Einstein marveled that a universe of raw cause and effect is not pure chaos, that, for instance the speed of a falling object could be described at all scales and in all gravitational fields by the simple equation Speed = 1/2 Gravitational force, ce He once said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”
As you thought about that and recognized its truth, there was a small, inaudible click of the cogs in your cognitive machinery between your ears. I want to give you several more of those clicks as I unfold for you the physics that forms the basis of the gut feeling you already have about your sacred rights to do as you please. My purpose is to open a vista on those rights that will empower you as you exercise them in your home, and everywhere else, especially when you have the opportunity to defend these powerful feelings in discussions with those who would twist or outright deny them.
Today, May 19th, 2026, my wife and I are in our small off-grid cabin in the tops of the Rocky Mountains. The nine miles of forest road from the highway to our acres of pristine pines, cedars, deer, and squirrels runs along a small stream on which the beavers have built a small dam and a fine, large lodge.
Fifty years ago today, May 19th, 1976, I was working feverishly on the Bicentennial feature series of eight articles entitled “A New Message” being published in The Freeman magazine, the main organ of the Foundation for Economic Education. The second in that series, On Human Rights and Government, introduced a new paradigm of natural rights that came to me then as I pondered in search of a basis for the rights demanded by our Declaration of Independence. I was hoping to find a basis that even an atheist could not dismiss as being an artifact of a false belief in a Creator that did not exist. Every time we drive by that beaver pond, I remember how it came to me then. I hope you will feel the same clicks in your cogs that I experienced fifty years ago.
The Natural Rights of the Beaver
It came to me that a visualization of a beaver felling a tree demonstrated his power over the tree, and that power gave him the authority necessary to live a beaver’s life. Click.
I saw him as a logger, a woodsman who was using his existential authority to build a lodge, a dam for winter food storage, and a water-locked entrance to his lodge. Click.
He was exercising his agency in a domain of freedom. Click.
He had many capabilities and was using each one freely and with authority. Click.
There was no better label for this dominion and authority than natural rights. Click.
I had never thought of anything but humans having natural rights, and apparently, no one else had either, but there they were undeniably and existentially. Double click.
So I had my answer for the Bicentennial treatment of the rights claimed by our Declaration of Independence, and I thought little of this revelation for more than 40 years. Then I decided to write a book about the false dichotomies surrounding the debate about church and state, and that soon led back to the beaver and the realization that all agents in the universe had similar rights. The implications of that fact soon began to unfold a whole raft of fascinating insights. Clickity clack.
Temporal Rights
Once I realized that this new theory of natural rights was largely unprecedented anywhere in world history, it was clear that it needed its own name, so it got “Temporal Rights.” The word “temporal” mainly pointing to its secular nature, but also indicating that these rights have their beginning and end in the same instant as their owners.
The Temporal Rights paradigm recognizes universal and ubiquitous natural rights at the most fundamental level of nature’s physics — as the inherent authority woven into the laws of nature itself. It is the realization that every agent of change in the universe has natural rights, natural authority, and all that implies. This is a profoundly consequential shift in perspective from older theories that found rights through necessity, moral agency, and other concepts. Temporal Rights are found at the most primal level of existence, so it does not merely connect fields of knowledge; it unifies them. Physics, ethics, and life are no longer separate domains but expressions of a single underlying reality. At its core is a simple yet radical axiom:
All agents in the universe exhibit dominion by effecting or constraining change. Such dominion demonstrates their existential authority, or natural rights, to exercise their capabilities.
This authority is not granted by law, philosophy, or divine decree — it is established in the actions displayed. The beaver demonstrates its power, authority, dominion, agency, prerogative, and choice. The first chip that falls is both a physical event and a moral one because that chip begins the destruction of the tree. That moment reveals the entire paradigm. All previous theories were based on a search for human rights, and this more universal, ubiquitous point of view was passed over. Like a fish doesn’t realize it is wet, prior theorists didn’t notice what was staring back at them from every object in their view.
From this single principle, a whole new universe unfolds. The world consists of agents working their individual capabilities and effecting change. This is seen in every dimension, from atoms to galaxies. The laws of physics describe those effects and their incredible scope. When multiple agents exercise their rights in overlapping domains, their operations collide or combine, giving rise to the laws of nature and revealing their intrinsic ethics. Cause and effect are still evident, but agents of cause become moral operators because of the intrinsic authority they display and the violence they sometimes do to one another.
