This paper presents the core concepts and most interesting features of this powerful, unique and unprecedented basis for John Locke’s natural rights. I identify these with John Locke because Temporal Rights are the rights he first espoused: life, liberty, and property. Temporal Rights not only support Locke’s vision of natural rights, but expand and clarify it.

These are the rights upon which the greatest (most prosperous, most just, and most free) nation in the world was founded, and which therefore are in most need of protection. But Temporal Rights go infinitely further, as described below.

Rights that are not recognized and comprehended cannot be protected.

An Overview of Temporal Rights

Definitions

• Operator
• Authority
• Natural RIght
• Domain

Principles

• The Ontology of Temporal Rights
• These natural rights are profoundly intrinsic.
• These natural rights are profoundly inalienable.
• Life
• Liberty
• Property

Observations

• The authority of natural law is the aggregation of opertors’ rights.
• Temporal Rights demonstrate that freedom is fundamental to existence.
• Temporal Rights is a secular paradigm and immune to dismissal.
• This is how the Creator endowed natural rights into man (and the universe).
• Temporal Rights directly infer a system of ethics and morality.
• Jurisprudence: Crime is not perpetrator/victim but a collision of rights.
• The law of the jungle is validated as the description of temporal reality.
• A philosophical unity with Eastern and Native American thought.
• Where justice rules, violations of natural rights create obligations.
• How making covenants can expand an one’s rights.
• The choice to love can lift operators to higher planes of existence.
• Why human operators want glory.

Definitions, Principles, and Observations

Definitions

Operator: Any self-existent object: galaxies, stars, planets, man, beavers, trees, and rocks, but not abstractions like “society” or “forest”. Air, rivers, and clouds are examples that remain undefined at this point – these need further understanding. They may or may not have standing as operators. My best guess is that they may be properly identified as operators unless they are being discussed in the abstract sense.

Authority: An operator’s ownership of the domain within which it operates grants the operator its authority to operate. We call this authority a natural Temporal Right.

Natural right: The right of an operator to operate. This includes both active and passive actions of any operator that has self-existence. (Rocks have property rights to their space.)

Domain: This is an existential part of the operator because its existence depends upon freedom to operate within its domain. An operator’s freedom may be restrained, but when it is, the operator itself is correspondingly devoid of a portion of its very nature, and it is no longer the same operator but a reduced or violated version of it. I am treating this complex issue in another paper.

Principles

The Ontology of Temporal Rights

Existence bestows capabilities and powers to operate. Powers entail a structural authority to operate. This authority is the operator’s inherent title to its operations. To state this another way …

An operator “owns” or has dominion over the sphere within which it operates, exercising its authority (dominion) to perform its operations. Such dominion is both necessary and sufficient to its operation. This is not an arbitrary attribution that attaches authority to capability but an existential and structural fact. If it had no dominion, it could not operate.

You may reject the vocabulary of “authority” or “right,” but you cannot reject the underlying structure without rejecting the capability itself, because a capability cannot exist without the freedom to exercise it. Freedom is the root of the right, even though other operators may violate it.

You may keep the beaver from cutting down trees, but that terminates his “beaverness” and eventually his existence, unless he is free to find a better domain.

Sole dominion is probably non-existent. Even a rock with its dominion over its space, is in the gravity field of operators whose dominions

These natural rights are profoundly intrinsic.

Each operator has sufficient dominion in its sphere of influence to allow its operation. If it somehow lacks the capability or power to do a particular operation, then it never had sufficient dominion. (We are focused on the fundamental structure of the operator, not the clipped dominion of an operator being overwhelmed by another operator.) This dominion, therefore, defines the extent of the authority or power of the operator. Thus, a capability and its corresponding right are but two semantic labels for the same property. This intrinsicality cannot be surpassed.

These natural rights are profoundly inalienable.

The property right of a stone to the space it occupies can only be violated by violating the stone itself. But then it is not a stone anymore but two stones, each with its property right. This principle is found to reign with every operator. This inalienability cannot be surpassed.

Life

The right to life is the right to exist.

Liberty

The right to freedom is the existential right to a domain within which to operate.

