FREE COLLEGE!

What Makes a right inherent?

Assumption: We are all created equal (with regards to inherent rights and obligations)

Therefore: Any inherent rights you have from society, are shared equally by all other members of your society.

For a ‘right’ to have relevance in discussion or debate, an obligation from one or more other people is required to fulfill that right.  (Example: If you have a right to not be killed by someone, that person has an obligation to not kill you)  You cannot enjoy a right unless that person upholds the enabling obligation.

An inherent right (due to it’s implied nature) would demand such an obligation from all members of society  (in our example, If you are in a society of ten other people, all ten must be obligated not to kill you for you to enjoy your inherent right to not be killed by any of them).

If all members of society are equal with regards to inherent rights, you must hold the reciprocal corresponding inherent obligation to all members of your society.  (In our example you would be inherently obligated not to kill the other ten people in your society.  If you weren’t, those people could not enjoy the right of not being killed.  If they could not enjoy this right, they would not be inherently equal).

Theory: In all cases, if you claim to enjoy an inherent right from your society, you concurrently claim the inherent obligation to uphold this right for all others in your society.

Next time you find yourself claiming you have a right to something, ask yourself, what gives you that right?  For example: ‘I have a right to free college.’  Ok, what gives you that right?  If your answer is that you deserve it because ‘everybody deserves it,’ you are saying this is an inherent right.  Therefore, if everybody deserves it just by virtue of being a member of the society, that means everybody is obligated to provide college to anyone in their society that wants it  – without compensation – including you.  Are you running a free college?  If not, you are asserting that you deserve a right that others don’t (since others are obligated to provide it to you, but you aren’t obligated to provide it them).  You are asserting you are superior, in terms of inherent rights.

If you don’t have the obligation to uphold the right of all others, they don’t have the obligation to provide the right to you.  Such a right, is not inherent.

This is not to say you don’t have a right to free* college.  You might.  I did*.  But it wasn’t inherent.  What gave me the right to free* college was a contract.  I came to an agreement with representatives of the United States Army for which I gained the right to (and the Army gained the obligation to pay for) my free* college experience.  This wasn’t inherent or assumed.  I didn’t have a right to it until I agreed to fulfill an obligation to (providing the Army with the right to my) 8 years of military service.

There are plenty of other ways one might gain a right to not pay for college, but simply being alive isn’t one of them.  Free college isn’t an inherent right.  It is not assumed in all societies without needing to spell it out in the contract or constitution.

Free* college for all is something though.  It is an ideal.  It is something that we can set as a common goal, and strive to achieve as a society.  Man wasn’t born with a right to walk on the moon, but we banded together, pulled up our bootstraps, shared a common vision, and either directly or indirectly contributed (through paying taxes) to achieving a seemingly impossible goal.

Such lofty goals require alignment and agreement for those that would fund the initiative, as well as intelligent solutions that would reduce the cost of such a prohibitively expensive endeavour.  

Is it a worthy pursuit?  Like universal healthcare, and many other potential societal benefits, that’s a conversation for another time.

*there’s no such thing as free college (or anything that requires human labor to enjoy), but let us assume someone who claims this right means ‘the right to have someone else pay for the cost of your college’

Duke’s Response

I think Eric is onto something here.  His personal example of free* college being paid for with deferred service is a great one because it points something out that is important.  It is the notion that rights and obligations are not always fulfilled on a one to one basis both in time and resources.  Eric’s educational benefit likely does not match up hour for hour or dollar for dollar with his service to the military – such an equation is difficult to quantify.  Even if you could match up the exchange dollar for dollar or hour for hour can it account for the intrinsic value of education, the compounding benefits it provides to Eric down the road, or the benefits Eric brings to society by being a more informed and engaged (we hope) citizen?  Similarly can we calculate the sacrifices and obstacles he must overcome in fulfilling his military service?  If he were injured, or worse, in the line of duty would we still call the benefit/obligation equal?

The answer is that these risks/rewards are both implicit and explicit and we can only hope that all parties involved made an informed decision when entering into the agreement.  What I believe is most significant aspect of the agreement is the intention of both parties to fulfill the mutually beneficial obligations.

Without going into the discussion of whether college should be free, I think it is important to take a step back to consider schooling in the United States more broadly.  We live in a country that has provided “universal”, free* k-12 schooling for the last 50-100 years (the grade range and year of implementation vary from state to state, but generally it was not until the 1930s or later that high school was accessible to most of the country and not until after World War II that a majority of Americans completed high school).  What were originally one room school houses that children attended sporadically became institutions with a systematic and expanding approach to education.  