One might study the above and write the remainder of this book, for it all stands upon that single axiom. My reader will want to stop for a moment and consider the extent of the implications of such a revelation of ubiquitous powers and ubiquitous agency that arises from the recognition that the universe consists of these agents.
Temporal Rights is a breakthrough paradigm that fuses physics and morality into a coherent political philosophy grounded in irrefutable natural rights. It acts as a golden thread, weaving together physics, the humanities, environmental thought, and jurisprudence. Unexpectedly, it has proven to be a powerful unification engine — one that threatens to become a “Theory of Everything.”
It dissolves long-standing dichotomies and connects previously isolated silos of understanding. Hume’s is/ought tension collapses in relief as we see that separating morality from physics was a false dichotomy. This is not a rebuttal of Hume any more than Einstein was a rebuttal of Newton; it is a correction of a category error. This is also seen in the animal vs. human rights sphere as all rights now proceed from a single fact. Locke’s rights are grounded existentially. What once existed only in poetry and fiction now emerges as an observable phenomena, as inanimate nature seems to come alive with moral intelligence.
Even in esoteric domains, Temporal Rights brings clarity: abstractions have no rights — only their concrete antecedents do. Collective theories of governance are thereby denied independent moral standing. In the study of sentience and consciousness, it reveals that consciousness is not a static state but a dynamic process of rights expressions, mirrored throughout the hierarchy of life. Intelligence, once thought to be the exclusive gift of sentience, is found along the entire spectrum of agents.
Semantics
We are not accustomed to seeing natural rights in non-human agents, but what criteria can be cited to prevent it? Do the natural rights and moral universes rotate around the human being? When we watch a beaver make a lodge for its family and a dam to flood its basement entrances, we see a free agent/operator using its existential dominion, power, agency, prerogative, license, permission, and authority. We can deny that it demonstrates a natural right, but denying it will not stop the beaver from using its capabilities. Semantics can get in the way, but words don’t matter here. What matters is what is obviously and objectively happening. Confessing that these are rights in motion helps us see and feel the weight of the ethical transactions.
It is enlightening to see that the beaver’s activities demonstrate its capabilities, so there is a one-to-one relationship between capabilities and natural rights. They are indeed but two aspects, two different ways of perceiving a single fact. This is not only reasonable but intuitive because it makes no sense to say, for example, that a person has a right to jump over his house. He can’t do it, so the right to do it is nonsensical.
Irrefutable Rights
Our Declaration of Independence is founded upon the idea that our rights were “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”. This theocentric description has completely lost traction with our non-believers. They say that when we need to claim something without a real basis, we make up a god and then make him the cause. They look at the revelations of science and see its advancements as slowly eliminating God while pointing out examples of this, like lightning, thunder, earthquakes, the phases of the moon, etc. There is more than one problem with their point of view. Discovering how God made things work without his direct involvement doesn’t eliminate him but only honors his capabilities.
What happened was that scientists managed to examine the data under new and different paradigms and so discovered natural explanations of these phenomena. Their explanations did not eliminate the phenomena, nor did they abolish God. What they did was explain how God made them all happen.
Still, if we can’t demonstrate that natural rights can stand on their own, then we have to admit that they are dependent upon something else, and their very existence can therefore be called into question. Fortunately, natural rights do have self-existence as described by Temporal Rights.
Western civilization rotates on an axis of natural rights. This becomes apparent if one removes the idea from our culture and watches what happens. Freedom and justice disappear, and chaos rules. Chaos rules anyway in pockets of our civilization where rights are deliberately violated to create uncertainty and fear as a means to control the vulnerable human spirit.
An improved understanding of natural rights provides a stronger, irrefutable claim to their sanctity and stops bad operators who ride fear into power. This new vision of natural rights is a purely secular definition and is therefore incapable of being dismissed on religious grounds. Meanwhile, it is not a negation of Divine Providence; for the believer, it is an explanation of the Creator’s endowment of natural rights at an immutable level where they cannot be denied. Our natural rights were once sacred; now they are both sacred and irrefutable.
