Natural Rights and the Right to Choose

Rating:
Summary: Showing us the way towards human unity
Review: Hadley Arkes has written a book that goes to the root of every political debate: what man is determines what "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" means, not just for American citizens, but indeed for all people everywhere.

In today's world people clamor for rights all the time without thinking about what a "right" is or where rights come from. Hadley shows that such forgetfulness (or outright ignorance) is a crucial mistake. It's as if builders lost the blueprints to a structure's foundations, taking it for granted that no matter where they erected pillars or beams, there would be some underlying foundation to support the weight and tie everything together.

The temptation to eventually consider rights a matter of majority might and politics simply "war by other means" only grows stronger within this ignorance of intelligible (i.e. universally knowable) foundations.

Thus a right to own firearms, marry whomever you please, use natural resources however you see fit, and get rid of inconvenient offspring will increasingly appear to be "victories" of pressure group tactics, open to ulterior change rather than anything objectively good and lasting...

Hadley makes the point of temporarily shifting the reader's attention from what people want, to what people are. Only if you know what human beings are can you distinguish between "wants" ("choices") that correspond to human needs, as opposed to "whims" ("choices") that may be neutral or harmful to those that desire it or others in society.

In other words, this book is a tour de force in the metaphysical underpinning of the American experiment. America is not an experiment in political expediency but in man's ability to use reason to know objective (public) truth and discover universally applicable goods that correspond to the reality of human nature. Rights are not a matter of human passion and whimsy. Even if you don't choose something, you may still have a right for it! Even if some ruler doesn't let you choose, you may still have a right to choose! But only if human nature exists. If human nature doesn't exist, then, as Hadley makes clear, politics is just a matter of majority rule and power.

His book reminds us of those solid intellectual presuppositions that make civil life "civil" rather than a charade in which inevitably those with power tyrannize those who are weaker.

Finally, there are no losers in this book; that is, there are no class or category of people whose lives and liberty are threatened by his thought. After all, human liberty is not a matter of doing whatever you want, but of doing what is right - and the "pursuit of happiness" is likewise not wholly subjective, as medical science and psychology proves...some ideas and habits are always harmful and lead to misery, others are always helpful and lead to health. Why? Because human beings (black, yellow, red and white) are all members of a single human nature; we are all of the same family - thus we all have the same rights. What these are exactly are discoverable by reason, not created by whim. Hadley shows us the way.