Salter: Reason for rights: Liberty and the good life
Natural rights are the foundation of a just government. Life, liberty, and property are non-negotiable. The pursuit of happiness — meaning a life well-lived, not mere satisfaction or pleasure — depends on the government respecting man’s rights.
But where do these rights come from? The Declaration of Independence asserts that “all men” are “endowed by their Creator” with rights. The Founders had no problem believing in a divine sanction for each person’s moral entitlements. To them, respecting natural rights meant honoring God, the source of human dignity. We have a duty to protect rights because we have a duty to obey God.
However, natural rights are not a specifically religious concept. Even those who don’t believe in God understand the natural equality of men, also proclaimed in the Declaration. Because human persons are moral equals, we must regard our fellows as ends in themselves. When we trample on the rights of others, we subordinate them to our own ends, reducing them to mere means. It’s wrong to treat people like tools. A human being is not an instrument to be manipulated by his presumed betters. Equal personhood means equal dignity, which establishes rights as a universal principle.
Natural rights deserve protection for reasons other than duty. Results matter, too. For example, societies that value life, liberty, and property are wealthier, healthier, and more socially equal than societies that don’t. A rights-respecting society is a free society, in which human ingenuity can best solve important social problems. Creativity requires freedom because creativity can’t function under coercion.
The greatest institution for harnessing ingenuity is the free market. Once upon a time, all of humanity was wretchedly poor. Now, thanks to the power of markets, we enjoy living standards that would be unimaginable to our ancestors. On average, an American earns about $63,000 per year. That’s roughly $170 per day. In comparison, it wasn’t that long ago that everyone but aristocrats had to live on less than $2 per day. This enrichment would’ve been impossible without market-supported innovation, which in turn requires private property and the rule of law. Free markets are the extension into the economic sphere of man’s natural rights.
If duty is too abstract a concept for you, an 85-fold increase in living standards is a pretty good reason to defend natural rights! Life, liberty, and property deliver the goods, plain and simple.
Protecting rights also helps us become better people. Performing our duty isn’t automatic; we have to work for it. Good consequences don’t materialize by themselves; we have to make them happen. Our ability to build worthy lives for ourselves, our families, and our communities depends on good ethical habits, which help us bear the weight of duty and strive for great achievements. In the Western philosophical tradition, we call these ethical habits virtues. A virtuous person is someone who has exercised their moral muscles, over and over again. You become a good man the same way you become good at free throws—practice, practice, practice.
Some philosophers, who believe “statecraft is soulcraft,” want to use politics to make men good. But the most the government can do is make us free, because freedom is a prerequisite for virtue. Coerced virtue is a contradiction in terms. A soldier who fights only when compelled by an officer isn’t courageous. A citizen who gives to the poor only when compelled by a bureaucrat isn’t charitable. Natural rights promote virtue by creating the social conditions necessary for people to grow and flourish. Citizens protected against force and fraud are free to work on the most important project of all: themselves.
Duty, consequences, and virtue point to a common truth: natural rights are woven into the fabric of reality. Any political philosophy that denies man’s inalienable rights is un-American and inhuman. True justice requires life, liberty, and property.
Alexander William Salter is the Georgie G. Snyder Associate Professor of Economics in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University, the Comparative Economics Research Fellow at TTU’s Free Market Institute, and a community member of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal editorial board. The views in this article are solely his own.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Alexander Salter reasons for rights liberty and good life
