The earth was the center of the universe for a long time. When we finally broke through that error we got a perspective that eventually put man on the moon. Likewise, the unspoken but universally accepted restriction of rights to humans, or at least sentient creatures, has kept us from the more universal truth, viz. all things have rights. Every object in nature has natural rights.

This discovery came as a result of thinking that there ought to be a basis for natural rights within natural law. Then Einstein’s admonition to “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better” seemed the perfect methodology. It took a while to find natural rights in nature, but eventually, I had the “yes, of course” moment.

We have overlooked this insight because natural rights are profoundly ubiquitous, and like a fish doesn’t know he is wet, we have missed what was in plain sight everywhere we looked.

What is a Right Anyway?

The idea of “rights” is clearly one of authority. Even toddlers demonstrate this sense when you violate their authority and take away their toy. Then there’s that feeling we all experience and youths verbalize it with “You aren’t the boss of me.” The idea of “a right” to do or have something is clearly an abstract one, but natural rights are always connected intimately to something physical or mental.

It is insightful to take the perspective of an outsider watching a rights-holder. What we see is someone who has a warrant, an authorization, an empowerment, or an authority to act for, or to be an agent for himself. In other words, having the power (capability) to act is also having the power (authority) to act. The two characteristics cannot be separated. Let me simplify this.

We observe that nature has given natural agency to a natural object because the object is doing what it naturally does.

To say this ontologically: the nature of nature is such that natural things have agency within nature to do what they naturally do,

It troubles me that these explications complicate something so profoundly simple. It is helpful to stop using words and just watch things exercise their authority. Watch the sun hold its hostage planets in orbit. Watch the beaver cut down a tree and build a dam. Watch a child explore, study, and solve a puzzle, etc. These are agents exercising their agency.

When we view the universe through this lens, seeing agents exercising their authority, we have a spiritual experience, and the universe becomes a living thing with beauty, majesty, and power. But I digress, that is a topic for another day. Here is a terse description of what I call Temporal Rights.

The Terse, Universal Definition

Natural Rights: the authority of an operator to operate.

A Longer Version

“Natural Rights” is the label we abstract from and then apply to the authority or agency an operator possesses to exercise its capabilities. For example, I have the power to speak, and my authority to speak is inherent and intrinsic within that power. When I speak, I exercise my ability and my right simultaneously because that right is inalienable. It cannot be separated from my power to speak. If you thwart my ability, you also destroy my right. You either have a speaker with the natural right to speak, or you have neither.

The right to life, or more broadly, the right to exist, creates a space filled by the right to operate.

The Explication

The essence of the universe is operators operating: all things, every single object in nature doing what it does. Plants growing, planets trapping moons, dogs barking, people writing essays, and rocks robustly defending their space. From these growing, trapping, barking, writing, and occupying operations we abstract the idea that these “operators” have the power and authority to do their growing, trapping, barking, etc. Then we create a name for that authority and call it a “natural right”.

To turn it around and see it from the back side: because a right is an abstract idea, it must have a real antecedent, or else it is unfounded. The abstraction is called a “right” and its antecedent is the power/authority exhibited by an entity when it exercises that power/authority. Although that last statement seems circular, it is not. It only seems so because Temporal Rights are profoundly inherent and intrinsic within their owner. One can, with semantic grace, denote a right as being the “authority” aspect of the corresponding capability.

Another way to comprehend the authority aspect of an opertor is to recognize that it is meta-data for the operator, a meta-level descriptor of its legitimacy and authority. For example, the capability to own property inherently includes the right to own property: without that right, ownership is meaningless. In this particular example there is a clear connection to law and jurisprudence.

The Unification of Authorities

It is evident from these descriptions that the connection between objects and their rights is extremely tight and in fact, in most cases, so intrinsic that they appear not as a separate entity but as a characteristic of the operator. This new definition of natural rights unifies the authority denoted in a right with the corresponding power of its owner. As a consequence, they are inherent, intrinsic, and inalienable in a manner more profound than any traditional theory of natural rights. The distance between temporal rights and the laws of nature and hence also natural law could not be shorter.

This is how the Creator endowed rights that are unalienable.

This is intrinsically that is usurpassable.

This is a definition of natural rights that is irrefutable.

Why “Temporal Rights”

I use the name “Temporal Rights”, primarily because they are created in the instant of the creation of an operator and are extinguished in the moment of its demise.

The Abstraction We Call Freedom

To fully comprehend this “temporal rights” paradigm for natural rights we need to realize that the idea of “rights” is an abstract one. There is no self-existent object we can call “a right”, only the operator itself has self-existence. To be a true abstraction, it must have an antecedent, something from which we draw out the abstraction. For the human being, it is the ability to choose that gives rise to the right to choose, or as we often say, “the freedom to choose”. Freedom is the label we use for the state of affairs that allows operators (human beings in this case) to operate.

Natural Rights and Natural Law Are in the Same Domain

The law of the jungle is played out on the Serengeti and in the ghettos, where untamed, uncivilized humans consume one another. The law of the jungle is the natural law of this planet. That law says that if an operator can, it has the right to do. The Temporal RIghts paradigm is thus a view of rights as they really are exercised and, therefore, the simplest possible view of natural rights.

