Without respecting individual rights, there cannot be Human Rights. Individual rights mean that the individual is the building block of society. Only when individuals are respected in their rights, can a society function. Why is that, what does this mean, what are the implications?
Let us state the core idea again:
Any moral and political philosophy needs to begin with the insight that every single life matters. Without this insight, the path is open to all the injustice and horror human history has so far had to misfortune to witness, and with our tools increasing in efficacy, our ability to create harm will increase as well.
But let us linger a bit more on this. Why does every single life matter, why is every single life important? Can we come up with a justification without recourse to history?
We are all born as individual beings. Our lives center around our perception of the world and our interactions with it. We may be able to communicate with others, to engage with them, and we certainly also – as social animals, following Aristotle – depend on others, but we are still individual beings. Centering morality on that fact means to honor each individual being’s relationship to life and the world.
We are alone in our joy, in our suffering, in our birth and in our death. We may be able to share these moments with others, but our perceptions and experiences are our own, mediated typically through our eyes, ears, and whatever means of sensory perception we may have. Our brain is our own, and our body holds our memories and thoughts, whatever makes up our mind, maybe our soul. We are unique, we are in-dividual, the smallest unit of society, not to be divided. If one of us is lost, a unique way of continually living and seeing and experiencing and reflecting upon our world will be irretrievably lost. We may be able to keep an echo of them through their work and through whatever they have left behind, but their active participation in our world will be over. The gain of each person is immeasurable; the loss of each person is immeasurable as well. This means that the protection of each individual life should be paramount for any society.
(Even more than that, ideally, we would be able to extend this principle not just to human-like life, or sentient life – whatever that means. There are limitations to our possibilities in this regard, especially given each living being’s need for food. But at least we can – as human beings – typically agree that we should not eat other humans, and we frequently extend this to our animal companions that we see as pets. If we need to kill for food, we should make sure animals and plants do not suffer unnecessarily, and we need to at least show respect to them while they are alive. You may notice that I cannot quite commit to vegetarianism or veganism here; that may be a different discussion. I’ll restrict the rest of the argument to human like or so-called sentient species, under which I would include apes and any animal with sufficient intelligence and capacity to reflect and engage with the world; plus whatever non-terrestrial species we will encounter that would fit such a model.)
Back to the individual. If they are unique and need to be protected and supported, but also respectfully considered as contributing members of society, they need to be seen as holding rights. Here I agree with the Anglo-American approach of assuming natural law to have decided that such rights exist a priori, rather than having to be created by a state. We have rights due to our being human. If you want to clothe this into religious speech: we are part of nature, which is part of the eternal, of divinity, the universe, God. God, or the universe, gave us life, and created us through nature and its laws in a way that we are unique, special, to be loved and respected. We are part of the divine structure. (To be honest, that sounds like Einsteinian religion, and that’s as far as I am willing to go. I may be a deist, even a pan-deist, but certainly not a theist, sorry).
Individual rights need to firstly be the right to life. With that comes also the right to personal property. Property rights are necessary in order to protect and sustain individual life: each animal needs territory, needs shelter, needs means to secure food and safety for themselves and their family and eventually their group. Individual property is not necessarily an aim in itself – it can be – but it is typically a requirement to secure a future.
In order to defend their rights of life and property, human beings need to be able to engage with each other on an equal footing, to secure and protect their own rights and the rights of others. This freedom to engage politically with each other, and to not be punished for it, is called liberty.
Freedom itself can be a two-edged sword – you can be free to do as you please, but you can also be free to be hunted down by others. Freedom itself is not enough; in order to sustain it, you need to secure it within society, within politics.
Thus even though I just argued that the individual is paramount, this needs to now be harmonized with Aristotle’s key insight that we are all animals (zôoi) that belong to the political world (politikoi) of human settlements, of poleis, of societies. A better translation of Aristotle’s key term would be that we are social animals.
We may all be individuals, but we are also living in a society. The rights of the individual need to be negotiated within the social sphere. The rights of someone will need to interact with the rights of someone else. This now is the source of most of our trouble, and we cannot solve it in principle other than to see it as a balance between individual and society that will always be under threat, but will always have to be maintained or – if lost – restored.
Individual-ism and societal-ism are deeply intertwined.
We have seen throughout history that when individual rights are not respected, the path to murder, mass murder and genocide is wide open. Too many societies have pretended to care about humanity, but only cared for humans in the abstract, as a mass of people, as a group, defined by class, ethnicity, race, caste or whatever category has been convenient. Once you are willing to sacrifice the few for the benefit of the many, nobody is safe from harm.
These are all well-known arguments from the entirety of the history of political philosophy, of course.
But it seems important to reiterate them because of a continued or even resurgent attractive of an authoritarian position that deviates from everything stated above by denying the importance of the individual, and thus by shifting the protections entirely towards the social group.
The danger herein is that history has shown that society here functions as a smokescreen for the special interests of smaller groups of people, or even of simply a few individuals. By giving up on the balance between the individual and society, two groups of individuals are created – those who matter (less) and those who matter (more). Everyone is equal, but some more equal than others, to echo Orwell’s Animal Farm.
Your utopia must not come at the price of someone else’s dystopia.
So much for now, there will be a need for some follow-ups later for sure.
Erratic Attempts 