Property

A tree gathers sunlight, water, and parts of the soil. This is its domain of operation. It cannot be a tree unless it can acquire and use things outside itself. The right to a domain of operation is the same as the right to exist. All living things possess this property right. A person’s right to gather, protect, and use property is their right to their domain, without which their humanity is violated, and their existence is compromised.

(I cannot but note with satisfaction that this property right is only tenable when supported by logic, as John Locke explained. In his Second Treatise, §6, we read: “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, …”)

Observations

The authority of natural law is the aggregation of operators’ rights.

This is self-evident upon recognition that a dominion and the right to operate therein are coincidental. It is the operations of the operators in nature that fuel or empower natural law. Thus, it is the nature of nature that empowers nature’s laws.

Temporal Rights demonstrate that freedom is fundamental to existence.

An operator has an existential freedom to operate, for if operation is impossible, its alleged capability does not exist. Since most operators display multiple operations, the freedoms associated therewith may be individually impaired while leaving the others free, but this does not negate the existence of the capability and its demand for freedom to exercise it. This fact offers a strategic principle for the preservation of political freedom.

To whatever degree a citizen’s freedom to operate is restrained, to that degree he is at best repressed and at worst enslaved.

Temporal Rights is a secular paradigm, immune to dismissal.

Temporal Rights are not based on religion, political expediency, social relations, moral obligations, traditions, customs, cultural norms, or any basis other than the realities of existence. No appeal needs to be made to divine authority or divine endowment. This makes John Locke’s natural rights immune to dismissal on the grounds that they are granted by a non-existent God.

This is how the Creator endowed natural rights into man (and the universe).

An explication of the temporal rights view of natural rights is a description of how the Creator baked rights into the very structure of natural objects with profound intrinsicality and profound inalienability. But only a believer will recognize this fact. The non-believer will be blind to that relationship.

Temporal Rights directly imply a system of ethics and morality,

This new theory of natural rights fairly begs us to recognize that evil is the unnecessary or excessive violation of natural rights. It may be impossible to identify an evil that is not such a violation. “Good,” on the other hand, is clearly the exercise of these rights in a way that recognizes and protects the rights of other operators. This is a codification of: operate on others as you would have them operate on you.

Jurisprudence: Crime is not perpetrator/victim but a collision of rights.

Jurisprudence will never be even-handed until crime is cast correctly as a collision of rights. The perpetrator/victim paradigm has the unfortunate tendency to ignore the rights of the perpetrator, whose rights are frequently violated in a way that at least unnecessarily tempts him or aggravates him to commit the crime.

The law of the jungle is validated as the description of temporal reality.

The law of the jungle is displayed where operators wield their powers to the detriment of other operators. This law is played out in the Serengeti savanna and the back alleys of cities. This means the Temporal Rights perspective produces an honest view of life as it plays out in this temporal world. As we learn to recognize and take accountability for this, we may raise ourselves to a new level of honorable and peaceful existence. This will happen as fast as we learn to exercise the freedom to choose to love as opposed to the freedom to use.

A philosophical unity with Eastern and Native American thought.

Perhaps our pioneer heritage explains how we adopted the “conquering the West” attitude. Civilization washed westward in a great wave where survival was paramount, and the elements of nature were always a challenge. This simplistic animosity separated and characterized us and nature as enemies, thus facilitating our materialism. Yet, we are repulsed at our extortion of eggs from caged hens, but have not been able to articulate clearly the reason why. Temporal Rights reveals a unified picture where all things, especially living things, are cousins. It is not “us and them” but “we are all family”: creatures not with opposing characteristics but whose differences are only of scope and degree.

When the Native American saw a buffalo, he perceived two things at once: a spiritual creature and a source of meat, bone, and hide. Many of these people believed it was necessary to explain out loud to the animal what was about to happen and why. He recognized he was about to violate the rights of the buffalo.

As they now stand, Eastern thought is profoundly different than Western. We see the world as a vast number of separate objects, while they see it as one complex whole. Our fractured view leads us to seek accumulation, while their perspective seeks harmony. We could improve our relationships with each other and with the world around us by recognizing that the fundamental difference between humans and other operators is not that we are separate entities but that our differences are only of degree and scope. We could see that dogs and trees “are people too”. But there is much more to this.

Where justice rules, violations of natural rights create obligations.

