Preface

This essay serves to refresh and elucidate the ideas of Classical Liberal philosophers, who inspired the foundation of the United States, with the vast scientific knowledge we've amassed in the past centuries. It uses modern reasoning to justify the existence of inalienable human rights. Today, most children (and adults!) are never taught about rights in the classical sense and possess only a vague inkling that actions like theft and violence are morally and legally unacceptable. We should aim to establish a firm understanding of human rights and law in all citizens if we are to safeguard our republic.

Introduction

Morality means what we “ought” and “ought not” to do.

Note: In this essay, we talk only about a “worldly morality” dealing with the material and political realm, to establish laws in the world. “Religious or spiritual morality” is up to the individual to decide for themselves and not the subject of this essay.

To understand morality, we must first delve into the concept of "value." Value is the subjective worth each person assigns to an object or idea. In economics, these individual value judgments collectively shape market prices. Take a simple item like a bottle of soda, for example. Each of us attributes a unique value to it based on our desire at that particular moment. The collective aggregation of these value judgments at a moment in time determines the market price, say $2.00.

Values for things like soda are inherently subjective, varying from person to person based on individual preferences and subject to the ebb and flow of supply and demand. We must ask the question, do certain concepts or objects possess intrinsic, universally shared value? Unlike items like soda, which can be highly valued by some and irrelevant to others, are there things which hold universal value for all of humanity? If so, this shared value forms the foundation for a common moral system that transcends individual subjectivity. To find these values, we must look at the lowest common denominator of values, that is: what are the basic values all humans share?

The Common Denominator

Values are deeply rooted in our wants and desires. Through careful reasoning, it becomes evident that all humans share:

i)     A fundamental need for freedom to pursue their goals.

ii)    People universally desire ownership of goods (property).

iii)   We must be alive to pursue our goals and own property.

Of course, people have unlimited wants, however, the Venn-diagram of every person would only converge on these three fundamental needs. Therefore, we can derive rights, from universal needs. The three rights are:

1.     Right to life.

2.     Right to freedom.

3.     Right to property.

With the closeness to life being the indicator of importance (since people universally value their own life more than property). For example, taking a life (violating right to life) warrants a greater punishment than stealing a loaf of bread (violating right to property). Violating “rights” is deemed “wrong”, and the perpetrator would then be liable for punishment under the law.

In essence, these rights form the backbone of a moral system. One may conceive of it as a game-theory model of morality. They guide how individuals interact with each other over time, and represent a stable “moral Nash equilibrium”, the “efficient laws which would naturally occur over time”.

The Social Contract

In the context of human interaction, these laws give rise to a social contract. In its simplest form, this contract reads as follows "I will respect your life, property and your freedom to act, if you reciprocate the same to me. These principles are known as “rights” and violating them is deemed “wrong”. The government's sole role is to guarantee these rights, which come from nature (what Founding Fathers called “God”), meaning they are always in existence with or without a government due to natural or “God-given” properties in humanity.

Negative Rights

These three fundamental rights are negative rights. Negative rights signify that individuals have the right to be free from certain actions or intrusions. The right to life, for instance, means that others must refrain from actions that would physically harm our bodies.

Human-centric Rights

These fundamental rights of life, liberty, and property are inherently subjective, bound to the individual's perspective, desires, and choices. On the other hand, the commonality of these laws to every human being lends it an objective quality; meaning that from within the human lens, they are objective, but to outside “alien observers” such as robots they are subjective. It's this reason that we call these particular rights “human-centric”.

Fundamental Laws of Nature

At the core of natural law in the universe is Mathematics. Building on mathematics, we derive Physics, with laws like gravity, electromagnetism, and nuclear forces. Moving forward, we delve into Chemistry, the laws that govern chemical interactions. Laws that govern life's processes are Biology, emerging from the interplay of cells with physical and chemical laws. We suggest that at the pinnacle of this hierarchy, human laws deriving from human rights naturally extend from the fundamental logic that governs our interactions. Human rights naturally extend from natural law.

Positive rights

Just as gravity and other natural laws apply impartially to the matter in the universe, our moral and legal principles must apply without bias, treating all individuals the same. Here, a positive right obligates action or provision of something. Our conception of the sole positive right that can be obligated is the obligation to apply laws in a rational and impartial manner.

Who is Guaranteed these rights?

All humans, regardless of their diverse backgrounds and experiences, are inherently guaranteed these rights. This guarantee is rooted in the recognition that all humans share the same fundamental common denominator wants of life, liberty and property. Humans share at least 99.94% similarity in genetic code. This unity encapsulates the notion our Founding Fathers mentioned of all being created in the image of God and rights coming from God.

Intricacies of Laws

Each state should uphold the rights of life, liberty and property. However the intricacies of laws, rules, and punishments within each state should be subject to the principles of a market system (voting through legislative bodies) as already present in the United States. By allowing individuals to cast votes and express their preferences including in the legal realm, we can have a justice system which protects fundamental rights, yet the intricacies and balance of punishment and/or rehabilitation reflect the will of the people in each locality rather than a one-size fits all approach.

Conclusion

This essay marks the culmination of what I consider to be an integral part of my life's work through my twenties, in which I obsessively wrote and spoke about in my personal notes, videos, school clubs and writings.

I have shortened and made a decade of my notes into this easily digestible essay. My work, I hope, continues the profound legacy of Enlightenment philosophers who illuminated the concept of natural law, laying the foundations for the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and more.

In my perspective, human legal systems and politics have been unjustly separated from these other scientific domains. It is my duty to reunite politics to its rightful place within the natural law framework, in an admonition to today’s zeitgeist of moral relativism.

© 2023 William Ho