Never were schools in America free. They were funded through a variety of ways (the most common being local taxes of one form or another, more recently property taxes).  The growth of schools was driven, and continues to be driven, by a pervasive belief that in order for a person to participate in a democratic society and function in a competitive capitalist economy the individual must have a basic and common set of knowledge and skills.  This belief is coupled with an understanding that if this foundational knowledge was limited only to families who could afford to pay for it, our democracy and our economy would not be equitable.

And so in regards to schooling the right/obligation is not entirely structured as a right to schooling / an obligation to pay.  Some parents cannot afford to pay, some people do not own property and thus do not pay directly (though in theory their landlord should pay), some children are wards of the state and obviously cannot pay.  Even if a family could afford to pay and dodged their taxes, we would still claim their child should not be denied an education.  None of these people are denied public educational opportunities (though there is ample evidence that educational opportunities are not of equitable quality).  

It seems we need to frame the educational right/obligation differently.  Either it is a deferred and corresponding relationship (as with Eric’s ROTC example) where we would say that all children have the right to public education with the expectation that they will pay it back and pay it forward to other children when they become taxpaying adults.  OR we could state that all children have the right to public education and society has a collective obligation to provide it.  

The distinction is important I think.  It is a distinction between private and public responsibility.  I know Eric would say there is no difference, because the public is simply a collective of individuals, but I in the case of education there initially was a difference (though unfortunately there may not be a difference any more).  

Those initial one room school houses served a function of teaching children to read the Bible – a value collectively important to the community with no expected economic outcome for the students.  The schoolmaster had to be paid though – and these fees were a collective responsibility of the community to ensure children could participate in the primary community function of religious worship.  The expansion of schooling into a compulsory and institutional endeavor was driven by a need to acculturate immigrants into the American values system and prepare them for work in the increasingly industrial economy (If you look up Horace Mann you’ll find out about this) – it was paid for largely by the wealthy because they had a self-interest in creating a workforce that could follow directions and that had a decent command of the three “R’s” (reading, writing, and arithmetic).  

In either of these examples according to Eric’s rights/obligations model we could say that no students in these education paradigms could claim a ‘right’ to education because they had no obligation to reciprocate.  Their access to education followed a sense of moral obligation from the community, or self-interest from a portion of the community, to provide that opportunity.  

I initially want to say that if we make the right/obligation connection with education more explicit at the individual level it reduces the risk that individuals later in life will back out of their commitment to support education.  “I’ve benefited at some point from public education and so I have an obligation to support it throughout my life”.   But structuring the right/obligation as such we run the risk that if an individual does not believe they benefited from public education they will feel no obligation to support it.  This works at the high end of the socioeconomic spectrum, in which a person may have attended only private schools, or at the low end where a person has struggled to make a living and feels disenfranchised.  

What we are witnessing now in the 21st century is that education is increasingly being viewed as a private benefit.  I’ve already written more than I would like to so I won’t go into the many ways this has manifest itself in declining funding for public institutions and the rising cost of a college education.  

I agree with Eric that no one should claim schooling (K-12 or college) as a right…that does not mean I cannot claim I, and society collectively, have an obligation to support public schooling.  

In a ‘chicken or the egg’ sort of equation I am saying that it is not a an individual’s demand for an education that drive’s his or hers or society’s responsibility to provide it for others; rather it is society’s decision to be responsible for children’s education that drive’s children’s expectation that they will receive it.

 

Unnatural Rights?

In an effort to define the difference between natural and contractual rights, a certain philosopher has challenged the presumption that natural, universal, or inherent rights exist at all.

I’ve similarly and inadvertently challenged my own assumption on the matter as well, in asserting You Have no Rights without corresponding obligations, and that You Deserve Nothing, if you haven’t earned it.

In the past I’ve use ‘natural’, ‘inherent’, and ‘universal’ rights interchangeably.  But in order to deeply examine this issue, I will separate their meanings based on their underlying definition.

First up: Natural Rights

For a moment, imagine you are the only person in the world, or – less depressingly – you are in the middle of wilderness with no means of interacting with other human beings.  Nothing is artificial.  You are in a State of Nature.  What are your rights?

Let’s examine the classics:

Life: While obviously nobody ever had the right to live forever (at least in our present bodies), in society we generally associated the right to Life as the right to not be murdered by anyone (or suffer lesser assaults).  Potentially, one could even argue it entails the right to call on others to help defend one’s self, but for now there is nobody else around.  In nature?  With nobody around, you certainly won’t be killed by another person, but what about wildlife?  They certainly don’t care about your right to life.  In Nature, I think anyone could accept a right to Life – which is the right to defend one’s self from threats to one’s well being.  So, rest easy fending off those bears.  Is Life a natural right?  Defined as the right to defend one’s self, certainly.  