Seen under the light of moral values, any exercise of a natural right that impinges upon the natural right of another operator creates a debt or obligation to the injured operator. In the preponderance of such violations, there is no observable compensation. This is seen in the food chain of all living things, for they live by the destruction of other living things. But we see no morality in effect there, no attempt at justice, but a hierarchy of natural rights in process.

Sentient creatures with moral values see the creation of a debt or obligation when they violate the natural rights of lesser operators. Unnecessary violations create an even stronger obligation that cries out for justice and/or recompense. Bitches confined in the tiny cages of a “puppy mill” and laying hens in their two cubic feet of space are examples of operators whose natural rights are routinely violated for maximizing profit.

How making covenants can expand an one’s rights.

One of the fascinating characteristics of the Temporal Rights view is that a person can expand their rights by expanding their capabilities. This is done by entering into covenants with others whose capabilities and/or domains are different or larger. Covenants bind operators together and give them both increased reach and power. The marriage covenant is an example of two people with different capabilities binding themselves together in a unification relationship that grants criss cross access to all available powers.

The Apollo Projects were huge and their accomplishments were amazing, but their power rested simply in the individual business relationships (covenants) that combined the capabilitis of millions of people.

The choice to love can lift operators to higher planes of existence.

Natural rights can be exercised in a way that recognizes the natural rights of other operators, or, in other words, in a way that is in harmony with natural law. This is the engine that drives material progress. But a parallel opportunity appears.

It seems intuitively obvious that the right to choose is the highest natural right of human operators. And the highest choice is to love; to choose to love instead of choosing to use. Such a choice not only honors the rights of others but also leverages both the lover and the lovee to a peaceful, harmonious, and all-around beautiful and joyous state. I believe that even the animals respond to this principle. They certainly enjoy the free exercise of their rights/capabilities.

This state is so desirable that when a person gets the vision of it, he naturally minimizes his use of others and replaces usage with love.

To love is to choose the higher way, the path where the disciplined exercise of natural rights elevates us. Why do politicians, even conservative activists, never use the word “love”?

I believe we are so distracted by the negatives in our world that we are failing to adopt the mission marked out by a vision of a better world. We must choose to keep our focus on that mission.

A humble example.

My wife and I have raised 10 children, 8 or our own and 2 adopted out of foster care. Consequently, I have, over the past 60 years, made probably a thousand feet of sheet rock cuts. When I focus on the point where the utility knife is cutting the paper coating, the cut wanders back and forth across the line. But when I keep my focus just a half inch ahead of the knife, it stays on the line with amazing precision, usually replacing the mark with the shallow ditch made by the knife. The amazing thing is that the effort needed to focus ahead is much less than that required to keep the knife on the line if I focus on the point where the knife touches the line.

When we exercise the natural right to constantly look ahead and focus on what we want, we naturally recognize relevant opportunities and avoid pitfalls and move inexorably toward that goal. If love guides our efforts by honoring and facilitating the rights of others, then our progress is attended by joy. This brings success to the pursuit of happiness for when we do the right thing, happiness happens. This is the highest exercise of our natural rights.

Why human operators want glory.

Our Declaration of Independence demands the right to pursue happiness but I think we want more than happiness; we want glory.

This is so obvious in those who have no compunctions about violating the rights of fellow citizens but greedily pursue money and power because they mistakenly think that is glorious.

Clearly, the highest form of glory is attended by love expressed through justice, mercy, and reverence for all things, especially one another, and the joy of being of service to others. That service makes us feel worthy and justifiably important. But the glory lies in the love and appreciation of those we have served, for they will literally worship and glorify those who have served them.

There is no operation in this life more rewarding, fulfilling, and satisfying than exercising our natural rights (capabilities) to accomplish some worthy object. There are no projects more worthy than serving the needs of others. We cannot help but glory in that, for when we do that, we elevate both the operator and the “operatee”. That is the glory we unknowingly seek.

As a devout believer in God, I recognize him as an unfailing servant who does all he can to support my efforts without violating my freedom. Because I have full trust in that love, I make him my boss. Because I understand that he is my literal father, I worship him and his glory. Because of his example, I try to be like him; loving all around me so that my dominion will grow without compulsion, for when other creatures observe that I am willing to be their servant, they will flock to me and make me their boss. This is the seeming contradiction that lies at the heart of the expanding dominion available to all who exercise their rights righteously.