unalienable — but because you’ve placed yourself outside the bounds of what your “right to life” actually protects: “the right to live, so long as you’re not trying to murder someone.”
With every right comes corresponding responsibilities. Such as, “Don’t do murders.” People don’t like to talk about the responsibility side of the equation so much. But you can’t enjoy rights and ignore the responsibilities without eventually losing the rights. History shows this again and again.
Life in summary
I digress, so let’s summarize:
Our Creator-given rights are never absurd, because the Creator is not absurd. If you find yourself at an absurd definition of a right, you’re probably off track.
Rights, including our rights under natural law, are not unlimited. They are bounded. They have “term and conditions”.
Rights are inevitably paired with responsibilities, which we ignore at our peril.
Rights can rarely, if ever, be accurately described in a short statement or slogan. Laying out the contours of a right involves much nuance.
Now let’s jump back to my questions at the start of this discussion.
I said self-defense was the easy one. I think most people — though not all — would agree that you have the right to take a life in defense of your own life, or the lives of others. The right of self-defense is a broadly accepted principle. If you have a right to life, then you must have a right to protect your own life when circumstances warrant.7
It’s complicated
But what about killing an enemy soldier in war? Does that violate the enemy soldier’s right to life? Some would say no, if it’s a just war. Of course, now you have to define “just war.” Some would say yes, because they believe war is never justified, so killing in war can never be justified.
There is not universal agreement on whether taking another’s life in time of war is justified and thus whether such a killing violates the enemy soldier’s right to life. Never mind civilian deaths, draftees versus volunteers, and all the rest. War is complicated.
Capital punishment? Same. And so on through the list. The exact contours of the “right to life” — what it protects and what it doesn’t — have been debated by philosophers, lawmakers, clerics, theologians, soldiers, doctors, jurists, and ordinary people like you and me since Cain sucker punched Abel. We will never arrive at a universally agreed upon set of specifications for the right to life.
Ditto for every other right. But it is important that we continue to engage with the problem and keep wrestling with where the boundaries are.
One of the responsibilities that comes with the right to life is that we must respect the right to life of others when the boundary is clear. Don’t do murders!
And we should be humble and err on the side of preserving life over taking life in those areas where the lines are less clear.
Most people will never be called on to kill in self-defense, or in a war, or to carry out a sentence of execution.8
Civilians are far more likely to encounter the edges of someone else’s right to live in situations involving a loved one’s terminal illness or other deeply personal circumstances. If you find yourself there — or have been there — you know the lines are rarely bright. You're not likely to be thinking about the treatises of John Locke or the words of the Declaration of Independence at such a time.
However, I want to close this rambling discussion by going back to the Declaration. After asserting that we have certain unalienable rights and namechecking life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the next clause is “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men”.
The fundamental purpose of any government is to protect the rights of those who live under its laws and authority. First of those rights is the right of life — without that one, none of the rest matter! You can’t enjoy liberty or pursue happiness if you’re dead.
How well our government is protecting the lives of its citizens is one of the basic metrics of its effectiveness, its usefulness, and even its legitimacy. We’ll come back to this point, and more about law enforcement and self-defense, in a future edition.
Wrapping up
I spent so much time on Life I didn’t get to Liberty or Pursuit of Happiness. I’ll plan to discuss those (or at least one of them …) next time. Then we’ll move on to other topics.
I’d say more timely topics, but I believe the ideas and principles set out in the Declaration — about self-evident truths, unalienable rights, and the proper purposes and limits of government — are timeless. They provide an important framework for understanding and responding to current events. We’ll be coming back to the Declaration often, so I wanted to spend some time there the outset of our Daily Conquest journey.
Those are my thoughts — let me know yours! If you’re a Daily Conquest subscriber, you can leave a comment below. If you want to comment privately, you can reply to the email you received or write to dailyconquest @ substack.com.
See you next time! Conquer the day!
Here’s a quick biography of John Locke from … Biography. https://www.biography.com/scholar/john-locke
Peardon, Thomas P. 1952. Introduction. In: Locke, John. The Second Treatise of Government. 1st ed. Peardon, Thomas P. ed. New York. MacMillan, vii.
Ibid.
Or maybe Locke believed there really was such a time. It’s unclear. But regardless of whether there was ever an actual historical “state of nature” the concept is the theoretical start of Locke’s whole framework.
To be clear, Locke was not endorsing unchecked vigilantism here. Well, maybe he was, but only in the notional “State of Nature” which no longer exists.
Once civil society and government is established men cede their individual right to punish murderers (and other criminals) to the proper authorities. But self-defense in a live threat situation is still on.
Defining exactly what circumstances properly trigger your right to self-defense is, of course, nuanced, complicated, and subject to much debate.
On the other hand, that’s probably what most Ukrainians thought until a few months ago.