Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

Natural rights are those human rights respecting which promotes social cooperation, general welfare, and human flourishing and happiness; and results in the fastest improvement in the standard of living of the immense majority of the population. In other words, natural rights emerge from the body of natural law as elucidated by natural and social sciences, especially as it pertains to human happiness.

Obeying natural law makes human actions as successful as they possibly can be relative to the society’s level of economic and technological development. Natural rights are the rights which, if respected, are most conducive to such success. In this sense natural rights can be likened, perhaps surprisingly, to rule utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism will then be the form or spirit of the human laws, while the matter of letter of the law can be filled in in the way Rothbard does it in The Ethics of Liberty. Although Rothbard seemingly berates utilitarianism for its subjectivity, for taking values as given and considers ethics to be a science of “true” happiness, there is no reason why we can’t use the term “rule utilitarianism” in this narrower sense to mean the requirement to create laws following which normally maximizes that true happiness over some group of people (such as, indeed, everyone). In other words, utilitarianism demands (1) that laws promote or be means to human “true” well-being and (2) that it be specified the well-being of which humans we are concerned with. Surely, this is uncontroversial. (Rothbard also chastises utilitarianism for taking all present property titles to be legitimate, but that criticism, if at all valid, applies to act utilitarianism only not rule utilitarianism.)

For example, just because every man naturally owns himself does not mean that he ought to own himself, unless you argue that slavery of whatever sort is evil, because it retards flourishing and happiness.

Two objections can be made here, now that I am remembering Rothbard. First, the ethics which allows some people to own the bodies or fruits of the labor of other people fails to be universalizable. “Thus, if someone claims that the Hohenzollern or Bourbon families have the ‘natural right’ to rule everyone else, this kind of doctrine is easily refutable by simply pointing to the fact that there is here no uniform ethic for every person: one’s rank in the ethical order being dependent on the accident of being, or not being, a Hohenzollern.” (43) The subjects, says Rothbard, are veritable subhumans as compared to their rulers, and this “violates the initial assumption that we are carving out an ethic for human beings as such.” (46) On other hand, “Universal and Equal Other-ownership” fails because it leads to mankind’s disappearing from the face of the earth. “Can we picture a world in which no man is free to take any action whatsoever without prior approval by everyone else in society? Clearly no man would be able to do anything, and the human race would quickly perish. But if a world of zero or near-zero self-ownership spells death for the human race, then any steps in that direction also contravene the law of what is best for man and his life on earth.” (46)

Second, we can argue that the soul commands the body as a crane operator commands his machine, infallibly; while a human master commands his human slave through mere incentives of fear and reward. The reason to acknowledge self-ownership then is the far greater intimacy of the connection between the owner and the owned in the case of self, the far easier and more direct control by the soul of the body than by a master of his slave. In addition, a man can know himself by direct introspection which is a greatly superior way of learning than any way a master can learn of his slave. So, any person is suited to own himself in a more robust manner than he is suited to be owned by another. This is because ownership of oneself is of a different nature than ownership of another: the union of the soul and body is far closer and deeper than the union of the master and the slave. It’s much more “efficient” for each person to own himself.