The problem with rights

Is that they have to be defended

The Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries featured various assertions of natural rights. John Locke listed the holy trinity of life, liberty and property. Thomas Jefferson tweaked Locke to yield life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. French revolutionaries preferred the formulation as liberty, equality and fraternity.

Not everyone agreed that these rights existed. King George III of Britain disputed Jefferson, and Louis XVI of France lost his head to the revolutionaries there.

The American and French revolutions reveal a fundamental problem with rights. For all Jefferson's effort to describe them as self-evident, they aren't. Or at least they weren't. They had to be defended with arguments and ultimately with arms. Some attitudes change over time, and it's probably the case that the idea of human equality is less controversial today than in Jefferson's time. But there is much evidence that a great many people around the world don't consider everyone else as their equals. The presumption of liberty is hardly less contested. Authoritarian states govern a substantial portion of the planet's population. As for a right to life, a quarter of the world's countries, including the United States, practice capital punishment.

The problem of defending rights takes another form. If you believe that everyone on earth has a right to equality, say, you might well feel a moral obligation to defend that right when it is violated. You might feel obliged to intervene in the domestic affairs of violating countries. Even if you don't feel the moral obligation, you might be tempted to express such an obligation as cover for intervention for less noble purposes. And if you cite morality to justify meddling in other people's affairs, you undercut your own ability to object to other people's citing morality to meddle in yours.

An alternative formulation is less troublesome—and less presumptuous. Treat things like property arrangements not as rights but as conventions. Some societies emphasize private ownership. Other societies prefer communal ownership. Defer to each society to choose its own formulation. Feel free to promote the benefits of yours, but do so by words and especially by example. If private property makes your society prosperous while communal property causes other societies to languish, your example will catch on. If the death penalty reduces the murder rate in your country compared with other countries, the death penalty will catch on. If it doesn't, maybe you should take the lesson of other countries.

This advice won't sit well with certain people. It's intoxicating to think that one's values are the values of the universe or of God. To hear that values are mere social constructs can be disconcerting, even threatening. Over the course of history, people have been burned at the stake for less. The burners felt a rush of righteousness.

If you really think your way is the only way, you ought to get out more. Over the course of history and around the world, people as smart and moral as we are have worshiped different gods, adhered to different values, and created successful societies while doing so. China, India and Egypt have been at the civilization game a lot longer than we have. Their notions of rights seem to have served them well. America, at a quarter millennium, isn't a tenth as old as they are. Maybe we should wait a bit before preaching to them.