When an author takes the task of summarizing the writings of other authors, the enormity of the task stares back at him with a serious, even suspicious look. To treat their works fairly, in a way that would please them, seems almost a fool’s errand. But, notwithstanding, it needs to be done to put the present discussion in a proper setting.
Aristotle (384 – 322 BC)
Aristotle was a philosopher and polymath, a student of a wide range of topics and disciplines. He ranged through the writings of prior philosophers like the deer browse the flowers, trees, grasses ,and bushes outside my window. He obviously enjoyed that way of living and thinking. His works profoundly influenced thinkers and actors for nearly two thousand years, coloring the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
His perspective was interesting in that he saw things as having intrinsic goals or destinies. These were his “telos”. His ethics came from the fulfillment of a thing’s potential, nature, and function. Where he came closest to the Temporal Rights point of view was in this understanding of ethics. He said, “Human good turns out to be an activity of the soul exhibiting excellence.” 1 So, like Temporal Rights, it is the exercise of capability that demonstrates goodness or evil. Notice his emphasis on “activity” and “exhibiting”.
Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679)
Thomas Hobbes approached an intrinsic or existential basis for natural rights with this: “The RIGHT OF NATURE [a natural right], which writers commonly call Jus Naturale, is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature—that is to say, of his own life—and consequently of doing anything which, in his own judgment and reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.” 2
The effect of Hobbes’ view that humans naturally compete for survival encouraged the idea that a strong centralized authority was necessary to prevent anarchy. This had a noticeable influence on the founding fathers, whose recent experience with the Confederacy’s weakness confirmed Hobbes. Modern assumptions about security and safety in politics often echo Hobbes, even when people have never read him. This competitive view may also seem to justify the often unwittingly assumed idea that the nation’s economic pie is only sliceable, not expandable.
So Hobbes came close to the Temporal Rights realization with his focus on people, but that same focus precluded, perhaps, his ability to see that beavers have rights too.
John Locke (1632 – 1704)
John Locke saw natural rights as coming out of natural law, as this quote reveals:
“A state also of equality, wherein all power and jurisdiction are reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to the same advantages of nature and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one among another without subordination or subjection…” [Emphasis mine] 3
Locke was talking about capabilities (power) and jurisdiction (right to rule) of operators. This is exactly the Temporal Rights paradigm. If he had not restricted his search for rights to humans, he might well have seen the beaver also.
John Locke had the greatest direct influence on popular Western political thought. He argued that individuals possess natural rights to life, liberty, and property inherently, at a level apart from government. He taught that governments exist to protect those rights, and that they lose legitimacy when they violate them: an idea you will clearly recognize from the similar phraseology in our Declaration of Independence. This concept was revolutionary at the time and became the justification for our Revolutionary War when the British King declared our dependence would not be violated.
Locke caused public reasoning to shift toward the idea that government authority must justify itself to the individual citizen: an idea still mostly missing in the governments of Europe and in the minds of Europeans. I am afraid that the general public in the United States has almost total ignorance of this fine but crucial line the founders drew between government and citizen. Generation after generation grows up in their respective environments, whatever they are, and accepts the status quo as “just the way life is.” Our schools fail to teach the fundamentals of civics, and citizens fail to recognize that our founders’ viewpoint and that of the rest of Western civilization are inversions of one another. Only the United States of America is founded on “government for the people,” while the others are based on “government of the people”. We need to realize that the latter principle is just an extension of the ancient “divine right of kings”.
David Hume (1711 – 1776)
David Hume’s perspective on natural rights was through the lens of morality. Here are two of his statements: “’Tis from the prospect of pain or pleasure that the aversion or propensity arises towards any object,” and “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” 4
Hume is saying that justification for a moral principle is found in human sentiments and the passions. This sounds pretty hedonistic, but his “passions” included recognition of and responses to flourishing, suffering, sympathy, practicality, approval, disgust, and social transactions.
Because David Hume grounded morality in observable human nature and interaction rather than divine command, his point of view is close to the Temporal Rights perspective in that it was also a secular view. For Hume, this was a bit of an adventure because many around him thought morality was imposed by divine command.
A Brief Aside on the Secularity of Temporal Rights
I believe in divine commands, and I want that fact to be remembered as I treat this subject. We have a natural tendency to see the commandments of God as restrictions on our behavior, and indeed they are, but the point here is that that attitude is self-imposed and not required by God. After gaining the perspective afforded by Temporal Rights, I see the commandments in an entirely different light. I see them only as warnings and guideposts. That is certainly not a unique discovery on my part.
