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Sunday, February 27, 2005
Intentions, Purposes, And Rights
At the fine FreedomSight blog, in the train of comments to a post by proprietor Jed about .50 caliber rifles and the recent attempt to ban them, we find the following comment:
What is the basis for a right to an orderly society? It's implicit in the formation of governments. If we all thought we could protect our own interests without assistance, we wouldn't bother forming governments at all. How much liberty am I willing to give up for order? It's the classic tradeoff: freedom vs. security. (Short answer: It depends. It depends on the specific circumstances of what's being relinquished for what expected gain.)
Jed responded:
Forming an orderly society isn't a right, it's a purpose, and perhaps a privilege. The two are quite different. My apologies for not being up to the philosopical heavy lifting here ... perhaps anon.
...and then wrote your Curmudgeon to invite him to participate.
Jed's riposte is entirely adequate and perfectly focused. Order is something we want, not something we can claim as a right. How could it possibly be a right, when it cannot be found in nature and there are so many divergent visions of it? More, under both contractarian (constitutional) and natural-rights theory, governments may only exercise such powers as the people delegate to them, and the people may not violate the rights of dissident minorities among them in doing so. Therefore, no man nor group's vision of order may be imposed through a government at the expense of any man's rights.
It is possible that the debate over what is and what is not a right will last until the extinction of our species. However, if an individual man possesses any rights at all, even the mere right to argue for his rights, by implication he must possess the right to defend those rights by force. For the defining difference between rights and any other sort of human possession is that it is morally acceptable to defend them by force and morally unacceptable to invade them by force.
From that follows the Second Amendment and all that it implies at maximum extension.
Now, there are obvious bounds on the right to own weapons. One of the most common straw men used to counter the right to keep and bear arms is the challenge, "But that would mean private citizens have the right to own nuclear bombs!" Persons who mount this challenge usually think they're being clever.
But a nuclear weapon is not controllable enough to be used in defense. To pop it off inherently involves the immediate slaughter of many thousands of people uninvolved with one's personal travails. More, the "non-prompt" effects of a nuclear blast would not only kill additional thousands, but would also precipitate secondary consequences likely to kill far more, and to hurl a huge region into chaos. The same argument would countervail a claim to a right to own any weapon of mass destruction.
Nuclear weapons are among the evil necessities of a State-ridden world. Humanity's two hundred governments are mostly evil, mostly rapacious, and mostly just waiting for a chance to spring upon one another and take what they desire. Some of the most evil ones have nuclear weapons, and others are straining hard to acquire them. Therefore, we're forced to have them too. Since the nuclear genie is unlikely to return to his bottle on his own, the condition will probably persist until governments are no more.
At the individual level, there is no argument for weapons of mass destruction. However, as long as a weapon can be used in a focused manner, such that the effects of its discharge can be limited to a well-defined target, it will remain the individual's right to acquire one, if he has the means, for his own defense; the mass-destruction argument cannot reach it.
For Jed's commenter's argument to have any weight, the defense of one's individual rights would have to be a conferred privilege, and "order" according to someone's vision would have to be a right. But this would upend any serious conception of rights; it would place the State above the people it's supposed to guard. The State, an agent with only delegated powers, cannot claim any rights whatsoever. Only if it is seen as prior and superior to the individual can it make such a claim -- but that ordering contradicts every fundamental principle of a free society.
Comments
Thanks for the input, Fran. You give me more credit than I deserve, but I aspire to live up to your commendation.
Posted by jed on 02/27/2005 at 12:33 PMI’m not a philophical heavy lifter either, but one of the pleasures of the internet is that I can pontificate on subjects I don’t know much about!
The first thing I notice is that you’re not simply asserting a right to defend your rights by force. You’re claiming a right to stockpile weapons even though your other rights are not currently being violated. You can say, “But if the government ever became tyrannical in the future, how could I fight it if I didn’t stockpile weapons now?”, which is logical, but that’s a pragmatic argument, rather than a philosophical argument. In this view of things, acquiring weapons is an insurance policy against possible future tyranny rather than a fundamental human right.
Second thing I notice is your statement: “Order is something we want, not something we can claim as a right. How could it possibly be a right, when it cannot be found in nature and there are so many divergent visions of it?” Your same objections apply to conventional human rights. I may _want_ to (say) proseletyze my religion freely, but other people may not allow me to do so. You won’t find religious rights “in nature”. And there are highly divergent views on religious freedom—ask Salman Rushdie.
I argued against the 2nd Amendment in terms of human rights because Jed had asked me to, but in truth my own view on human rights may be closer to Jeremy Bentham’s, who called natural rights “nonsense on stilts”. Part of his objection, I believe, was that the concept of natural rights is inextricably bound to the concept of legal rights, which can only exist under a government. In a truly lawless situation, no-one has rights, but no-one has restrictions: there are only competing interests. We establish governments partly to protect our own interests more efficiently and to resolve competing interests peacefully—i.e., to form a more orderly society.
As you can guess, I take a practical, seat-of-the-pants approach to gun rights and gun control. If I thought there were a significant chance of our government devolving into tyranny in the near-future, I might favor making even military weapons available to the general public. But at present, I’m a LOT more worried about being killed by criminals or terrorists, so I tend to favor gun control.
Interesting comments from both you and Jed… thanks for a good debate.
Posted by on 02/28/2005 at 11:50 PMSeems to me that a person concerned about being killed by criminals would also be concerned about personal self defense. But that’s rather beside the point.
The premise of natural rights, as I understand it, flows from the foundation that each of us owns ourselves. Contrast this with fuedal systems, for example, or societies where slavery is still condoned. It is our self-ownership which enables all other property rights, for how can I trade my labor for something, if my labor is not my own? The right of self-defense is also derived from self-ownership.
I haven’t read Bentham. I suspect I prefer Locke.
Posted by jed on 03/01/2005 at 01:17 AM
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