The natural law that governs the operator and the natural rights that arise therein are in the same domain. There is no need for a theory to connect them. There is no need for logical arguments or for “reason” to be cited for the derivation of these rights or for hundreds of appeals to related observations of human behaviors and values.

Traditional theories of natural rights typically claim a connection to natural law. The Temporal Rights paradigm says that natural rights are not merely connected, but an intrinsic characteristic of the laws of nature. There is no claim for natural rights that is more natural than the Temporal Rights perspective.

The sum and substance of thousands of years of natural rights theory reach their climax in Temporal Rights.

Good and Evil

The Temporal Rights perspective is an explication of the law of the jungle: I can smash you, so I have that right. That is positively frightening, and many will chafe at it. However, it is not a bug; it’s a feature. The obvious danger of this perspective demands something to preclude the total destruction of civilization. This powerfully demonstrates the need for a principle that will civilize people, and we find that in the simple “all men are created equal [in value]” principle. The morality needed is simply that your rights end where mine begin otherwise, I am your slave.

There are quite a number of nice features of the Temporal Rights paradigm. One particularly interesting feature is that it leads to the principle that good is honoring, respecting, and protecting natural rights, and evil is any violation of those rights, whether by law or person. Can you think of an evil that is not such a violation? This morality is powerful because it is simple.

A Paradigm Shift for Jurisprudence

The usual view of crime sets a perpetrator against a victim, but under the light of Temporal RIghts all conlicts are seen as a conflict of rights. This is a paradigmatic shift that balances the process of jurisprudence by simultaneously recognizing the natural rights of both parties. Temporal Rights establishes an objective view rather than a moral supremecy/guilt view of crime. This promises to usher in a higher form of justice that will reduce or eliminate the feeling that justice was incomplete. This often arises when a victim has rights that were ignored during a trial. This new paradigm could lead to a sentence for both the parties by addressing all the rights that were infringed. The victim might need to change some things too.

Overcoming Nihilism

The “scientific” thinkers have all but conquered our civilization and are hell-bent on returning us to the pagan state the desert religions saved us from. They happily celebrate the death of God with their hedonism and perversions that, for example, are sacrificing children to the god of convenience and sexual slavery they call freedom. They don’t seem to realize that they are fundamentally claiming to be the center of the moral universe.

The Temporal Rights perspective offers a completely secular origin for the natural rights that they cannot violate without revealing their crass selfishness.

The Temporal Rights concept goes even further. If the highest power of man is the ability to separate stimulus and response and thus to choose, then the highest choice must be the choice to love.

The Spiritual Component of Temporal Rights

When the American Indian needed and saw a buffalo, he saw two things simultaneously: a wonderful resource and a divine creature. Many of these people thought it was necessary to explain to the animal what was going to happen and why. Some even thought that unless this kind of respect was afforded an animal or plant the power and/or healing/nourishment would not be experienced.

It is not too much of a stretch to say that these people simultaneously saw a resource with a right to life and its other natural functions. This connection of rights and powers are central to this scenario. Thus Temporal RIghts offers a graceful pathway from the physical to the spiritual.

In fact, we may someday discover that even this viewpoint is upside down: that the primal thing is the rights, and they gave rise to their physical embodiment. Just a thought that I cannot fully comprehend.

An Invitation

Several years ago, I decided I wanted to look within natural law for a source of natural rights. It seemed obvious to me that the two had to be intimately connected: that the ontology of natural rights ought to be the nature of nature. In fear that any study of existing natural rights theories might prejudice my mind and preclude my hoped-for discovery, I avoided them altogether. I avoided the masters in hopes that I might surpass them.

This search was inspired by an experience I had almost a half-century ago. While writing On Human Rights and Government, the second essay of the Bicentennial feature series for The Freeman magazine published by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), I wanted to provide a basis for those rights that would be at least palatable to non-believers. I didn’t know a basis that was not some version of “endowed by their Creator,” so I apologetically prayed for one.

A concept immediately came to mind of the hierarchy of rights demonstrated by beavers cutting down trees, and trees splitting rocks. The essence of this was that they had the right to do what they were doing. The property right of the stone was particularly compelling to me because it demonstrated the inalienability of rights so profoundly: you either have a rock with a property right or you have neither. I liked the fact that this was all within the domain of the most fundamental principles of natural law.

While I liked the demonstration of rights that provided, it seemed to me that it just sort of hung out there in logical space. I wanted to see if that could be anchored better, or justified by finding a solid connection to the physical universe. But a connection eluded me until one night I realized that the right and the power are one and the same, that the two characteristics only appeared when an object was examined with one or the other lens. The profound intrinsicality had escaped me until then.

It is a new and unprecedented paradigm, and I invite anyone who can find a problem with Temporal Rights to please help me fine tune (or abandon) the idea. If you happen to be one who disagrees, PLEASE state your reasons in a comment below. It is new and virtually untested so –

We rarely think of this fact, but it is true that our freedom in based on the idea of rights. There is no other basis. So if you think Temporal RIghts might be a strength to freedom, help me get the word out.