Liberty: Can you do whatever you want in nature, and feel no remorse?  Within your abilities, yes.  Though your potential is severely limited in isolation compared to society, you can do what you are able.  Liberty can be defined as your ability to do what you want – free from restraint –  so long as it does not harm another.  It can also be viewed as the ability to choose how to expend the time we have remaining in our lives.  With no others to impact in a state of nature and nobody to restrain your free will, Liberty is a natural right.

Property: In the ‘John Locke’ sense of the term, Property means that you can appropriate yourself what you want from nature for your own benefit – so long as there is effectively as much remaining to satisfy the needs of the rest of mankind.  By yourself, in the wilderness, there are no other human needs to fulfill, so you can drink as much from the stream as you’d like, pick as many berries as you’d like, and eat whatever meat you can capture and kill.  There will be nothing immoral about feeding yourself, clothing yourself, or fashioning tools for yourself from nature to help make your life easier.  The only limitation from a spiritual standpoint would be to avoid waste, which – on your own – is more of a practical guideline than a moral one.

Property could also be defined as the right to not have what is yours taken from you by others.  Like Life, in a State of Nature, no other humans are around, but the bears that don’t respect your life probably won’t have qualms about eating your food either. In nature, your right to Property is essentially just the echoes of your former society saying, “good luck.”

I would contend that, with above conceded definitions, the rights to Life, Liberty, and Property do exist in nature, but their relevance is extremely limited.  In general, people speak of rights as something they are due from other people.  Rarely do you find the need to defend your rights from yourself.  Still, I think these natural rights are important to understand as a baseline minimum.  No human is ever born into a state of nature, but so long as they choose to stay with a society, one must understand what they are sacrificing for the benefits of that society (and what they are not).  The only right of Life and Property in nature is the right to defend them, but the right to Liberty is nearly absolute.  

But what about rights and obligations between people?  Universal Rights

Returning from the wilderness to the reality of society, one might ask, are there universal rights between humans?  For instance, is there a right and obligation to Life that universally binds people to not murder each other, at a minimum?

Before answering, let’s specify that here universal here means ‘applying to all people, in all cases, at all times.’  

Whether you want to focus on morality or legality, the answer must definitively be ‘no.’  In ancient Sparta, unhealthy babies could be murdered legally and – what was viewed at the time – morally.  It was not considered wrong or illegal in that society.  Even today, and districts controlled by the Islamic State, murdering individuals is both legal and considered righteous.  (Of course in these situations those doing the killing don’t consider it murder, but this is precisely the point)

An important thing to note here is that your personal view of what is right and wrong may be able to be applied universally for yourself.  For instance, you could sit here and condemn Spartan, Nazi, or Islamic State practices, but not everyone would agree with you.  The morality is individual, not universal.  And while it seems obvious to me that murder or theft is wrong, in order to truly explore philosophy we must accept that we could be wrong about anything at any time.  Is there something we condone today as ‘right’ that a few hundred years from now will be chalked up next to burning ‘witches’ alive in the history books?  The answer is: probably.

With seven billion people walking the earth today, many more in our past, and hopefully more in our future, we can not find a universal acceptance of right and wrong on any subject, at any time, across any geography, or even within a single society.

In this context, we cannot definitively determine any universal rights among mankind.  (Kudos, Duke/Kefer)

Does that mean we have to worry about getting murdered, enslaved, or robbed by everyone we encounter?  Inherent Rights

Now that we explored the rights of an individual in a vacuum, and the rights of all individuals in all cases, let us explorer a similar line of reasoning.

After you’ve killed a beast in the wilderness, and are harvesting it to eat, another human may stumble out of the brush.  In that instant, knowing no universal rights, you have yet to exit a State of Nature.  In that moment, the man emerging from the brush is no different than another wild animal with regards to safety and security of yourself and your possessions.  You do not know his beliefs.  Perhaps he is a cannibal.  What’s he doing here anyway?

Our ability to communicate, however, could establish some rights and obligations between two or more individuals.  The stranger in the wilderness could offer you his belt in exchange for a slab of meat, and you may accept.  Until this occurred there would be no reason to believe this exchange would be fair or moral.  There may be no universal beliefs, but in this specific case, two individuals have manifested beliefs that this specific exchange would be morally acceptable.  Presumably with nobody else affected by the trade, a micro-case of right and wrong has been created (the wrong here being the refusal of one party later refusing to uphold their end of the deal).  Of course, this subject is a large one with many aspects, the contract.