Nihilism
Now, you may say that Temporal Rights is a perspective fabricated out of nothing, that there is no such thing as rights, and that all is pure cause and effect, there is no such thing as authority, and it’s all metaphysical mumbo jumbo. To that I reply with this observation, “Be my guest! However, I noticed that you just said you have no right to your opinion! But more to your point: you are saying that when you make a choice to espouse your cause and effect perspective, that you didn’t actually have a choice because all is cause and effect. I recognize that as a plausible scenario for existence, but I cannot imagine a more dreary, lifeless, and empty concept. I don’t know how it is in your mind, but in mine, I am sometimes painfully aware that I must choose between alternatives that present only trouble of one kind or another in whatever I choose. Those situations don’t happen very often, but when they do, I feel like any choice I make will result in some kind of trouble, and I labor over it, weighing the alternatives and analyzing the consequences, trying to sort out which trouble is the least. In those moments, I cannot for the life of me believe that I have no choice, that whatever choice I make was not a choice but the uncontrollable effect of an immutable cause. In my mind, it is like declaring that it is nighttime while I am staring into the sun.”
And I propose, in passing, that the there-is-no-good-choice experience we all have from time to time is a second witness that Temporal Rights is a proper view of natural rights.
Let me add a thought about inalienability. If we esteem a rock as an operator that prevents some kinds of operations, we recognize a property right. Furthermore, that right cannot be violated without violating the stone itself. Such is an inalienability that stretches across all operators. Curtailing a capability is violating a right. This is powerful because it is profoundly simple!
Individual Freedom
The Declaration of Independence is a detailed justification for the freedom of the undersigned colonies. It can be read as a demand for freedom from tyranny. But this demand for “freedom from” was not like the present-day demands for freedom from pain, poverty, or threats. Those are demands for entitlements that make others responsible for my comfort. This was not a demand that burdened Britain or its king; rather, it was a statement of a new condition wherein Britain was free to go its own way, as were the colonies. It was not a demand at all, just a courteous announcement.
What you and I want (although many of us don’t quite realize it) is freedom to exercise our rights, or, in other words, to operate our capabilities with as little interference as possible. The Temporal Rights perspective clarifies this by offering a vocabulary that precisely articulates the needed conditions of our flourishing. In street talk, this would sound like “Get the h… out of my life and let me do what I want. I’m not gonna hurt anybody!” In Temporal Rights lingo, it sounds like “I have the right to use my capabilities in any way I choose and without interference from others, so long as I honor the rights of others.”
A Paradigm Shift for Jurisprudence
The usual view of crime sets a perpetrator against a victim, but under the light of Temporal Rights, all conflicts are seen as a conflict of rights. This is a paradigmatic shift that balances the process of jurisprudence by simultaneously recognizing the natural rights of both parties. Temporal Rights establishes an objective view rather than a prescriptive view of crime. There are procedures in our present jurisprudence to ensure the victim’s rights are acknowledged, but the perspective of perpetrator/victim is the current point of view, and a point of view is always a powerful biasing agent.
Jurisprudence cannot be even-handed while crudely casting conflict in the simplistic framework of perpetrator/victim. Meanwhile, justice demands an understanding of the hierarchy of these rights. Even a stone has the right to the property (space) it occupies, for if that is denied, there can be no stone. So a spectrum appears, or a hierarchy of rights, with the least rights belonging to a minuscule grain of clay and the greatest to the gods, who, being all-powerful, must have superior rights in all categories.
Realizing that natural rights have a natural hierarchy, I began a search for a way to place them in their proper order. This led to the discovery of the dependency stack whose initial phase was the natural hierarchy observed in nature. These can be used in jurisprudence as an aid in balancing the rights of the plaintiff and the defendant because they demonstrate types of rights and their relative weights.
The Natural Hierarchy
It is important to note again that the beaver was inflicting terminal damage on the tree which makes that a moral event. By extension, we find that the popular concept of a food chain is also a morality chain where humans are omnivores, eating both animals and plants, whose lives are extinguished in the process. This food chain reveals a natural hierarchy of operators. Apparently, nature is demonstrating that higher orders of agents have rights superior to those of lower orders. The breathing animals consume plants, and plants consume sunlight and soil, and trees split rocks, and rocks defend their property rights.
Here we can also mistakenly cast this as a war for existence, or we can cast it as the balance of nature, or, more fundamentally, as the universal hierarchy of operators through ordered dependency, wherein each operator’s authority is exercised within, and limited by, the prior conditions (set by other operators) that make its operation possible. (For example, have those operators spared it the freedom to act?) This is seen, for example, in reciprocal flows across a cell membrane that sustain the life of both cell and organism.
