Introduction
Those of us in America and other rights-based societies live in countries where we constantly hear about rights. It seems that this discussion is often most heard in America where you can hear someone talking about their rights or someone else’s everywhere you turn. This is not without reason as we live in a rights-based country and, in the case of America, we live in a country whose entire start came because our ancestors’ rights as British citizens were being violated.
With all of this talk about rights and rights’ violations, you would think we would understand what a right is and is not. But as I have talked with people and pondered the concept of rights myself, I have realized that most do not have the first idea what a right is at its core. They do not even have half of the definition of a right or a basic understanding of what makes a right a right. Many might point to the American Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Of course, those are examples of rights, but if you were to ask them what a right is, how many could tell you?
Living in a rights-based society, we should know what a right is and what it is not. How can we stand up for our rights and others if we do not even understand what we’re standing for or why they matter? Furthermore, it is important to understand what kinds of philosophies we can use to determine the source of rights. These philosophies ultimately will lead to either the upholding or the tearing down of human rights, making it essential we have a strong grasp on the philosophies and their logical conclusions. That is what we will examine in this article.
What Is A Right?
The dictionary defines a right as “a moral or legal entitlement to have or obtain something or to act in a certain way” (Oxford Languages/Google Dictionary). In the case of human rights, we have here two different perspectives that we could look at: the moral and the legal. But this definition still is not the most useful one in understanding what a right is.
I was working through a rights-related question on the Masterpiece Cakeshop (for those who don’t know what that is, you can find out more here.) and the differences between that case and cases back during the apartheid period of our history where the government denied business owners the “right” to refuse service to blacks. I could not understand how one could argue that it was acceptable for the government to step in to stop discrimination during the apartheid period and not when they step in and claim that a gay individual has the right to violate the religious freedoms of another in the name of non-discrimination. Whether you like the question or not, it was this confusion that led me to ask my father about it. He and I discuss philosophy, theology, and history on a frequent basis, and he is very well-read, so I thought–correctly as it turned out–that he might be able to help me work through the question I was struggling with.
During the conversation, my father gave me a definition of rights that is much more basic. A right is the ability to say no with moral and legal grounding. Note that a true right may be upheld by the law, but the law does not make it a right. We will get into that point later.
Basically, when you exercise a right, you are either saying no to someone else’s request of you or saying no to someone else who has said no to your request.
The Concept in Action?
What does this look like in action? Let us look at the Masterpiece Cakeshop case that I was asking about. In this case, the artist who owned the shop created both custom event cakes and pre-made event cakes/cupcakes/etc. The owner was asked by a gay couple to create a custom wedding cake for their reception. The owner, on the grounds of his sincerely held religious beliefs, exercised what he viewed as a legitimate right to say no. The couple then took him to court, thereby saying that his claim that he had the right to refuse was invalid. The question then becomes, of course, who actually has a right to say no.
How Far Does the Right to Say No Go?
There are cases, of course, limits to this. There are points where we do not have a right to say no, nor should we. Not everything we wish to say no to is a “right” to say no to. While we do believe–at least in America–in certain inalienable rights that no government can take, those rights do not extend to every point in which we wish to say no.
If a police officer comes to your home with a warrant and demands you allow him or her to search the house, you do not have a right to refuse. You may not say no. But if the government comes into your home and tries to take away all of your guns, you do have a right to say no because you have rights to those things and neither can take them away in the absence of anything that would make your right to say no null and void. You have a right to hold guns (second amendment) because our Founding Fathers understood that an unarmed people facing a tyrannical government was likely to lose the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So, they viewed possession of firearms as a part of the natural right to protect one’s life. Wherever you stand on the issue, the second amendment says what it says, and it is a right that the government cannot take because it is ingrained in our Constitution.
This, of course, is not necessarily an example of an inalienable right in some respects. It would fall under the legal header in the dictionary definition of a right, but that still does not mean that the government can take it away just because it is a legal right granted to us because the basis for that right was–in the minds of the Founders–irrevocably entwined with our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. But this statement, to be supported, requires us to go to the next point regarding where our rights come from.
Where Do Rights Come From?
