The Underlying Principle
If there are natural rights, we should be able to find them in nature, in the composition of the universe, without having to infer, assume, or generalize. Such rights would be obvious, reasonable and comprehensible. Furthermore, they should lead directly to the ideas of justice, morality and ethics and identify rights as the sole issue in legal struggles.
Such are the characteristics of Temporal Rights. These rights arise and extinguish with their owners and are inherent within the capabilities of their owners. A Temporal Right is exercised simultaneously and intrinsically with the exercise of the antecedent natural power.
The Temporal RIghts theory of natural rights connects rights to existence. If a thing exists, it has the right to exist; if it has the power to do something, it also has the corresponding right to do it. Temporal Rights are profoundly simple – they are the most powerful natural rights ever advocated.
The Temporal Rights perspective of natural phenomena gives them authority to do what they do and this authority provides the connection to jurisprudence. This is a universal perspective that connects nature and jurisprudence at an intrinsic level. As the primary beneficiaries of nature, we will be wiser stewards and more tolerant citizens if we see these connections clearly and honor them with integrity.
Jurisprudence
This insight into natural rights offers many confirming advantages over prior theories. For example, in jurisprudence, the connection between rights and actions identifies injustice as rights in conflict and suggests that the proper approach to an even-handed outcome is to identify the operators and their operations as the first task. That is to be followed by an analysis to determine the natural rights that are in conflict. The next step is to look into the law through the lens thus provided and identify the relevant law.
All these identifications should occur before addressing the legal issues. The former analysis will guide and temper this process. Unnatural laws and agenda-driven laws will be exposed for what they are.
For example, (brace yourself for a paradigm shift) the burglar has the power and therefore, the right to burgle. The victim also has the right to maintain the security of his person and property because he can do that. Thus the conflict of rights. The burglary occurs because the burglar finds a way to temporarily overcome the victim’s rights i.e., to make his rights superior. The genius of Temporal rights in this case is that the rights of both the victim and the perpetrator are recognized simultaneously. This is not just a burglar abusing his freedom and violating the rights of the victim. It appears the way it should, as a conflict of rights.
The old saw “Your rights end where mine begin.” applies here, but Temporal RIghts already comprehended and advanced that viewpoint.
The Hierarchy of Natural Rights
This novel point of view, that the burglar has the right to burgle, is the correct Temporal RIghts perspective and the interesting thing is that it makes the judgement, the jurisprudence clear. What happens in this corner of jurisprudence is the attribution of weighted values to rights. Temporal Rights brings this art out into the middle of the public square where everyone can see it happen. This might be the single greatest improvement the it brings to jurisprudence. This attribution is usually done “by the seat of our pants” in a way that leaves us largely unaware of it. Temporal RIghts force an explicit and open attribution.
Temporal Rights describe the source of the law of the jungle, or the law of the natural hierarchy of rights. Clearly, this is the law of our temporal world and the animator of all operations that effect the changes that define it. Temporal Rights honors all rights including both the right to build and the right to destroy. This is the most realistic, the most honest view. Its view reveals the operation of judgement, the attribution of values to rights that has been going on all along and shows its attachment to morality. This is where it gets interesting.
The Demise of Socialism
In order to sustain the attitudes of socialism, it is necessary to attribute value to rights in such a way as to support its attack on freedom. This is the part of socialism vs freedom that has been held in a cloudy corner of our culture. Socialism can only be supported by valuing group rights above individual rights. This has been obvious to political philosophers for a long time. The adoption of Temporal Rights as the foundation of jurisprudence illuminates this process in a way that the common man can clearly see what has been going on.
The crucial question becomes whether a group has as much standing as an individual: whether an abstraction can compete with a reality. It is a question of standing. Making this judgement clear could go a long way toward putting socialist viewpoints in proper perspective. More on groups later.
Emphasis on Stewardship
This is only the beginning of the interesting perspectives offered by Temporal Rights. Animals, plants, and rivers have rights and we cannot violate them without recognizing that fact. This adds a missing dimension to our shallow, Western attitude that humans have absolute rights over all of nature. Instead, Temporal Rights brings a much needed respect, even a reverence for the things that we use for our benefit.