One might say, didn’t you have the ‘right’ to make that contract?  If so, doesn’t all mankind have the universal right to contract?  Of course not.  I could not possibly say that I have the right to create a contract in which I exchange one dollar for all of your worldly possessions.  The right to contract is not universal.  It requires consent.  You seek to rephrase: then you have a universal right to contract with those that consent.  But this is not correct either.  To offer a trade is simply the exercise of the natural right of Liberty.  When nobody is within your sphere of influence, your actions cannot possibly harm another.  When there are others around, a contract is simply a manifestation that the action(s) in question are viewed by affected individuals as (net) beneficial.  The agreement is a confirmation that your action does not harm the others impacted, in their own opinion.  A contract is the checkpoint from transferring your natural right to Liberty into society.  To contract is no more right then it is an  obligation – a requirement to form a society.  It is also an expression of goodwill toward one another, since the alternative would have been to proceed with your desired action without regards to the wellbeing of others involved.

So then, what of inherent rights?  Since there are no universal rights among mankind, wouldn’t there also be no inherent rights in a society?

Not so, I would say.  If we can accept that every contractual society is created for personal benefit.  Whether we agree to form a nation together or simply a single instance of exchange of goods or services – there is no doubt agreements are made to the perceived net benefit (despite obligations incurred) of all consenting parties.

To this end, one could argue that under all manners of society – unless otherwise stated in the contract – certain rights and obligations are inherent (or at all times implied).

For instance, would it be practical, prudent, or necessary to – for every agreement in the world add the phrase “and we promise not to kill each other” ?  No.  If you have reached the point of a legitimate, consensual contract, there is an understanding that both sides perceive a greater benefit gained than sacrifice they are obligating themselves to.  A contract is a manifestation that parties intend to respect the others’ well being, otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered to contract in the first place.

Therefore the the terms “Don’t kill me and I won’t kill you as long as our contract exists” is implied.  To not be killed by others in your society would then be an inherent right (which would carry a corresponding obligation to not kill them).  Likewise, lesser forms of injurious assault could logically be included in these implied terms.

Therefore, the natural right to defend one’s life from external threats (‘Life’) is inherently at all times extended to encompass a right to-not-be-injured by those under contract – unless expressly stated to the contrary in the agreement itself.

A contract is a consensual limitation on one’s natural liberty.  In nature, one holds no obligations to anyone for anything.  Under contract, one specifies the obligations to another they explicitly agree to, in exchange for the perceived greater benefit.  Inherent then, in this contract, is the preservation of all remaining liberty not otherwise sacrificed under the contract.  All liberty is natural, therefore liberty not willingly sacrificed to be part of a society is inherent.

But what of property?  In nature, under no agreement with anyone, a man might expect to have to defend the fruits of his labor from anyone or anything.  Legitimate property is merely the static result of of the specific way one has chosen to expend one’s body and time – one’s Liberty and Life.  To take someone’s property then, is undisputably injurious to that person.  If it takes a man an hour of undesirable labor to feed himself for the day, and before he eats, another takes his food, the thief has effectively wrongly imprisoned the victim for an hour.  Theft of property then is undoubtedly an assault on another’s life and liberty – albeit slightly less obvious.  Therefore, relief from theft of one’s property by others you’ve reached agreement with is likewise implied, or inherent, unless otherwise stated in the contract.  One important caveat – property rights are only as inherent as the legitimacy of the property is obvious.  When their is not an agreement as to who actually owns the property, such terms would have to be spelled out in the contract to firmly establish what is inherently protected for each individual in the society.

In this sense, I think it is appropriate to assert that Life, Liberty, and Property are all inherent rights – in the contexts I’ve stated – for any people that have entered into an agreement with one another.  Every legitimate contract between individuals carries these terms, whether or not they are in writing.  If one shirks the obligations he has incurred under a legitimate contract, they then have sacrificed their rights the agreement has granted as well.  They walk through their former society as a wild beast, whose life, freedom, and possessions are no longer guaranteed to be respected by others.  

However, like the natural rights themselves, these inherent rights may also be explicitly sacrificed by a willing individual that views the rewards to exceed the injuries suffered.

There is much more to be discussed on this topic, but at present this reasoning will serve as a foundation that natural and inherent rights do exist, at least in some capacity.  We’ve discussed some of the most commonly recited examples through history here, and we’ll define a litmus test in another article to help tackle the subject should the question ever arise on other specific subjects in the future.