Natural Rights: The Complete Set

by Carl Milsted Jr.

Posted September 03, 2007

It’s About Freedom Baby!

Freedom is popular! It’s the American Way. So why aren’t people flocking to the LP? Where are the free spirits? Where are the hippies? Come on now, why can’t The Party of Pot get the hippies on board???

The answer may surprise you: most people don’t associate the libertarian philosophy with freedom.

They associate libertarianism with corporate domination. See movies such as Alien, Robocop, and Rollerball (the original). Watch episodes of Max Headroom and Dark Angel. Call this liberal propaganda if you want, but this propaganda has a basis in fact: the corporate world can be very authoritarian. Corporations are putting more people in uniforms than the government in this country. Read Bob Black’s The Abolition of Work.

Why isn’t libertarianism big on campus? Because this audience just spent the summer taking orders from big corporate managers and libertarians call for giving those same managers more power. Anarchocapitalism = Disney Emirates. Oh boy! Where can we sign up?

The freedom to own slaves, run sweatshops filled with indentured servants, or collect ground-rents from the peons is a rather narrow freedom vision. For many, socialism is preferable. Libertarianism fails as a freedom vision.

For those fixated on principles, the path is often to diss the peons, or rationalize around the potential dystopian consequences of pure libertarianism.

Rethinking Natural Rights

There is a better path: revisit the core principles. The reason why libertarians get stuck defending warlords, Frankensteins, robber barons, ecocide, the early Industrial Revolution and other unpleasant things is that libertarians are working with an incomplete theory of natural rights. A complete theory of natural rights includes libertarian, liberal, conservative and environmentalist components.

Ask yourself what rights would you have in a state of nature? What if you had all of planet Earth to yourself? This gives you the individual rights. Then, ask what rights you and your friends would have if you had Earth to yourselves?

Obviously, you get a host of libertarian rights: no taxes, no regulations, no restrictions on religious practice (or lack thereof). You and your friends can smoke dope, gamble and be naughty nudists if you so desire. Of course, you pay the consequences of your behavior. No work means no food or shelter. There would be no guaranteed healthcare system or other welfare benefits.

If you stop here, you end up with some recognizable flavor of libertarianism. You might go for anarchy, in a quest to preserve such rights perfectly, or you might opt for some government, in the recognition that such perfection is impossible, going instead for maximal preservation of these rights. While I think the latter flavor is a huge improvement over the unrealistic Zero Aggression Principle, both flavors look at an incomplete list of natural rights!

In a state of nature you would also have the wealth inherent in nature: animals to hunt, wild plants to harvest, beach to play on. All of this would be rent free. Most of the world’s poor have less than what nature provides. They have to pay rent to landlords for the right to have a bit of ground. To be poorer than a certain floor is to be deprived of natural rights. This is a liberal right! A system designed to preserve natural rights would require paying rent to the landless. A Citizen’s Dividend funded by natural resource exploitation fees would be a better approximation of natural rights than a system of zero taxes!

And there would be conservative rights as well. You would have the right to morally raise your family away from the influence of drug taking naughty nudists. Calling for the end of all morals legislation deprives them of natural rights. A better approximation would be to make such laws very local – as in less than citywide – with bounded penalties, and possibly with compensation for dissenters when the local rules are changed. (Topless beaches vs. manadatory burkhas should be a local decision.)

Once you get the swing of this line of reasoning, environmental rights become obvious as well. In a state of nature you have nature. Duh! You have clean air, wild animals, etc. You have the right to roam through pristine wilderness. (And if you applied this reasoning to animals, you could get a ban on certain factory farming practices, but you would not get a ban on hunting or eating meat: carnivores exist in a state of nature.)

But remember that you also have the right to exploit nature in such a state of nature. A complete hands-off policy deprives people of natural rights, as does a policy of unlimited exploitation. Private property is a compromise. People get limited domains to exploit, or not, as they see fit. But it is an imperfect compromise. Having public right-of-ways, public squares, and public wildernesses helps provide for those natural rights not well served by private property. A mix is optimal.

No Perfect Solution

In case you haven’t noticed, we have conflicts. In a world of 6 billion people, it is impossible to preserve all natural rights completely, or even perfectly compensate everyone for rights lost. Your right to make noise conflicts with my right to quiet. Your right to roam conflicts with my solitude on my own property.

Any attempt to optimize the preservation of natural rights is going to be messy. There are subjective decisions to be made, including decisions to be made as a society. Private property rights work well for some domains, but other decisions are better made democratically.

Since the subjective value of different rights changes, it is impossible to derive the optimal solution using the philosophical approaches beloved by Objectivists and Rothbardians. A complete natural rights approach requires embracing politics, not just as a temporary path out of our current bad government situation, but forever.

The bad news: a complete natural rights approach leaves us stuck with some politics. The good news: by embracing this approach we could actually get good at politics.

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