Two Differences from the Declaration

In the comments to the post on arms below, Tom asks after two differences between the logic I offer and the one from the Declaration of Independence.

GRIM:

The Declaration asserts two things that I’m not arguing here:

1) That there is a right to life (it is named, alongside ‘liberty and the pursuit of happiness’);

2) That establishing a government is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for defending these rights.

I’m not arguing (1) because I am not sure about it. I’m not arguing for (2) because I hope it isn’t true.

TOM:

I would be very interested in your thinking on these two things you aren't arguing.

The latter is easily explained. I hope it will prove to be true that an adequate defense can be made through voluntary organizations of free individuals, which would not rise to the level of 'a government.' An adequately distributed capacity for resistance might make a populace sufficiently prickly, as it were, that even a tyrannical state would find it to hard on their throat to swallow. 

One might argue that something like that proved to be true in Afghanistan. The analogy benefits from setting aside the question of what constitutes tyranny, and focusing purely on the dynamic of whether a free association can prove indigestible to the most highly-organized government. The Taliban's loose organization of families and those freely choosing to resist conquest proved impossible for the United States and its coalition to digest, though it kept Afghanistan in its gullet (as it were) for two decades. Previously the Soviet Union had a very similar experience, substituting for American technical proficiency significantly brutal tactics. That did not work either. 

In other words, Joe Biden's favorite claim that resistance to the American government requires F-15s instead of AR-15s is likely exactly backwards. A government that depended on F-15s would have logistical chains that could be easily broken by the American military, quickly collapsing its ability to resist conquest and domination. A nation adequately provided with AR-15s could have a distributed capacity for resistance to those things that would be insuperable even by the US Army and Marine Corps even if they were provided with air superiority, fire support, and decades of time. We might do better to ship rifles to Taiwan than air defense systems. 

That is what I hope is true. It does not admit of a logical proof such as I was offering in the post below, only pragmatic arguments. If it is true, though, then we can organize ourselves in the human future along the lines of anarchy: no leaders, no masters, no domination. Just free individuals defending each other's liberty, as we come together to do other worthy things -- whether churches or volunteer fire departments, accepting that the latter would require another funding model in the absence of grants from tax-funded state agencies. That would be a better way forward, one that lacked even the mechanisms for the grasping to exert power over others. It is the 'Black Flag America' that I hope someday might become the freely-chosen human future.

I will put the other question after the jump.
Whether there is a 'right to life' is a matter I have long had questions about. The right to life is generally said to be a natural right. I accept that nature is a good place to go to look for what rights exist, although that position is itself controversial. Any attempt to prove a natural right of any sort has at some point to establish that natural rights can themselves be proven, which is an undertaking far beyond the scope of this post.

The Declaration itself does not use the term 'natural rights,' and also does not attempt to prove that they exist. It instead famously attributes the position by bald assertion to the Creator, and declares the existence of those rights (as well as the equality of men) to be a self-evident truth that is accepted by the authors. That dodges the need for philosophical combat on the point, which they were able to do because they were able to wage and win the actual combat. Nevertheless, it is clear that they intend to refer to the tradition of natural rights, and to invoke also the Christian theological tradition by which God ultimately is the author of nature and of natural law, which is a lower and imperfect expression of the Divine Law that is written beyond the walls of the world. 

I think it suffices to argue for human dignity, as I did below, without establishing a natural right to life as a further ground for that dignity. Whether or not one has a right to life, if one is able to be a party to the discussion in a meaningful way one already is a human being with the associated facilities of life and reason; this is sufficient ground for dignity, which is itself sufficient ground for the right to arms (as argued in the prior post). It is not necessary to establish that you have a right to life any more than it is necessary to argue that you have a right to reason: whether or not you have a right to those things, you obviously do have them or you wouldn't be able to participate in the discussion. 

[An aside: this is analogous to the discussion of how likely it is that a randomly-created universe would have the right conditions to support intelligent life. In a way, the question is beside the point: in order to even entertain the question, intelligent life must in fact have already arisen in the universe, and thus the conditions must have obtained in order for the discussion to happen at all. The probability may well be unknowable, but the probability given that we are having the discussion is 1. So too here: it may be impossible to create a philosophically unassailable defense of a natural right to life and/or reason, but in order to have the discussion both life and reason necessarily obtain in fact. The dignity associated with that necessary possession is therefore a firmer ground for a right to arms, philosophically, precisely because it is necessary rather than debatable.]

