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• I: Social Science Methodology
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• Laissez Faire and Moral Revolution
• III: Human Rights and Ethics
• Recent Scholarship On Rights
• Two Concepts of Rights
• Establishing Human Rights
• Misunderstanding Human Rights
• Is Privacy an Absolute Right?
• Animal Rights
• Nature and the Tao
• Self-knowledge: Nietzsche, Heidegger & Buber
• The Prospects of Objective Morality
• Measuring Ethical Ideologies
• Individualism and “locus of Control”
• Should We License Parents?
• IV: The Heritage of Freedom
• How Conservatives Differ From Liberals
• English Radicalism: Rights Vs. War & Taxes.
• Liberalism: the Seedbed of American Culture
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• Thomas Burke: Whig Radical
• Liberal Republicans During Reconstruction
• Adam Smith & the Liberal Tradition
• Human Individuality and Autonomy

Misunderstanding Human Rights

Tibor R. Machan

• Visiting Assoc. Prof. University of California, Santa Barbara; Visiting Assoc. Prof. SUNY Fredonia; Resident Scholar, Reason Foundation

“The Corruption of Human Rights.” Policy Review (forthcoming, 1981)

If we are to believe the United Nations Charter Universal Declaration of Human Rights, individuals have rights to vacations, to be employed by someone, to be given health care, and to numerous other benefits apart from their rights to life, liberty, and property. And these days the American legal system has firmly embraced some of these ideas. One “public service” ad speaks of the right not to be lonely!

How did the original concept of natural (human individual) rights—gained from Locke (but hinted at by early Greek thinkers, Aquinas and Ockham)—which meant not having one's moral independence thwarted by members of one's community, reach such a confused conception in our time?

The difference between that original notion and the current one is clear: The right to life, liberty, and property mean that others have no justification to use or govern a person and his property unless permission is given. It affirms the moral independence of human individuals concerning their own lives and creations. The current view of rights includes references to valued services and items to be produced by some people for others on command of governments. The former principle liberates individuals, the latter places them into servitude (of course always for allegedly noble reasons, e.g., others' needs).

One main reason for the change is that the foundations of human individual rights have been abandoned in modern philosophy. The very idea that human beings are something definite in being human has been abandoned: human nature is said to be nothing but a prejudice, with no foundation in fact and logic. So when human rights are discussed, there is no clear referent as to the scope of the concept “human” so as to provide criteria for distinguishing human from, say, special rights (e.g., those created by contract or institutional affiliation). Instead, now some process loosely referred to as ordinary language analysis (or consulting one's moral intuitions) serves to guide the identification of human rights. This comes down to listening to what people want very badly, even call theirs by right (or to what they strongly feel should be theirs by right), and concluding that therefore those things are human rights.

Another reason is that human beings are widely thought of as passive participants in nature's and history's flow of events. Thus the better conditions of some are seen as accidents and it is felt that fairness requires that these conditions be spread around equally. By reference to this criterion of fairness, it is felt that everyone has a right to some roughly equal share of goods, irregardless of who creates these goods.

The result in public policy is a massive interventionist state which embarks upon “adjudicating” demands of rights and a confused foreign “human rights” policy. All this in the face of the error of rejecting the idea of human nature and accepting the belief that human beings are passive and not responsible for their conduct. The error of rejecting human nature stems from the false belief that the nature of something must be forever fixed. If this were so, no nature could be identified, since we could never make sure that no change will occur in the future. The error of human passion stems from an invalid reductionism which holds that everything in nature must reduce in character to Newtonian matter-in-motion, human beings included.

By correcting these two errors, we can make progress in recovering and improving the very good idea of natural human individual rights.