The proof is in the pudding, they say and the devil’s in the details so let’s see how Temporal Rights handles some tricky legal issues like suicide, victimless crimes, and eminent domain.

We are in a period when technology is advancing so fast that our traditional legal and value systems, worked out and fine-tuned during the past millennia, no longer seem to apply and difficult questions arise, questions we could not even ask a few years ago. This new understanding of natural rights promises a perspective that will not only simplify the issues but often points directly to their proper evaluation and resolution.

One of the problems with current legal reasoning is the reliance on ad hoc balancing tests when resolving conflicts. Courts often do this in ways that lack a clear logical basis, which leads to contradictory rulings and inconsistent applications of the law.

By contrast, Temporal Rights provide a principled method for resolving legal conflicts based on the logical hierarchy of rights—where more fundamental rights serve as the meta-data of derived rights. This eliminates arbitrary legal exceptions by showing that some rights are logically necessary for others to exist, making it impossible to arbitrarily treat all rights as equal or negotiable in the same way.

It is important to note that the outcomes of the cases below are very similar to those under the traditional theory of natural rights: arguments based on abstract principles of social and human values. Temporal Rights, however, provide insights and a vocabulary with which we can articulate and explicitly deal with the components of the issues. They provide a finer-grained and more articulate view.

To establish a vocabulary for this discussion, I repeat the terse definition of Temporal Rights: the authority of an operator to operate.

Ethics

Ethics forms one of the most important bases for juriprudence so I want to comment on that to set the stage for the following analyses.

By treating rights as the authority proceeding from, or the meta–data of, capabilities, ethics is moved from a system of imposed obligations to one of inherent recognition. Ethical action then becomes the process of ensuring that all operators can exercise their fundamental capabilities in accordance with their Temporal Rights. The supremacy of human rights is made clear by the supremacy of human capabilities. There is a natural hierarchy of rights in nature and civilization that informs an appropriate order for those rights. This natural hierarchy creates a basis for an ethics that is at once rational, discernable, and nuanced appropriately. I’ll treat a few tricky issues to illustrate this.

Suicide and Euthanasia

The act of suicide is self-contradictory because it destroys the existence necessary for all other operations. It destroys an existence whose inalienability makes it the greatest violation of rights. Against this superior claim is the claim of self-determination, which Temporal Rights also holds inviolate. However, that impasse yields to the following analysis. The right to life is the most fundamental right being prior to all others. The right to self-determination is fundamental but becomes moot when life ends. Thus, the right to life wins, but the right to self-determination can be given a weighted value if the law suggests/provides intervention to preclude suicide during a cooling-off period, for example.

Assisted suicide appears somewhat differently under the lights of Temporal Rights. Here a person delegates the destruction of life to another person. In the new parlance, both the suicidal person and the chosen executioner have the right to do as they are able, but the destruction of existence is the greatest possible violation of rights, suggesting that the law must rule this as illegal unless there are extenuating circumstances that alter the hierarchy of rights.

Euthanasia is an interesting case study. An extreme but illustrative example is a person whose brain has ceased to function but the brain stem is still activating breathing and heart beat. To put this in the terminaolgy of Temporal RIghts: the operator is incapable of operation, so an operator doesn’t actually exist. This condition probably defines the end of the spectrum of possibilities.

Temporal RIghts show that euthanasia is similar to abortion. It is the termination of an operator that ends the temporal period of an incredible range of operations. That fact leads to the logical evaluation of the operator based on its abilities to operate. In both instances, the so-called quality of life can inform the degree to which rights may have been violated. There is, however, one fact that overwhelms this comparison: one life is developing, and the other is probably diminishing.

It is important to note that these outcomes are very similar to those under the traditional theory of natural rights. Temporal Rights however provides a vocabulary with which we can explicitly deal with the components of the issues. They provide a finer grained view of most issues.

Victimless Crimes

First, I will note that the label “victimless crimes” is, as applied to most of these, an oxymoron. The use of heroin, for example, cannot be considered victimless because self-harm is still harm. The idea that a person can be their own worst enemy is not a new one.

Under the lights of Temporal Rights, heroin usage is correctly evaluated as parallel to but less onerous than suicide. There is always temporary and sometimes permanent damage to the powers of the operator and, thus, a violation of the authority /rights of the operator/person. The attenuation of capabilities is intrinsically a violation of rights.

Wikipedia lists a number of “victimless crimes” most of which are clearly not victimless under Temporal RIghts. However, certain acts between consenting adults are often cited as victimless because these acts seem to have very limited consequences both in space and time. But damage to the operator is what we are looking for here because damage to the operator is inherently damage to its rights.

