So, this has been a relatively recent advancement of mine ideologically, but I do want to offer some support for, at least, the Americanized version of natural rights in the declaration of independence. Not necessarily Locke's original version, but my own version.
I don't like natural rights theory itself. This idea that God has these objective ideas of morality that we just came up with in the 1700s seems wild to me. It's nonsense. Please, don't ever try to justify ideas by saying "God said so" or appealing to some sense of naturalness. The state of nature sucks in my ideology, I'm more aligned with the social contract type people in that we form societies in order to escape the state of nature. And that's what my basis of morality more or less is. That's not to say I'm a strict social contractarian either. I don't think that we can just say because a social contract says something, that it is good, but that's also what this article is intended to bridge, what IS good? What are the goals of morality?
Well, as I see it, the primary goal of morality is to enhance well being and reduce suffering. We make rules in order to leave a state of nature and leave longer, more pleasant, and less painful lives. In a sense, this is very parallel to the right to life. It is a similar idea with a similar goal. Rights are just social constructs we create, and they should be judged by their consequences. And the right to life, is essentially aligned with this urge of morality toward enhancing well being. If anything, what I offer here is an expanded version of the right to life. Not only do we have a right to life, but we should have a right to a life relatively free of suffering. I won't say we should just maximize pleasure as that might mean just hopping everyone up on brain chemicals like in Aldius Huxley's "A Brave New World", but minimizing suffering seems like an intinsic good. Improving health and well being seems like an intrinsic good. Avoiding death seems like an intrinsic good. These are all the primary goal of morality. To make life more longer, more pleasant, and relatively free of suffering to a reasonable degree. I say reasonable because I know philosophers like to try to twist things and take them to extremes and I will say there are likely exceptions that would come up in specific thought experiments. I'm actually trying to avoid being specific and keep it open ended for people to debate. Because I'm sure if you ask a hundred different people what the good life looks like exactly, you'll get a hundred different answers.
Which actually brings up the need for the other natural rights. The right to liberty and the right to pursue happiness. So, liberty is the natural state of humanity. If anything, the social contract is predicated on us leaving a state of absolute liberty so we can live with more security, as per above. We aim for a world where we're not murdered or tortured to death or otherwise harassed or made miserable by state action, and we tend to adopt a relatively minimalistic approach to doing it. Because the point of rules is to stop problems that arise in their absence. Liberty should always be seen as the default state of humanity, and social contracts, in their pursuit of security, should seek to balance it with liberty. Liberty is important because people differ on the specifics of what the good life looks like. i don't believe in a single model of how humans should act or should live. They should be able to decide for themselves, and live in accordance with their desires, assuming their desires don't harm others. If anything, people have a right to be left alone to a reasonable degree to pursue their own lives and their own interests.
Which brings us to the third right. The right to pursue happiness. If liberty is framed negatively, as in, the right to be left alone and not interfered with, the pursuit of happiness is the right to pursue that which makes us happy. It's the more positive liberty that complements the negative liberty. Here, people have a right to pursue what makes them happy. And we should create an environment that allows them to pursue that happiness. In a sense, real libertarianism and indepentarianism are based somewhat on this. Indepentarianism is more the right to be left alone, the right to say no, the right to non interference, but Van Parij's real libertarianism is more toward the right to pursue the life one wants. Either way, the two complement and overlap with each other. You cant be allowed to pursue happiness if you aren't first given the right to be left alone. So they do kind of overlap with each other.
And yeah. I think this is a reasonable secular framework to basically backdoor the Americanized version of natural rights into discussion.
Now, as you can tell, I explicitly avoided supporting the right to property. Because it's not a natural right, and as I've argued many times in the past, including the other day in my human centered capitalism article, the right to property is actually counter to the above rights. In modern society, we dont properly give people a right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and this is because the right to property effectively forces people to work. And if anything, I think paying some taxes so everyone can be freer and have their basic needs met so they can achieve their full potential in our society in terms of their quality of life, liberty, and ability to pursue happiness is actually the lesser evil. I mean, we modify the rewards system for work a little bit, make a property rights system that prioritizes people having enough to be truly free and taken care of in society, and THEN we let property be tied to work purely as a motivator. I mean, capitalism works, it's pragmatic, it motivates people to get the sausage made, but the problem is, without these important guard rails that come up within an economic bill of rights like the right to an income, the right to healthcare, etc., is that people end up becoming enslaved by the system to produce. If anything, the right to property in an absolutist sense keeps us enslaved. So no, property must be subservient to the other three rights. We can have a "property rights system", but such a system should not be treated as absolute.
But yeah. That's how I see things. We can't really even say any of this stuff are "rights", as "rights" come from God by divine fiat, and I fundamentally reject that. Rather, rights in my worldview are social structures that outline the goals and limitations of morality and governance to ensure that it does what it's supposed to do, while being subject to reasonable limitations to avoid overstepping its bounds. A right to life guarantees life and well being. A right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, ensures other governmental structures don't overreach and create tyranny. Again, we want a society that ensures people are taken care of, but also free to be left alone and pursue their own interests. And my ideology is kind of an attempt to balance these things.
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