Good and Evil
This seems like a metaphysical consideration, and Temporal Rights shows that they are the moral demonstrations of operators. Evil is simply the unneeded or unnecessary violation of natural rights. Can you think of an evil that is not such a violation? Good is the honoring of boundaries, the expansion of capabilities, and the protection of natural rights. The “unneeded or unnecessary” qualification is required because all food chains exhibit the destruction of operators.
It is important to avoid conflating culpability and violation. Evil can only be committed by sentient operators who possess the capacity to discern between necessary and unnecessary, yet violations characterize our food chain. Ultimately, morality can be determined by the Dependency Stack, which is treated in detail in its own chapter, where I will address this matter directly and resolve the seeming contradiction.
It is this connection of rights and ethics that makes Temporal Rights a powerful contender for a position as a moral alignment methodology for artificial intelligence. This is also discussed in that chapter.
The Temporal Rights Vocabulary
We, humans, have a terrible habit of seeing the negative and focusing on it to the exclusion of the positive that almost always, almost inherently must exist simultaneously. For example, were it not for darkness, light would have no name. Were it not for death, life would be taken for granted. The law of the jungle and the worst courtroom battle are good when they are necessary. The counter-flow of nutrients and waste products through a cell wall exhibits this simultaneously. The perspective that reveals the goodness of drawn out divorces and long wars is the longer view. These conflicts are patterns repeated throughout the universe where opposition brings balance, and collision is the mechanics of resolution. War and divorce are the repetition of a natural pattern demonstrated throughout the universe. That does not make them inevitable. This is the posiotive point of view of Temporal Rights, a view that sees order coming out of chaos and harmony from conflict.
I have developed a generalized vocabulary for this universal point of view as follows:
- Operator: any agent capable of changing or preventing change.
- Operation: the process of an operator making or preventing change.
- Capability: and power that can effect change.
- Domain: the sphere within which an operator can effect or prevent change.
- A Temporal Right: the existential authority exhibited by an operator’s exercise of a capability.
This vocabulary will be fully developed in the vocabulary chapter, where it will be applied to life’s challenges and opportunities to show the unexpected guidance Temporal Rights affords us at work, at school, at the polls, in personal and family relations, and in political debate. Meanwhile, in this introductory chapter, I need to point out some of the salient characteristics of the Temporal Rights point of view that let one see the universe in an entirely new way, from the inside out rather than from the outside in as science has heretofore done.
Real and Artificial, Abstract Operators
Some things qualify as operators and others do not, and this distinction is vital. To own existential rights, an operator must be self-existent, that is to say, it must be made of some kind of matter be it physical, spiritual, or otherwise; it must exist on its own without depending upon the existence of anything else.
Sometimes this is difficult to discern. But there is a dependable, rigorous method available. Politically speaking, this consideration is vital to the preservation of freedom because Socialism and Communism are based on abstractions, while the Declaration of Independence is based on physics. The method relies on the tight logical structure of the dependency statement. The dependency stack is an interlocked list of these. I want to take you know on an intellectual adventure where I will deliberately confuse you and then turn on the lights. I have chosen this method becasue I want to minimize the hate know spreading accross our once loving nation. I actually hope I can confuse you in the same way that half of the nation is confused so as to make you more empathetic to the confusion (rather than out and out hatred) that we seem to see.
I am looking out my cabin window at big, beautiful pines, firs, and cedars. I see individual trees, and I see a forest simultaneously. (I once owned a portable sawmill, which radically changed my perception of trees from big plants to standing lumber.) This forest is real; I can walk out there and enjoy the smell, the whispering of the wind, and their majestic images, but the trees are more real than the forest. The forest is a figment of my imagination, but the trees aren’t.
I hope that is confusing.
When we focus on a tree, we see an operator made of matter, but when we focus on the forest, we don’t see an operator; we see trees, a collection of operators. Therefore, a tree has rights while a forest doesn’t because it is not a tree but an abstraction of the perception of a multiplicity of operators. It is a collective.
Why Collectives Have No Authority
The dependency statement to rigorously separates tree as self-existent operators from a collective we call forest reads like this:
A tree can exist without a forest, but a forest cannot exist without a tree.
