The Fundamental Right to Life
Life.
Life is the most fundamental part of existence. Life is what animates every living being. In the physical sense, a person cannot enjoy the other inherit rights without life.
I have to state the obvious because this is often overlooked, underappreciated and dismissed by those who spend their precious little time arguing for infringements on the Natural Rights of individuals.
If simply having the gift of life is fundamental to existence, then so is the right to life. Individuals have an absolute right to their own life. Easy peasy, right?
Not so fast. I’ve been told by anti gun zealots that individuals do not have absolute rights. I’ve been told that the state can place limits on individual rights in the interest of the common welfare of the people.
This interpretation of Natural Rights is perverted and incorrect. In order to understand why, we need to take a look at the concept of Natural Rights and look at what was written by the philosophers to whom the concept is attributed.
Great thinkers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hobbs, Locke, Descartes and others lived during the Age of Enlightenment, which was a period of intellectual and scientific advancement in the 17th and 18th Centuries. This period of human reasoning lead to a confidence for the improvement of the human condition.
René Descartes, who is known as the father of modern philosophy, wrote, Cognito, ergo sum, or I think therefore I am. He rejected the concept of authority derived knowledge and sought a new way of thinking based on observation and experiment. This laid the foundation for others to challenge how man would view and govern himself in the future.
John Locke in particular, disputed, in his Two Treatise of Government, that the monarch's political authority was not derived from God. This was yet another challenge to authority derived knowledge - that only specific other men with power and authority could have certain knowledge and then use it to govern other people. In the Glorious Revolution, Locke argued that upon birth, man inherited a set of rights already in existence as a result of the state of nature. These rights, he argues were life, liberty and property. Upon entering what he called “civil society,” Locke argued that man surrendered to the state via the “Social Contract” and that the State is responsible for securing these rights, not enforcing them, and that a failure to do so gives way to the right to responsible, popular revolution.
If man is born into a natural state where nature’s order and laws are already in existence, then man is subject to that natural order. It becomes his state of being. If by virtue of his own existence, man inherits the order of nature then that order gives way to man having a set of Natural Rights.
Those rights are self evident. They are inalienable, meaning, they are not transferable to others. Each individual has their own rights. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” are among the primary rights conveyed to man upon his existence in nature and these rights are indeed absolute.
Man absolutely has the right to his own existence and each individual most certainly has the right to exist freely, to improve their life and to defend it with any and all means possible. The only time man surrenders his ability to exercise a right is when he enters Civil Society via the social contract, which is necessary to protect his or her rights.
Like I stated in the beginning, it is Life and the right to it that is the most fundamental of all. Without it, man cannot exercise the others. Every other aspect of Natural Rights rests upon this very foundational understanding. Protect it. Cherish it. I encourage all readers everywhere to not let others tell you that rights are not absolute, especially the right to live. If you can think for yourself, then you can recognize that this belief is not true. You have the right to your life and what you do with it is your choice, but whatever you do, I hope you choose to fight for it, protect it and preserve it. We only get one. Make it count.