4. Natural Law and Natural Rights

0:00Chapter 4 Natural Law and Natural Rights As we have indicated, the great failing of natural law theory, from Plato and Aristotle to the Thomists and down to Leo Strauss and his followers in the present day, is to have been profoundly statist rather than individualist. This classical natural law theory placed the locus of the good and of virtuous action in and the State, with individuals strictly subordinated to state action. Thus from Aristotle's correct dictum that man is a social animal, that his nature is best fitted for social cooperation, the classicists leaped illegitimately to a virtual identification of society and the state, and thence to the state as the major locus of virtuous action.

0:55It was, in contrast, the Levellers, and particularly John Locke in 17th century England, who transformed classical natural law into a theory grounded on methodological, and hence political, individualism. From the Lockean emphasis on the individual as the unit of action, as the entity who thinks, feels, chooses and acts, stemmed his conception of natural law in politics as establishing the natural rights of each individual. It was the Lockean individualist tradition that profoundly influenced the later American revolutionaries and the dominant tradition of libertarian political thought in the revolutionary new nation.

1:40It is this tradition of natural rights libertarianism upon which the present volume attempts to build. Locke's celebrated second treatise on government was certainly one of the first systematic elaborations of libertarian, individualistic, natural rights theory. Indeed, the similarity between Locke's view and the theory set forth below will become evident from the following passage. Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

2:38It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labor Something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this laborer being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to. He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself. They can deny, but the nourishment is his. I ask, then, when did they begin to be his? And his plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could. That labor put a distinction between them and common. That added something to the more-than nature the common mother of all had done, and so they become his private right. And will anyone Can say he had no right to those acorns or apples he thus appropriated because he had not the consent of all mankind to make them his?

3:49If such a consent as that was necessary, man had starved, notwithstanding the plenty God had given him. We see in commons, which remain so by compact, that tis the taking part of what is common, and removing it out of the state nature leaves it in, which begins the property, without which the common is of no use. It should not be surprising that Locke's natural rights theory, as historians of political thought have shown, was riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies. After all, the pioneers of any discipline, any science, are bound to suffer from inconsistencies in the present work are only surprising to those steeped in the unfortunate modern fashion that has virtually abolished constructive political philosophy in favor of a mere antiquarian interest in older texts.

4:53In fact, libertarian natural rights theory continued to be expanded and purified after Postlock, reaching its culmination in the 19th century works of Herbert Spencer and Lysander Spooner. The myriad of post-lock and post-leveler natural rights theorists made clear their view that these rights stem from the nature of man and of the world around him. A few strikingly worded examples, 19th century German-American theorist Francis Lieber in In his earlier and more libertarian treatise, wrote, The law of nature, or natural law, is the law, the body of rights, which we deduce from the essential nature of man.

5:38And the prominent 19th century American Unitarian minister, William Ellery Channing. All men have the same rational nature and the same power of conscience, and all are are equally made for indefinite improvement of these divine faculties and for the happiness to be found in their virtuous use. And Theodore Wolsey, one of the last of the systematic natural rights theorists in 19th century America. Natural rights are those which by fair deduction from the present physical, moral, social, religious characteristics of man he must be invested with in order to fulfill the ends If, as we have seen, natural law is essentially a revolutionary theory, then so a fortiori is its individualist natural rights branch.

6:34As the 19th century American natural rights theorist Elisha P. Hurlberg put it, the laws shall be merely declaratory of natural rights and natural wrongs, and whatever is indifferent to the Laws of Nature shall be left unnoticed by human legislation, and legal tyranny arises whenever there is a departure from this simple principle. A notable example of the revolutionary use of natural rights is, of course, the American Revolution, which was grounded in a radically revolutionary development of Lockean theory during the 18th century. The famous words of the Declaration of Independence, as Jefferson himself made clear, were enunciating nothing new, but were simply a brilliantly written distillation of the views held by the Americans of the day.

7:28We 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. The more common triad at the time was life, liberty and property. 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. Particularly striking is the flaming prose of the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Applying natural rights theory in a revolutionary way to the question of slavery.

8:20The right to enjoy liberty is inalienable. Every man has a right to his own body, to the products of his own labor, to the protection of law. That all these laws which are now in force, admitting the right of slavery, are therefore or before God, utterly null and void, and therefore they ought instantly to be abrogated. We shall be speaking throughout this work of rights, in particular the rights of individuals to property in their persons and in material objects. But how do we define rights? Right has cogently and trenchantly been defined by Professor Sadowski. When we say that one has the right to do certain things, we mean this and only this, that it would be immoral for another, alone or in combination, to stop him from doing this, by the use of physical force or the threat thereof.

9:20We do not mean that any use a man makes of his property within the limits set forth is necessarily a moral use. Sadowski's definition highlights the crucial distinction we shall make throughout this work between a man's right and the morality or immorality of his exercise of that right. We will contend that it is a man's right to do whatever he wishes with his person. It is his right not to be molested or interfered with by violence from exercising that right. But what may be the moral or immoral ways of exercising that right is a question of personal ethics rather than of political philosophy, which is concerned solely with matters of right and of the proper or improper exercise of physical violence in human relations.

10:14The importance of this crucial distinction cannot be overemphasized, or as Elisha Hurlbert would concisely put it, the exercise of a faculty by an individual is its only use. The manner of its exercise is one thing. That involves a question of morals. The right to its exercise is another thing.