Lesson 6: Individual Rights and the State
Objective rights (part 2)
We have just seen two principles which guide our use of the concept of rights. To illustrate these principles, let's take the example of the right to property :
* Our rights stop where the others' begin : Our right to property stops where the other person's right to property begins. He has the right to his own property, and demanding that he provide me with it would break his own rights.
* Rights are negative : The right of property does not give you the right to take other people's property. They protect the product of your work from other people stealing it.
These two principles express the same thing, in a different form. They lead to another important principle which we have also seen in ethics, the non-initiation of force.
The fact that the initiation of force is socially undesirable can be seen as a consequence of rights being negative. If all rights are a freedom for the self, and not rights to other people's freedom, then no one is justified in using force or fraud in usurping another person's rights. This gives us our first practical principle, and this is why it is so important :
Man's rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.The precondition of a civilized society is the barring of physical force from social relationships - this establishing the principle that if men wish to deal with one another, they may do so only by means of reason: by discussion, persuasion and voluntary, uncoerced agreement.
For this quote and more on the non-initiation of force as applied to politics, see Capitalism : The Unknown Ideal, p330.
Note that I have been working under the premise that rights only apply to the individual.
In ethics, we have started on the premise that only individuals act and benefit. This is still true in politics : society is a collection of individuals. "Society" as a whole does not act or benefit, only individuals in that society do.
In this sense, the term "individual rights" is a redundant expression. All rights are necessarily individual. A group cannot have more rights than its component individuals. Groups themselves do not possess rights.
For example, the notion that a corporation can exist as a "moral entity", which has itself rights and responsibilities, is a corporatist absurdity. "Companies" do not dump toxic chemicals in a river. "Companies" do not fraud customers by selling them defective products. It is individuals who work for, or own, that company who take decisions and make mistakes. There is no such thing as a "moral entity".
To take another example on the egalitarianist side, the notion of "common good" is fallacious as well. There is no "common entity" which benefits from the good, no globulous ubermind or collective unconsciousness which is the beneficiary of man's work. Only individuals benefit from an action.