Even if one does wish to argue for a natural right to life, one has to establish some agreed-upon grounds for how a right can be derived from nature. This is an uncertain business also. The Christian approach referenced in the Declaration is only one of many, one that requires acceptance of an additional metaphysical entity ('the Creator') and some inferred ideas about his will (either from natural theology or from scripture). This worked well in a pre-Reformation Medieval Europe, but it is not clear that it is possible to return to that ground of consensus from here -- especially not as our societies have integrated with ones that are neither Christian, rooted in Christianity, nor even necessarily positively-disposed towards Christianity. It may be an unobtainable position, which means pragmatically it is impossible even if it could be shown to be philosophically desirable. 

That religiously-grounded approach was in any case rejected by Kant, among others, who tried instead to derive such things from practical reason; and that approach, likewise, has proven unsatisfactory to many. It has a similar pragmatic problem. 

One alternative argument for rights from nature is that one has a right to anything that one naturally needs, i.e., that there are therefore rights to food, water, shelter, and so forth. This one has advocates, but because these 'rights' result in positive demands on others, there are also numerous opponents to the whole model. Wouldn't you have a right to medicine and medical care, and thus a right to demand it at need from those who produce it? Wouldn't this then create a potentially limitless demand on doctors or producers of medicine? Could they ask payment as a condition for providing you with something to which you had a 'natural right,' or would they be required to provide it regardless of your ability to pay (and also landlords, farmers or others with food, etc.)? How would such a 'natural right' system be different from slavery for those who produced such things, and how would you get anyone to agree to expend the resources or effort necessary to become capable of producing such things if that very expenditure reduced them to slavery? That approach seems untenable pragmatically as well.

Another approach to natural rights seems to provide a counterpoint to a right to life. Let us say arguendo that nature can be said to ground a right if and only if nature will defend one in doing something. One might then argue loosely that one has a right to strive for virtues, i.e. for excellence, because nature pragmatically supports the Aristotelian virtues in just the ways he says they do: becoming courageous will make it much more likely that you will find success in seeking your goals in the world. Nature can therefore be said to support courage, as self-control, the development of practical wisdom, and so forth. Then one might even say (again following Aristotle's definition) that one has a natural right to pursue happiness: because happiness, eudaimonia, is the flourishing one experiences while pursuing excellence, and the capacities for excellence are nothing other than the self-same virtues.

Note, however, that life is not among the things that nature will support you in achieving or maintaining. In fact the opposite is true: at least for human beings, nature is determined to support your attainment of death. One could more readily argue on this ground that one has a right to die than a right to live, and indeed at some point the maintenance of life seems to be unnatural (and even undesirable, as for example in the case of someone kept on life support machines well beyond any hope of recovery, normalcy, or even the exercise of reason or action). 

In my novel -- an announcement about which is forthcoming -- the characters discuss this matter in some depth. There is a sense in which death cannot harm you, but life can. Even on less literary terms, though, if one wants to derive logically out of facts about nature, nothing is more obvious or certain than that nature's telos for us being death. It is universal, necessary, and inescapable. 

Perhaps it is even valuable, and choice-worthy under some circumstances. We tend to oppose euthanasia, but not because we want people with no hope of survival to suffer longer. We often speak of their death as a release and a blessing, an end to suffering and a coming-home. We oppose euthanasia because it very rapidly brings us to evil places in which we are disposing of people not because it is desirable for them, but because they are a burden to us. Many of the saints are said to have desired death, not to end their painful martyrdom but because it was the final road to God. Galahad is said to have prayed for the right to choose his moment to die as a boon, once he had seen the Grail and thereby lost all joy in and desire for merely mortal things. 

For these reasons, I avoid grounding anything on a right to life natural or otherwise. I am not sure of it: neither that it is a secure and reliable ground, nor that such a right really exists, nor that we ought to want one at all. Others have thought otherwise; I am sure you are familiar with their arguments. 

UPDATE: The comments to this post turned out to be at least as important as the post. Please read them as well.