Now, if we are going to understand what constitutes a right and how we can protect them, we need to examine where they come from. The American Declaration of Independence says that “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.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
This leads us to the first of the arguments on where rights come from. The Founders and many who followed after believed they were endowed (bestowed or granted) to us by a Creator who was far above any human and did not change. Note that, while in the case of America’s Founders this Creator was the Christian God, it is not necessary that it be the Christian God that the individual believes in for this argument to hold sound.
While I am personally of the belief that, based on my research and the evidence, the Christian God is the only one whose existence can possibly make arguments for morality (which was part of the dictionary definition for rights, if you recall) hold sound, it should be admitted here that anyone who has a belief in any kind of Creator whose will–at least in the area of rights and morality–can be known and who does not change will render this argument sound on those grounds.
The second argument is that we are granted our rights by government. This view has become more and more prevalent in American society as our society has moved away from a belief in any sort of Creator–Christian or otherwise–and toward increasingly higher numbers of agnostics and atheists. This argument is predominantly founded in evolution. It rests on the idea that humans are no different than animals and that there is no Creator to endow them with any specific rights.
Therefore, for society to function, someone must decide both what is moral and what the inhabitants of that society may and may not do. In this argument, then, if carried to logical conclusion, the government is the best source of those rights as no individual could determine such a thing for the collective. Furthermore, since society is constantly evolving just the same as everything else is, the next step is always best and we must always be evolving our rights and laws to encompass the ever-changing landscape. Nothing, then, can be fixed. We have no inalienable rights because there is nothing particularly special about us to necessitate them, nor is there a God to grant them who does not change on a whim.
There are no other rational arguments. Either our rights come from some force or being outside of ourselves or they come from humans and their institutions deciding what rights are at any given moment in time based upon what they believe is best for society. You cannot have it some other way. The very nature of the issue precludes it.
Which Argument Holds?
Now that we know what the arguments are for the source of rights, which one should we be standing by? Let’s start by examining the one the Founding Fathers presented us with. This argument, recall, states that human beings have certain inalienable rights endowed or granted to them by a Creator. This accomplishes a few key things.
1. These rights will not change because the Creator does not change. The rights are set in stone, and they belong to each individual regardless of what society may wish to say or do.
2. Taking away those rights can be considered wrong as it violates what the Creator granted to us each as human beings. (For example, we could declare slavery to be wrong because it violates the principle that no one is owed another person’s labor or the fruits of it without both just compensation and the agreement of the other individual. We could also declare it wrong because it violates the inalienable rights of each individual to liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and life.) While a government may choose to violate rights in practicality, they do not in philosophy or reality have the right themselves to take away these rights.
3. Government is not the source of rights; it is the defender of them. Therefore, government can neither grant to nor take from someone any right. Period. They do not have that power because they are not the source of rights. The Creator is, and the Creator is a higher authority than any human government will ever be.
4. We then have some basis for arguing on what those rights may be. Having a Creator in our belief system does not mean we will agree on what the rights might be that are granted to us. Muslims and Christians both believe in a Creator, but we have very different ideas of what the rights granted to us by that Creator are. So the existence of a Creator, while central to rights, does not guarantee agreement. It does, however, give us somewhere to start from and a way to debate which rights are truly rights and which are not.
That, then, is what the first argument gives us, logically. We can only say these things logically if we believe there is a Creator whose will and law can be known to the degree that it affects rights, at least, and who does not change their mind on what they have decreed as moral or as right.
The second argument is the one from an evolutionary perspective or one that precludes the existence of any Creator. Note that this argument would include anyone who says God exists but that we cannot know anything about the entity we are calling God. If we know nothing of our Creator, we cannot have any place to start on what rights might be inalienable and inherent to us as humans, and therefore, we are back, once again to humans having to make them up based on whatever reasoning they may feel is best suited to the time and place. So this argument says that there is no Creator or none that we can know, and therefore, government or society is the basis for rights. In this viewpoint a few things are true, logically:
1. Government must be able to both grant and take rights. Most of us today are fine with the first. Government gives people rights to other people’s work, time, and effort all the time in today’s day and age, in some countries more than others. Not many complain. But we do not much like the second: taking them away. However, if the government is our basis for rights, then they have to be able to take them away as well. You cannot say I have the ultimate authority over some realm of life and then tell me, “but I, the governed, am refusing you the ability to do a, b, and c with that ultimate authority.” If I am the place something originates from, I can both give it and deny it. That is how it has always worked and always will work.
