what are our rights

Our “rights” are a constant source of discussion, making one believe that we are naturally endowed with a list of these, and the only argument revolves around which items are on the list. The reality may not be so simple.

Looking at the natural world, it’s hard to find anything resembling rights. From birth on it is a struggle to eat and to keep from being eaten. A creature’s survival depends on luck and on how good it is at these two things. Lions don’t have a right to a fat gazelle, and gazelles don’t have a right to plentiful grass or to immunity from lions.

What humans consider rights are part of the social overlay we place over the natural world, something that imposes our concepts of order on what we perceive as natural disorder. Like most other items in human culture, these are artificial, in that they do not occur naturally. We build certain rights into the structure of our societies. For example, most societies feel one has the right not to be murdered, so they impose severe penalties on murderers.

When the Declaration of Independence claims, “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,” they start the sentence with “We.” In this they are saying that our culture, our society, our leaders hold these things to be true. They did not claim that this applies to people in far away places, bob cats, inch worms or oak trees.

Not all societies have our long list of rights. In some places, the king or chief has most of the rights, and the people have the right to do whatever doesn’t displease the leader. The old Soviet Union believed most rights were reserved for the collective, not the individual, and the collective was embodied in the leaders. Other societies base all rights on their religious books.

Naturally, we prefer our long list of rights, but even in our society some people would rather sacrifice some of those for a bit more order and security. In times of war, we tend toward order and security, and the degree and timing of the return to rights is always debated. The bottom line being that there are no set of rights that seem natural and proper for every human and for every occasion.

We can add to our list or subtract from it. We can have the right to universal medical care, equal civil rights for all, rights of the poor equal to those of the rich, rights of women regarding child bearing and many others. We can even lose our rights and allow someone to enslave us.

We, individually and as a people, have to decide what rights we are to have, and then we must secure these and defend them, once secured. We can secure them by force, which often backfires on us, leaving us with fewer rights, or we can secure them through legislation and jurisprudence. We can also convince others that our list of rights is best, and then we build a consensus which changes our society’s point of view. We can stand up individually against transgressions against our rights, or we can act collectively. However we choose to do it, and whatever list of rights we deem proper, we must do it, for without a conscious social act, we revert to the natural world, where the concept of “rights” has no meaning.