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April 6, 2005
Defining Rights
One of the many reason's I am indebted to Ayn Rand is that by reading her work, I realized I needed to be able to clearly define many concepts I'd use in everyday speech. Freedom, reason, and logic are but a few examples. These are words that often mean different things to different people. Clearly, if you want to have substantive debates about ideas, everyone must start with an agreement on the definition of the concepts being discussed. If not, discussions unknowingly digress into a debate over semantics.
Probably the best example of the importance of being able to define a concept comes from the word "right". Years ago, if someone would have asked me to define what a "right" was, I'd probably reply "Well... it's a right. You know... a right" and would have been stuck with this circular definition. While I did have an idea of what the concept meant, not being able to articulate it clearly in some ways made it meaningless. Is there a difference between a right to free speech, a right to health care, or the right for Louis XIV to have absolute control over France, summed up by his famous declaration “L'état, c'est moi” (I am the state)? Clearly yes but what is that difference?
Let me start with Rand's definition of a right, as it is one of the clearer I've ever read (from "Man's Rights" in TVOS):
A "right" is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man's right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)
The concept of a "right" pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.
Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive—of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.
Keeping that definition in mind, head over and read Tom Palmer's recent review of Cass Sunstein’s book The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever. It will make the NRO piece all the more enlightening.
Posted by Peter Mork at April 6, 2005 7:02 PM
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