What are rights?

"Rights exist regardless of whether they are implemented in the legal constitution of a given country." David Kelley, A Life of One's Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State.

Mark Passio explains that a Right is “an action that is not harmful to anybody else”. He places the emphasis on the idea that a right is an action, specifically a correct and moral one. What is right, can be described apophatically, meaning that it is better described deductively, by excluding and dissecting truths from untruths. Rights and wrongs are expressions of the same in various degrees, similar to Plato's cyclical becoming: it is right what falls outside the parameters of what is wrong. So, what is a wrong? It is wrong to harm somebody else in their property. Somebody’s property is what is proper to them. Proper also means right, it is what is of their property, what they are at this present time using. Their body, their mind, their home, they are all properties of men. This is clearly seen in the Catalan language in which 'proper' also means 'close to'. In this way, there is a clear distinction between what is private and what is public to somebody. Stealing somebody’s property would be a wrong, and so not having one’s property stolen is a right. 

It is not just a coincidence that those concepts are explained with one word only. The word 'right' is a homonym because all of its meanings are related, and what is more, the fact that some of those meanings have not been forgotten or replaced by other terms indicates that they are still relevant. Rights cannot be described in positive only because doing so would be misusing the word ‘right’ to refer to what would really be a privilege. For example, to have a right to free healthcare means to have a right to somebody else's labour, and that is basically the definition of slavery. That then would be better described as 'having the privilege of somebody else's labour', and to say that one has 'the right to' would certainly be misusing the word 'right'. That would empty a ‘right’ off its meaning because it will undoubtedly come at somebody else’s (i.e. the doctors, the nurses) expense, becoming therefore, a wrong. Exchanging 'privilege' for 'right' does not magically change the meaning of right, it only indicates the speaker’s ignorance and self-deception. A right in that case would still be a wrong, if by ‘right’ one really means a ‘privilege’.  

What if rights are there to establish the red lines between what is private and what is public?

David Scott in UK Column's episode 3 of 'A Dissident's Guide to the Constitution' explains that the European Court/Convention on Human Rights establishes that the rights of people are not absolute because they need to be balanced with the rights of the state. However, as we have seen in this publication, granting rights to fictions might well be a mistake rather than 'progress'. The language that establishes the ECHR jurisdiction in UK Statute Law was past in 1998 – Blair’s Human Rights Act – and it stated that the infringement of Human Rights must be necessary and proportionate in a democratic society. Some absolute rights become ‘qualified’ ones as this type of democracy described the need to restrict and delimit rights on the individual in favour of the public. This has not always been the case when it comes to states possessing rights, fictions not always had rights; but corporations at one point did. The most important question is whether men's rights exist just for the sole condition of men existing in this world or because men has created an entity which is supposed to be there to protect them. “Stateless people do not have rights” is an idea widely proposed in the International Relations/Politics sphere and it is taken as a fact. But is it true that states give rights to men which they would otherwise not possess?

It boils down to the same principle: where do rights come from? Napoleonic/Civil Law versus Common Law/Constitutions – where does the presumption lie? Is there a God or not? If men are born with rights, then the state is not the source of those rights. At one point in history, men had enough of the abuses of Kings, and thus the enlightenment brought about the idea that the only way to guarantee people’s rights was through the state. However, after the industrial revolution and the economic improvements in society, the state required not only to provide negative rights (not to be invaded) but also positive ones (right to work or to opportunities). But as we have discussed earlier, those positives rights are really privileges that are detrimental to the well-functioning of society. 

An example of this can be seen nowadays with the concept of 'gender parity', as in pursuing 'gender equality', what really happens is that merit is replaced by inequality and gender discrimination. Parliamentaries under the policy of 'gender parity' are not selected by votes (as one would think that happens in democracies) but it becomes a gender-number only equality. Therefore, if the maxim quantity of men is reached, women are going to get the seat for the sole reason of being a woman and thus it ends up being a manifestation of what it is trying to avoid which is discrimination by gender. When equity does not prevail, meanings start to get distorted. In this example, it can perfectly be seen that the negative right not to be discriminated on the grounds of gender becomes the privilege of accessing first certain positions on those same grounds. What was once a protection is inverted into an imposition and thus it infringes upon other rights that then have to be balanced instead of acknowledging that what was first called a right was not really a right, and thus solving the problem altogether. 

Moreover, when adding privileges into the category of rights what really happens is that those God-granted natural or absolute rights merge into state-granted privileges too. The effect of this model of society is that we all become ‘part-time slaves’ to the public. This picture of Black's Law Dictionary's definition of rights also expresses this 'privileged' condition of rights. However, it is not a privilege to the other's equity but the privilege that 'the law' provides. This is deceptive, because in a way, and if we are talking about Natural Law or Common Law, then it is certainly an honour or/and a privilege to be able to harmonically co-exist with our peers. It is right and honourable to be able to trade and exchange one's labour with others, and it is only in that sense that one has the right to somebody else's labour, always as long as it is a respectful and equitable exchange to which both parties entered consciously consenting. That is far from what is really happening in our current system. If when referring to 'the law', instead of refering to Natural Law or Common Law one means the State's Acts and Statutes, then those rights that are a privilege in an honorable way become a privilege that benefits only whoever has the coercive force of the law behind them, because the essence and meaning of 'right' has been disolved into a totally undefined concept, and thus it can be anything the State decides it to be.

This model relies on the presumption that the State is always good and moral as they have been delegated (by persons) the power of being the source of law, and thus morality and fairness. It is therefore supposed that those men taking up the role of ‘public servants’ and 'legislators' are not going to abuse that power, and if they do, the people who are consenting to this system shake their heads and ultimately feel powerless. 

The traditional definition of right refers to ownership, you have a right to defend your property. In common law, if an intruder comes to your home, you have the right to defend your property through the use of reasonable force. In civil law, the State does not give you that right, you can only immobilise the intruder until the State (who has the monopoly on force) deals with the situation. What happens when the intruder is the State, tresspassing on our unalienable rights? Larken Rose (2012:105) writes:

“To say that someone has a ‘right’ to do something, while also saying that he would not be justified in forcibly defending such a right against government incursions, is a contradiction. In truth, what most people call ‘rights’ they actually perceive as government-granted privileges, which they hope their masters will allow, but which they have no intention of forcibly protecting if such ‘rights’ are ‘outlawed’ by government” 

Just the fact that a 'person' is a 'defendant' when in court means that, when we identify as those persons, we are required to defend ourselves from charges brought against us. The state is in the seat of power and judgement and the people are guilty until proven innocent. And because the State is only a fiction created by man, it can only be mankind who resolves takes the power back from the fictional realm.