THE CONCEPT OF INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS (Ayn Rand)

If one wishes to advocate a free society, that is, capitalism, one must realize that its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights. If one wants to uphold individual rights, one must realize that capitalism is the only system that upholds and protect them. “Rights” are a moral concept, the concept that preserves and protects individual morality on a social context, the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to the moral law. Every political system is based on some code of ethics, and the dominant ethics of mankind’s history were variants of the altruist-collectivist doctrine which subordinated the individual to some higher authority, either mystical or social. Consequently, most political systems were variants of the same statist tyranny. Under all such systems, morality was a code applicable to the individual, but not to society. Society was placed outside the moral laws, its embodiment or source or exclusive interpreter, and the inculcation of self-sacrificial devotion to social duty was regarded as the main purpose of man’s earthly existence. Since there is no such entity as “society”, since society is only a number of individual men, this meant, in practice that the rulers of society were exempt from the moral law. They held power on the implicit principle of: “The good is that which is good for society (or the tribe, the race, the nation), and the ruler’s edicts are its voice on earth…” All these political systems (The Divine Right of Kings, the theocracy of Egypt, the welfare state of the Emperors of Rome, the Inquisition, the welfare state of Bismark, the Nazy Germany, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” of the Soviet Union, and so on) were expressions of the altruist-collectivist ethics, and their common characteristic is that society stood above the moral law. The most profoundly revolutionary achievement of the United States was the subordination of society to moral law. All previous systems have regarded man as a sacrificial means to the end of others, and society as an end in itself. The United States regarded man as an end in himself, and society as a means to the peacefull, orderly, voluntary co-existence of individuals. It held that a man’s life is his by right, that a right is the property of an individual, that society as such has no rights, and that the only moral purpose of government is the protection of individual rights. A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right, all the others are its consequences or colloraries: a man’s right to his own life. The right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action, which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being (which is what defines men) for the support, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life (such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pusuit of happiness). The right to life is the source of all rights, and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave. To violate man’s rights means to compel him to act against his own judgement, or to expropriate his values. There is only one way to do it: by the use of physical force. There are two potential violators of man’s rights: the criminals and the government. The great achievement of the United State was to draw a distinction between these two, by forbidding to the second the legalized version of the activities of the first. The Declaration of Independence laid down the principle that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted amon men.” These provided the only valid justification of a government and defined its only proper purpose: to protect man’s rights by protecting him from physical violence. Thus the government role was changed from the role of ruler to the role of servant. The government was set to protect man from criminals, and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed against private citizens, but against the government, as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power. The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day. In the United States, it lead to a pattern of a civilized society that for the brief span of some one hundred and fifty years, it came close to achieving. A civilized society is one in which physical force is banned from human relationships, in which the government, acting as a policeman, may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiated its use. This was the essential meaning and intent of America’s political philosophy, implicit in the principle of individual rights. It was the concept of individual rights that had given birth to a free society. And it was with the destruction of individual rights that the destruction of freedom had to begin. (But this will be the subject of another post……) In contrast, the concept of man as a free, independent individual, was profoundly alien to the culture of Europe. It was a tribal culture down to its roots. The American philosophy of the Rights of Man was never grasped fully by European intellectuals. Europe’s predominant idea of emancipation consisted of changing the concept of man as a slave of the absolute state embodied by the king, to the concept of man as a slave of the absolute state embodied by “the people”, switching from slavery to the tribal chief to slavery to the tribe. A non-tribal view of existence could not penetrate the mentalities that regarded the privilege of ruling material producers by physical force as a badge of nobility.