That clear logic permits the mind to discern a crucial difference in the nature of the existence of things. The existence of the forest is entirely dependent on the existence of trees, whereas the existence of a tree is fundamental. In other words, the tree is more fundamental than the forest in spite of the fact that they both seem equally real. This is the confusion that gives Communism and Socialism traction in the world of political philosophy. This wonderful construct has proven to be the source of much discernment for me and revealed the existential this basic problem with political collectives.
In plain semantics, the forest is an abstraction, a mental capability developed at an early age to help the mind deal with otherwise blinding complexity. The mind does this without thinking, and that is the problem. We will visit this again in the chapter devoted to collectives.
Natural Law and Natural Rights
The authority denoted as “law” in the expression “natural law” is based, I believe, on the constancy of relationships found in physics, where these relationships have largely been identified and encoded as equations, which in turn denote a reliability and predictability. As we watch these entities interact and see their relationships with one another, we observe their rights in operation with the same authority and constancy. This cements the fact that natural law obtains its authority from the individual natural rights of the resident operators. The balance of nature is the result of multiple operators exercising their rights or existential authority in a grand dance of free movement constrained by the operations of adjacent operators in the same domain. Thus, the collisions and “collusions” of natural rights bring order out of chaos. This identical scenario is observed up and down the dimensional scale of the universe, with examples ranging from the bonding of sodium to chlorine, the exchange of nutrients and waste at the cell wall, and the ordering of galaxies.
Universal Intelligence
One of the false dichotomies Temporal Rights has dissolved is the idea that only some things have intelligence. Here’s a way to see that error.
A computer programmer writes code and places it in a computer where is can exercise the intelligence he placed there. A close examination of this computer and its intelligence reveals that the intelligence is not a self-existent thing so much so that it can only exist by being imbedded or encoded in some kind of matter. This is true of all information and intelligence. The medium I once worked in was holes punched in cards, then it became tiny magnetic structures, or ink on paper, or sound waves from mouth to ear. The point is that intelligence must be encoded in some structure ourside itself.
So we examine a leaf operator in the sunlight, and we see that the structure of the leaf is such that it produces sugars and lignin: tree parts. This is an intelligent factory, programmed to automatically execute or operate the capabilities intrinsic to its structure. As we go up and down the dimensional scale we pattern is repeated. Even a rock can be seen to have the intelligence baked into its structure that gives it the capability to persist in a robust way. If we chose, we could even say that the rock is choosing to survive, but I am unable to go that far.
The Spiritual Component of Temporal Rights
When the Native American saw a buffalo, he saw two things simultaneously: a spiritual creature and a resource of meat, bone, and hide. Many of these people thought it was necessary to explain to the animal what was going to happen and why. Some even thought that unless this kind of respect was afforded to an animal or plant, the power and/or healing/nourishment would not be realized.
Perhaps our pioneer heritage explains how we adopted the “conquering the West” attitude. Civilization washed westward in a great wave where survival was paramount, and the elements of nature were always a challenge. This simplistic animosity separated and characterized us and nature as combatants, facilitating our materialism. We in the West have lost the vision of the existential connections between one another and between us and the animals and trees and indeed all things.
Yet we are repulsed by our exploitation of eggs from caged hens, but have not been able to clearly articulate why. Temporal Rights reveals a unified picture where all things, especially living things, are cousins. It is not “us against them” but “we are all family”: creatures not with opposing characteristics but whose differences are only of scope and degree. This unity is seen, oddly enough, in the conflict of rights that literally “makes the world go round”.
Science and Truth
Finally, I must warn my readers that this book is not the usual mouthful of dry powder so common in academic sophistry. I have little patience for the sterile, arcane, and tedious style that dominates many academic writings. That antiseptic tone is meant to suggest that the subject is being handled with perfect objectivity—a plainly impossible achievement. No one, myself included, can entirely extract himself from a philosophical subject into which he must necessarily immerse himself.
Yet a researcher who claims to advance “settled science” confesses thereby his fear that it may not be as settled as he would hope, or that he is determined that his work harmonizes with the agenda of his grant provider. A true scientist can discipline himself with abject humility by recognizing that every finding raises at least one more question. Temporal Rights seems to answer some “how” questions with surprising clarity, but it does not answer “why” the universe is what it is.
Jackson Pemberton
