Lesson 6: Individual Rights and the State
The consequence of ethics on politics
We have concluded in the last lessons that Objectivist ethics is based on volitional life as the prime value.
Politics is the study of the optimal social system.
Thus, politics includes such questions as : how should the law be established, what kind of institutions should we have, who has the power to do what, and so on. We can group all these questions into one : what kind of government, if any, should there be ?
"A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area" (Capitalism : The Unknown Ideal, p329)
These rules of social conduct depend on our goals - our values. Since we have established that volitional life is the prime value, and its corollaries are our positive values, the optimal societal context is one where everyone is free to pursue his own survival and flourishing - where no one must be sacrificed for another.
What is the concept which we use to understand this context ? It is the concept of rights. A right tells us what important concepts are protected in a society. More strictly, a right is a principle defining an individual's freedom in the societal context.
If no one in a given society has any rights, the government then has ultimate power to dispose of people's lives as it sees fit. We say properly that everyone in that society are slaves. A right is by necessity a restriction on the actions of the government.
Before we examine what these rights are, it is important to understand their nature. People routinely say that governments "grants" people rights. This is not correct. Rights are derived from ethical principles : therefore they are a derivate of reality, they are natural.
Thus we say properly "natural rights". They are not a matter of vote, opinion or dictates any more than science or reason are.
Because of the objective nature of politics, the government is an institution which administrates rights. It does not have the power to create or destroy them, unless it has power over human nature and reality itself.
Before continuing to the next section, you may wonder why I have posited that a government is necessary. Isn't anarchism - the absence of government - a possibility ?
This is a subtle but important point. While it is true that anarchism implies the absence of formal government, it still does not exclude the possibility of one or many organizations which "[hold] the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area". Such a power would simply be informal instead of formal.
While it is possible to have a society in a state of complete disorganization, such a state is usually temporary. These situations must eventually collapse to a state of formal or informal government.
For more on anarchy as seen from Objectivist political theory, see Capitalism : The Unknown Ideal on the bottom of page 334 and top of page 335.