There is a natural hierarchy of rights in nature: the law of the jungle. But Temporal Rights gives us the pause that we need before we violate the rights of natural things. It clarifies the fact that we are stewards and that extortion is to be avoided. It can give standing to these things and even, should we so choose, make such rights legally cognizable.
Priorities in Jurisprudence
Temporal Rights provides a logical priority that informs the balancing of the rights of victims and perpetrators. (“Victims and perpetrators” are to be understood in their broadest sense.) Many legal systems struggle with the justification of rights. This natural rights perspective not only justifies rights but clarifies the question of whether a law or policy violates or honors intrinsic rights by providing a clear link to them for both the victim and the perpetrator.
Limiting Government Power
Since human rights, or freedom to do what the individual wants and can do, are fundamental to our very existence, government actions that suppress any of those rights are immediately suspect and demand justification within the domain of the individual’s rights. This provides sronger boundaries to legislation.
Groups Do Not Exist
The question of the “common good” arises here. If we attempt to extend the fundamental principle of Temporal Rights to a group by saying that the group exists and therefore has the right to do what the group can do, we have run afoul of a fundamental Temporal RIghts principle and attributed reality to the group that cannot be justified. Technically, there is no such “thing” as a group because “group” is an abstraction and lacks standing in Temporal RIghts. A group has neither life nor ability to operate on its own. Only the people in the group have powers and the corresponding Temporal RIghts.
We talk about groups doing this or that, having motivations, goals, etc etc. Such speech will persist forever because of the convenience afforded. However, whenever the group interacts with anything outside itself, it does so only through the operation of individuals. Those are the operators to be addressed by law. Groups should never be the subject of any law. Temporal Rights makes this a clear guideline for the creation of laws that will remain easy to enforce and clear to understand.
Notice the freedom this grants to groups. They have no restrictions, no entitlements, no obligations, and no standing to defend. It is only when a representative of the group interacts with the outside world that laws should be applied. This is a paredigm sift of major proportions, but a needed one that would simplify laws and make both compliance and enforcement clear putting an end to abuses on both sides.
Once a law tries to address a group, it ventures into a fuzzy domain that can never be properly handled in jurisprudence because it can never be clearly defined. This problem was addressed with the legal recognition of the corporation as an entity with personhood. But that only masked the complexity. That has led to both economic progress and abuse of the corporate veil. So, I will address this matter in another post. It deserves further attention. I will say here that Temporal RIghts exposes corporate taxes for what they really are: tariffs on the consumer.
The Problem With Groups
The attribution of reality to an abstraction like a “group” has wreaked havoc among us. This is the lynchpin of socialism. But legislators have tried recently to attribute rights to various groups based on gender, race, etc, a natural outgrowth of socialist views. Such issues have been far too complex for our crude tools of jurisprudence to handle with grace. All this changes under the light of Temporal RIghts. Laws could handle individual rights with clarity, and justice would have a better chance to reign. It is not too soon to make a significant advancement in the common man’s understanding.
Disclaimer
I confess that I have no training in jurisprudence (which probably is already clear), but my training in Physics allowed me to discover Temporal RIghts: a paradigm shift in the natural rights domain. I can see well enough to recognize that this perspective on natural rights makes a lot of things more clear, just as Einstein promised. For example, in Constitutional law, this viewpoint gives originalist and natural law greater authority to control the perspective and scope of legislation. It gives SCOTUS a new, impenetrable basis for the supremacy of freedom and a platform from which to view regulations with great suspicion.
Conclusion
Temporal Rights makes jurisprudence a more coherent, logically structured, and open enterprise. They provide natural rights that reinforce individual liberties, identify government overreach, and reveal new, complex legal issues at their primal level. We are rapidly entering a period where traditional boundaries are easily breached by technology. Temporal RIghts clarifies the underlying issues that otherwise seem to confuse us. As traditions give way we can build new ones founded on more fundamental principles that are intrinsic within the natural laws of the universe.