Adultery, fornication, and prostitution are often placed in this category, but it is hardly necessary to elaborate on the damage these activities perpetrate on their operators. Temporal Rights insists that these are not victimless for obvious reasons. The degree of violation is an ancillary question that Temporal Rights is able to address in an articulate fashion because the degree of violation is directly proportional to the degree of damage. Temporal Rights can clarify these issues in a remarkable way.

The difficulty with these crimes is whether laws can be written that protect the rights being violated in such a way as not to inflict even greater violations of other, more weighty rights. That is one of the primary reasons these crimes get labeled “victimless”. Can government address these in a rational way? Temporal Rights say “Yes, but not directly.” Laws always restrict the operations of operators and to restrict these operations it would have to make major inroads on freedom.

Our founding fathers talked about these issues and concluded that the only rational way to address them was to encourage religious belief among the people. That principle has not changed but the semantics of our legislators and laws have developed an anti-religious force of great consequence. The false dichotomy of believer/nonbeliever is almost universally accepted as an excuse to build a wall between church and state, which has made atheism the state religion. Furthermore, the wall cannot be built because it too is founded on the same false dichotomy.

Eminent Domain

When I was five years old, the government sent my parents a letter informing them that they had thirty days to move. We happened to live in the great bend of the Columbia River in a tiny farming community called White Bluffs. The Manhattan Project created a sub-project called the Hanford Project, which bought up the land where five atomic reactors would be built to finalize research on the first atomic bomb. It was a clear violation of property rights, and they are one of the most fundamental rights under the view of natural rights offered by Temporal Rights. The preservation of the existence of the operator is tops, and a place to be is a close second.

The Columbia River comes south from Canada into White Bluffs, so it is cold. It is also a large, dependable flow. Those were primary needs for the Hanford Project, which needed to cool five reactors at once. The “compelling interest” of the government in this project was clear at the time when Japan was threatening the existence of our nation of operators. We were compensated for the disruption of our operations, but most of the operators thought it was inadequate.

The principle of eminent domain is a prima facia violation of Temporal Rights. However, if the people delegate their rights to the government through volunteer operations, it can be justified. It seems the principles are all in place, and these governmental activities are appropriate unless there are bad operators in the execution of eminent domain: graft, conspiracy, etc.

Artificial Intelligence

There are rumors and innuendos galore regarding this new technology – autonomous robots invading our cities, becoming conquerors and tyrants. There is a corresponding discussion about the supposed rights of such “creatures”. I won’t attempt to delineate any regulations, but I do want to address AI at a philosophical level because the way we perceive AI will profoundly affect how we treat it.

Let’s focus on the operator of artificial intelligence: software. Does software, seemingly an operator, have any rights? Under the title There Is No Such Thing as Software I have already treated that question indirectly. It turns out that Temporal Rights sees no relevant operator in software because software is not a thing – that is, it has no self-existence. (So maybe I need to tweak the terse definition a bit.) You see, software, a bunch of data that contains operational instructions, never exists as an entity unto itself but only as these instructions are encoded in some form of organized matter – often in the orientation of magnetic fields. So there is no operator here and therefore no rights.

If we want to find an operator, we have to look at the matter in which the software is encoded. So, we need to drill down on this. Often, the software instructions are stored in magnetic media and then transferred to electronic circuitry for execution. The object performing this execution can do that, so it has the right to do so. Although the software of AI has no rights, the hardware that executes the instructions does. One could venture to say that an animated robot is endowed by its creator with certain inalienable rights.

But that focuses on this creation and we are missing an overarching fact: the robot was created as a tool of its creator. So we can honor the Temporal Rights of such a robot, but the responsibility for its operations is traceable back to its creator. In the final analysis then, the primary operator is the person responsible for the creation of the robot. The secondary operator, the robot, has neither guilt nor virtue.

This outcome can be tested further by asking the question, “Does it make sense to punish an AI robot for any misbehaviors?” In a sort of worst-case scenario, when attacked by such a “creature” we might destroy it in self-defense, but the answer is a clear “No!”

Perhaps the wisest way to handle this issue is to say that the operator/creator delegated rights to the robot, which in turn may abuse those rights, making its creator guilty.

Conclusion

I am continually impressed with the way the Temporal Rights paradigm provides a vehicle for a very fundamental and articulate evaluation of rights issues. I believe it has a bright future. It needs a lot of work before it can go mainstream. A study of the proper hierarchy of rights is a clear necessity.