Fifty years ago, my object in writing the Bicentennial featured series of articles for the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), was to help my fellow citizens understand the fundamental principles of our freedom and our government which, while being tasked with protecting rights, had slowly encroached upon them until we were in danger of losing them all. While writing the second in the series, On Human Rights and Government, I discovered the Temporal Rights paradigm met my desire to present a secular basis for Locke’s natural rights that could not be dismissed for being based on religious faith, but failed to recognize its universal implications while typing out the remaining six on my Remington Standard. I was working full-time as a Computer Systems Analyst, running our eleven acre farm, and my wife was pregnant with out seventh child. I locked myself in a bedroom so I could not be disturbed by the young roving herd of sweet ones. It was a busy year for me and a frustrating one for her.
In recent years, finding the profound implications of the Temporal Rights view of natural rights, and then witnessing the power of the Dependency Stack, I became deeply impressed with the idea that they provided a computer executable methodology perfectly aligned with the intent of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. This was to me a repetition of the object for the Bicentennial series of essays: helping fellow citizens understand and protect their natural rights. That this happened on the eve of our Semiquincentennial was a major heart warming non-coincidence. It should come as no surprise that Temporal Rights logic aligns with the Declaration because they are both grounded on the same natural rights.
The AIMM
There is much concern that Artificial Intelligence will run amok and destroy the hands that built it. My research in that arena confirmed that the fear is easily justified so I began to search Temporal Rights implications looking for help. I had already discovered an obvious hierarchy in natural agents beginning with the food chains in the animal kingdom, and the extension of that idea was simple enough. To ensure I had these in proper hierarchical order, I used the dependency statement which has the following pattern:
An operator (agent) can act without acquiring, but it cannot acquire without acting.
This shows that acting is more fundamental than acquiring. So I constructed a stack of these statements and interlocked them so as to make the stack an unbroken hierarchical spectrum of capabilities/rights.
Finally, I discovered that this provided a structure against which I could measure the morality of a collision of rights executions. As a retired computer analyst, I was elated to find that I could even derive a signed numeric result for such a collision. The sign indicated whether of not it was a moral infraction and the size of the number indicated its severity. Because I was focused on AI at the time, I named the stack and its method the Artificial Intelligence Moral Machine (AIMM). Taken together the paradigm and the stack was a computer algorithm that paralleled our Declaration and validated our fifty-one constitutions.
The Declaration of Independence Algorithm
Here’s our Declaration with the Temporal Rights concepts inserted where relevant.
We hold these truths to be self-evident (Existential Natural Rights), that all men are created equal (The AIMM is blind to all considerations except the immediate question of an event’s moral weight), that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable (Temporal Rights) rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (The Dependency Stack). That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed (The Dependency Stack inherently casts government as a protective servant of the human operator).
The alignment here is almost total. Temporal Rights and the Dependency Stack, provide a “Scientific Operating System” for the philosophical source code of the Declaration of Independence.
Locke’s Natural Rights
John Locke’s writings on natural rights were often cited as the justification for our Revolutionary War and the famous claim in the Declaration of Independence cited above. Temporal Rights not only validates Locke’s point of view, but grounds it existentially in a way that should unify our citizenry in the work of protecting their free exercise.
Jurisprudence
The Temporal Rights point of view makes a significant contribution to jurisprudence with its inherent recognition that every collision (crime) in the exercise of rights is not a simplistic perpetrator/victim scenario, but an intermingling of the results of the exercise of the rights of at least two operators (parties). By bringing the rights of both parties to the adjudication table, it inherently protects the rights of both.
It is true, of course that there are many institutions now in place to protect the rights of the perpetrator, but the fundamental principles of today’s jurisprudence supports the simplistic view. Even the rule “innocent until proven guilty”, altruistic as it is, nonetheless reinforces the point of view that this is a unidirectional issue. The truth is that in many cases, domestic violence being a prime example, the victim is nearly as guilty as the perpetrator, or perhaps more so. Temporal Rights suggests that this unidirectional point of view should be replaced with a bi-lateral one, where both parties are simultaneously on trial. This method comports well with the wisdom of Solomons in his trial to determine the motherhood of the allegedly stolen infant.
Individual Rights v. Societal Rights
Temporal Rights recognizes natural rights only in fundamental, self-existent operators where existential capabilities are exhibited. A government fails this test because it does not have fundamental self-existent. Any authority exhibited thereby is not the exhibition of the abstraction “government” but of one or more human agents authorized by that institution.
There can be a citizen without a government but there cannot be a government without a citizen.
This fact presents a denial of authority to collectives of any type. Socialism and Communism claim that individual rights can be sacrificed on the alter for the common good and their advocates support that by diverting attention away from the citizen to the abstraction “collective”. By sheer control of the dialog, they erase the knowledge that the citizen is the paramount entity in the discussion and that, by extension, the rights of the individual must surpass all other rights, or else the citizen is subordinated in spite of the fact that without him, there would be neither citizen nor government.
Temporal Rights also searches for rights in concepts like “social justice” and finds no rights for double abstractions of this nature.
Animal Rights: Universal Rights
While starting to build the dependency stack, I worried about how it turn out. Would it even make sense? ‘Would it support our cultures commonly held values? Would it codify “might makes right”? But to my delight I realized that fear had caused me to “jump off the bridge before I even got to it.” The stack documented our common values and granted rights even to chickens in tiny cages and bitches in puppy mills whose rights were clearly infringed by the extortion practiced their operators.
Family and Human Rights
The conflict between adults and children is legendary. Every adult has experienced it at some point, and sometimes peace is only found when someone exits the family group. This is a sad waste of human potential.
The Johnson O’Connor Foundation’s study of prison inmates incarcerated for violence, found overwhelmingly that these people had limited vocabularies. The violence was often cause by the circumstance that the inmate, lacking words to express his viewpoint resorted to violence for two reasons: he was frustrated because he found himself in contention about some issue, and he was also frustrated because the “knew” he was right but could not explain why.
One of the corollaries to the Temporal Rights axiom is: All conflict is a collision of natural rights assertions. It is these assertions that define the conflict between parent and child. A typical scenario looks like this: the child wants exercise his rights to do something the parents see as a threat to their responsibility for the child’s safety.
If the parents would learn for themselves and teach their children the fundamentals of rights, they would give all a vocabulary of natural rights and much friction could be avoided. This would permit both sides to quickly verbalize their points of view and clearly define the relevant issues. Otherwise both are left groping for a handle on their intuitions and the double frustrations of prison inmates creates the anger that disfigures the family unit.
That this applies equally to married couples should be obvious.