2. We cannot declare the rights granted or not granted in times past or times to come as being right or wrong. This one may trip some people up. But let us go back to the point I made earlier about where this belief really stems from. It stems from a belief that there is no God (or none that we can know), and that society must determine what is best or right for them in that day and age. Therefore, if enslaving one group is beneficial to the larger society, it must not be wrong because it was in accordance with the purpose of survival, and the fittest survive. Of course, we no longer do that in today’s day and age because society has evolved past that and now finds that it is no longer beneficial to do the things that our ancestors did. It is survival of the fittest at its finest, and we were the fittest while those individuals in history who held slaves were not.
3. The majority may impose its will upon the minority wherever it pleases so long as it is in control of the government because it is then the source of rights.
4. We can never be certain of any right because tomorrow, the government as the source of that right may decide to take it away, and we have no recourse because there is nothing above the government if the government is the source of rights.
5. We also cannot look at another country who is doing horrible things to its citizens and say that they are violating rights. The government has decided that the citizens do not have rights to the same things we have decided our citizens do. Whether we agree or not, their choices must be acceptable because each society must determine for itself what is most beneficial for their survival at any point in time. Furthermore, if this causes the eradication of some group, this is not a problem because it is simply the strong winning out over the weak, which must happen in the natural course of things. This may lead to the death of the weaker or simply mean they are trodden under politically depending on where the society is at. The point is that none of it can be deemed reprehensible.
So which one is best and right? Well, if you are all right with a viewpoint that logically requires that nothing be wrong and that all rights can both be granted and taken by government, which may not be comprised of people in your favor at any given point in time, then the second can be taken as acceptable.
I, for one, am not able to stomach or swallow the implications required of me as a rational being if there is no Creator at all and the second argument is in the right. It would mean, if taken to its fullest conclusion, the eradication of all liberty and the institution of the same fascist regime that Ancient Rome, Germany, Italy, and the USSR (more on that to come at a later date) erected.
So, I must conclude that the first is the logical one if we are any sort of decent people who do not believe that is acceptable for all forms of evil to be enacted upon whoever is unlucky enough not to be included in a given society’s set of rights. I must further conclude that the first is in the right if I am to make any moral judgment upon the actions of rich plantation owners beating and destroying the lives of countless slaves or upon the actions of Hitler in destroying countless lives in his quest to eradicate the less “pure” races.
Conclusion
Each person is faced with these two arguments and must make up his or her mind without coercion from another. The points are clearly laid out here. I have also made my stance on the matter clear. With the evidence presented, you as the reader must determine for yourself whether one viewpoint or the other is preferable and which is correct. You must examine your own viewpoint and determine whether it holds logically valid when examined.
I find that many people I know who hold to the second want to argue both that there are rights the government cannot take away (inalienable rights, which as we have examined come from a source they will not admit) and also rights the government can give. But, as we stated, the government cannot be in any way involved in the giving of rights if it is also denied the taking of rights.
They may legislate, of course, whatever they please. Plenty of despots have done so in the past and will continue to do so. But there is no such thing as an inalienable right if rights are able to be legislated into or out of existence. If the government is the source of rights, then it may take or grant them as it pleases. If it is not the source of rights, then it can have nothing to do with giving or taking them, only with protecting those that may already exist–as the Founding Fathers stated. Therefore, any argument made for the second case while still insisting that we must have what only the first case can allow is rendered invalid on the grounds of logic. We cannot have both. It is a case of either/or in this matter by virtue of its nature, and we cannot pretend fairly that it is otherwise or else we delude ourselves.
So, I invite you to examine both arguments on the sources of rights and determine for yourself which you will hold. But in doing so, I must warn that you will need to examine the logic of what you already believe to be certain that it holds true to rationality. If it does not, then it should not be granted place any longer, and any of us who discover a logical fallacy or inconsistency in our thinking ought to make it a priority to determine what the logically sound conclusion would be, whichever direction it may go. But we can do neither if we do not first check our premises before continuing on to assume that both they and the thought process we have built with them are correct.
