“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” wrote Thomas Jefferson 244 years ago, “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.”
A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that we should discuss the nature of unalienable rights. John Locke was an early thinker in this area; his Second Treatise on Civil Government was published 330 years ago. In it, he discussed the difference between a state of nature and a state of civil society. He argued that the primary purpose of government is to protect the rights humans possess in the state of nature from other humans.
So, like Locke, let’s start the conversation about human rights with, “what rights would you have if you were alone in the jungle?” You have the right to be alive, the right to stay alive as long as naturally possible, the right to make your own choices, including choosing your actions, the right to do what you think is best to improve your own life, the right to learn and grow in your ability to make your choices, and the right to possess what you have taken from nature or built out of nature.
And I totally understand that there’s a debate to be had as to whether other parts of nature have natural rights or just us, but for the time being, let’s gloss over that.
We add other people into the mix and it becomes: you have the right to do those things as long as you don’t interfere with someone else’s right to do those things.
Humans have a very simple, very intuitive sense for cooperation, for getting things done without infringing on each others’ rights. Trade for example. If you want to improve your life by eating a fish and you don’t have a fish but someone else does, you can get the fish without infringing on the other person’s rights by providing something that they value more than the fish but you value less.
This is pretty straight forward. Life, liberty, property. Now, let’s get into the weeds.
Do you have the right to live and pursue your happiness without being offended by other human beings? That one is a bit tricky. Because the logic tracks, to an extent, that people are infringing on your right to make your own choices and engage in your own actions if they accost you with words you have no way of preventing from burrowing into your brain and forcing you against your will to think about things that you would not otherwise choose to think about.
Well, 229 years ago, James Madison drafted the very first amendment to the Constitution of the United States dictating that the right of every single person to say anything they want to say was so important for the preservation of Jefferson’s unalienable rights that it was added to the list. Because restricting speech is a greater infringement on your right to act and on everyone’s right to learn from each other and grow than hearing horrible things is on your right to not think about them.
So do you have the right to not be offended? On the contrary, you have the far more valuable right to be offended. You have the right to disagree with anything that anyone says, including people with power over you, even the government, and the right to try to get other people to agree with you.
In order to prevent people from saying things you would choose not to hear, you would necessarily have to give up your right to disagree with the people who wield that power. Remember McCarthyism in the ’50s? That is worse than any horrible, hateful, disgusting thing that any human being could possibly say to another.
Let’s try another tough one. Do you have the right to shelter? That is a tough question. Shelter is one of the most basic necessities for life. And people have the right to live, don’t they?
To answer, let’s return to Locke’s state of nature. If you were alone in the jungle, would you have a shelter? No. You have the right to build a shelter. And you won’t have a shelter until you build it. To define shelter as a human right is to ignore the fact that shelter must be built. Shelters only exist because of human effort, human sacrifice.
Now, don’t mistake this analysis for an argument that government shouldn’t guarantee shelter. That’s different. Governments collect taxes and those taxes are spent taking care of their responsibilities, whatever they may be. A government could certainly be organized to guarantee shelter to everybody while giving fair value to the human effort and sacrifice necessary to supply it. But is shelter a human right? No, it is not.
The same argument applies to healthcare. If you caught the flu alone in the jungle, would it be cured for you? No. If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s that medical care is not infinite. Not even with today’s technology. It does not appear naturally in the world. It is built, like shelter, by human effort and human sacrifice. Like shelter, healthcare is NOT a human right.
And, just like shelter, from this point, there is a debate worth having: Should governments guarantee healthcare? Maybe. But if you ask me, guaranteeing shelter is infinitely more simple than guaranteeing healthcare. And, last I checked, the government of the United States hasn’t even figured out how to do that yet.
