THE STATEMENT OF INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS

The Statement of Individual Rights for the Island Nation of Tagg



Statement of Individual Rights for the Island Nation of Tagg

Individual rights provide moral protection for individuals against unchosen and characteristically harmful incursions carried out by other individuals or groups. Rights are normative signposts that tell us that such incursions are morally impermissible, that groups or individuals that engage in such incursions act wrongfully, and that such wrongful incursions may rightfully be suppressed. Individual rights are often described as moral fences or boundaries. An individual's rights specify the domain over which he rightfully exercises control; if others intrude on that domain, they trespass on him. As John Locke put it in Two Treatises of Government, rights allow individuals “to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit… without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.” Morally speaking, individual rights divide the world—including, most fundamentally, the world of persons—into “mine and thine.” Indeed, libertarian doctrines of individual rights are often cast in terms of a fundamental right of self-ownership. However, libertarian theories of individual rights also affirm individual rights to extrapersonal objects (e.g., to acorns, tractors, and software). Individual property rights radically expand the domains in which individuals may act as they see fit; without rights to extrapersonal objects, the outer boundaries of those domains would be the outer surfaces of our bodies. Individual rights—including property rights—protect persons in the private pursuit of their own preferred ends. They protect each individual's freedom to pursue his own conception of the good against all individuals and groups that might propose to subordinate the individual or his resources to another's purpose.

Although some libertarian thinkers eschew the vocabulary of rights, doctrines of individual rights have been fundamental in most libertarian theorizing. Most of the great figures in the history of political philosophy to whom libertarians appeal—such as John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and Herbert Spencer—placed doctrines of individual rights at the core of their political philosophies. Similarly, most of the recent theorists to whom libertarians appeal— such as Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Robert Nozick—have grounded their libertarian conclusions in robust affirmations of individual rights. That common appeal to individual rights is not surprising, because affirmation of individual rights manifests the core individualism of libertarianism and of the philosophical traditions on which libertarianism draws.

Indeed, among libertarian advocates of individual rights and among their philosophical predecessors, the ascription of protective individual rights reflects a deeper belief in the separate importance of each individual's person, life, happiness, or life projects. Advocates of significant protective rights do not think of persons and their lives (or their happiness or life projects) as important merely as a means to some collective end (e.g., the collective end of social happiness or social equality). Rather, those advocates think of each person and his life (or his happiness or life projects) as something that has its own independent importance. Advocates of individual rights take seriously the separate importance of persons ...