The top operator, God, has no ego need for our obedience, only a love of his children that “forces” him to warn us so we can live in harmony with our individual universes rather than run afoul. We, in turn, have no need for blind obedience, only for maintenance, insofar as possible, of our domain so that we are primarily actors (operators) rather than acted upon (victims). I sense that some people find the secular view of Temporal Rights as taking God out of our lives, an attitude which is also clearly self-imposed. Let me ask this rhetorical question: “Why does an explanation of how God did something remove him from the scene?” On the contrary, it only makes God more clever. I think when we have that negative reaction, it may be because we somehow like worshipping an incomprehensible, even mysterious being, because that makes him seem more wonderful and powerful. I see that as a mild form of superstition.
Let me be perfectly clear. I love God, and although as I learn about the universe, I see less of his direct, ongoing intervention in our existence (because of his cleverness) I see his fingerprints on everything. Temporal Rights has not estranged me from God, only impressed me with his ability to bake vital matters into matter itself. Meanwhile, I recognize his inspiration in so many ways as I learn to listen with real intent to learn and understand, an attitude I am building based on growing trust, or if you prefer, faith.
Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677)
Baruch Spinoza looked at nature and saw its capabilities manifested by its power in much the same way as we recognize the power of the beaver and all the agent operators of the universe. He said, “The right of nature extends as far as its power extends.” and “Each individual thing has sovereign right to do all that it can do.” These quotes demonstrate that he saw the Temporal Rights paradigm, in which rights are recognized for each capability an operator owns. *
However, where the Temporal Rights vocabulary uses “Operator”, a descriptive noun, as a label for an entity or agent, Spinoza was postulating that an agent was connected to God in such a way that it was actually a mode of expression of the power of God. He saw that agents behaved in a way that demonstrated perseverance (conatus), which then sustained the universe.
This visualization comports well with that part of the Temporal Rights point of view that identifies power with authority, recognizing that a capability and a right are two exhibitions of the same thing, but Temporal Rights sees operators as distinct functionaries.
Spinoza was looking for a justification of natural rights in political and human contexts, whereas the Temporal Rights theory sees rights in every agent in the universe possessing a capability.
It is noteworthy that we have both been pushed in the direction of secularizing ethics and politics, a perception that morality and society can be understood by observing the structure and actions of the universe itself.
Baruch Spinoza influenced intellectual culture more indirectly. His identification of rights with power and nature helped weaken older supernatural and divine-right models. He contributed to the secularization of ethics and politics — the idea that morality and society can be understood from the structure of existence itself rather than revelation.
Summary
Reading the philosophers and visualizing their searching and discussions has taught me humility. There has been a tremendous amount of effort in every age to understand the nature of nature. Every researcher is hampered by the biases he has picked up, by the thinking of those around him, by the nature and extent of his vocabulary, by his assumptions he doesn’t recognize, and by other factors I cannot identify. Yet, in spite of those handicaps, they have produced volumes of wisdom and insights that have slowly pushed civilization forward. The crucial factors of freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of movement have been impressed upon me.
At the same time, I have recognized that the structure of our scientific community is badly skewed in the direction of something that can only be described as “fake science”. I am primarily referring to the research grant process, where money is gifted to those who will produce “scientific proofs” according to a predetermined agenda. This structure is completely antithetical to real science, where no bias should exist.
Meanwhile, my best guess is that natural rights philosophers missed the universality of natural rights because they assumed, probably without even recognizing the assumption, that only humans, or at least only sentient creatures, could have natural rights. As they looked at nature for a source of natural rights, they, like a fish doesn’t know it is wet, did not see what was everywhere they looked. A classical assumption error.
When I was taking flying lessons, I was required by law to attend monthly safety meetings. One of the most frightening realizations that came to me there was the fact that “It is the assumptions you don’t know you are making that kill you.” I believe science is shot through with those kinds of assumptions, so much so that if we could find a way to identify them, it would prove the biggest discovery of all time.
But more to the point of the present discussion of the history of natural rights, there has been a lot of work in this discipline, and most of it done with honest, even humble motivation. As I have tried to sit in their chairs and hold their pencils, I have sensed their motivation to comprehend and articulate truth to the best of their ability. I sensed their desire to help mankind see a better way, a more complete picture, and a more fulfilling way of life. And I have joined them in their urgent yearnings to be a blessing to their fellow travelers on the roads of life.
1 Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Chapter 7 (1098a16–18). Translated by W. D. Ross.
2 Leviathan (1651), Part I, Chapter XIV Of the First and Second Natural Laws, and of Contracts
3 Second Treatise of Government, Chapter II, Section §4
4 A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), Book II, Part III, Section III.
* Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Chapter XVI, “Of the Foundations of a State; of the Natural and Civil Rights of Individuals.” Spinoza, Baruch. Theological-Political Treatise. 1670.
