Are all rights Inalienable?

I wrote Mosoff and Berliner. I can't find Peikoff's contact info. We'll see what the former two have to say.

Jordan

Post 21

Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - 2:59pm

Jordan,

There are serious problems with the position you stated: "all rights do indeed become permissions upon entering another's land."

Stepping onto another's land can not take away my right to life (I'm just keeping it simple), not unless I have seriously violated his rights in the way I step onto his land. (No right to violate a right).

There exist many ways in which I can be on another person's land without it being a violation of their rights. In that case all of my rights are undisturbed. My right to my life isn't a risk when I go to the mall, or drive down the street, or go next door to borrow a cup of sugar, or visit my friend, or go to the doctor, or.... Only if I am launching some kind of attack that violates someones rights, and do so on their property and in a way that requires their property and my trespass, does that situation exist where my right is no longer in effect.

Someone can say, "What if party A won't let you speak about politics on their property?" They are exercising their property rights and it doesn't diminish your rights - you never had the right to force yourself upon their property in ways they don't grant.

It is the existence of property rights that makes everything work - without those boundaries, we would have no objective standard to determine where one right ends and another starts. Rights with no limits is really just no rights.

Post 22

Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - 4:02pm

Jordan,
I'm reluctant to state the obvious, but the laws of the land are the laws of the land. Owning a piece of that land doesn't change their application. Life, liberty, and the whole ball of wax applies within the borders of the nation, to all the people. I can't help feeling this doesn't need saying...

(Edited by Mindy Newton on 2/11, 4:03pm)

(Edited by Mindy Newton on 2/11, 4:04pm)

Post 23

Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - 4:43pm

Hi Steve,

Stepping onto another's land can not take away my right to life (I'm just keeping it simple), not unless I have seriously violated his rights in the way I step onto his land. (No right to violate a right).

Why not? What's the Objectivist basis for saying an owner cannot stipulate that he will shoot and kill at will any visitor who enters his land? I'm not seeing one. Sure, it's morally unconscionable, but legally impersisible? On what basis? Regular ol' law has some pretty easy answers to this, but I don't see that Objectivism shares those answers. And it won't do to reference your safety in malls, streets, the doctor office, and your neighbor's house. Your life in those places is safe by and large because current law curtails the sovereignty of the landowners, not only restricting what terms and conditions they can set for permission to enter, but also imposing on landowners obligations of care they must take toward entrants.

Jordan

Post 24

Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - 4:45pm

Mindy,

The trouble is in finding an Objectivist basis for that proposition. Again, it's probable that you think that the owner can curtail some liberties of the visitors. But which ones and why?

Jordan

(Edited by Jordan on 2/11, 4:46pm)

Post 25

Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - 5:04pm

Jordan,

I don't see this issue as that difficult. First, we are talking individual moral rights, not the law. I don't have to reference the law to say that I can go down the street, visit the doctor, shop at the mall or go next door taking my full set of moral rights with me. And each the owners whose property I interact with retain their full set of rights. Neither of us loses any unless we give them up by initiating violence/fraud/theft. If anyone thinks that it is the law that is the main reason we are safe from violence they are giving too much credence to the law and law enforcement, and too little to the general moral tenor of a culture. Head down to Tijuana and stroll around awhile... they have the laws on the books, but they won't make you safe.

Everyday, as we go about our business we pass property that we are not welcome on. Those owners don't get any advantage of our presence, and we don't get any advantage from visiting their property - so what? Our life is a complex fabric woven out of voluntary associations and the customs that guides through them: Doors that say "employees only" - fences and gates - customs that tell us we should knock on some doors before going in, etc., etc.

Stepping onto another person's land, if it is done so as to violate his property rights, means leaving ones protective moral shell. A person can't step onto your land and claim that you have no defensive right whatsoever. Where would they have acquired rights to your land? Why would you have lost rights to be in sole occupancy? Universal rights have to mean that my right to do X ends at where your right to do Y begins.

If a person is wandering around inside of a store, and while no one is looking, slips some merchandise into his pocket for the purpose of stealing it, he instantly loses some of his rights. Before that, even though he was on private property, he had the right to come and go as he pleased. After he tried to steal the merchandise, he could be detained, at least some of his rights are not available to him.

If some private property is posted against trespass, then someone who choses to violate that owner's property rights can only do so at the expense of some of his rights becoming unavailable.

I don't think that it is difficult to reason that the nature of the right violated determines the kind and degree of rights loss that causes for the violator. (meaning that you don't blow the head off of someone that comes up to the door and knocks, just because you have a no trespassing sign.)

What you are asking for is a view of rights that says on person can have a right to violate the right of another which makes no sense, or that one only has rights when on ones own property, or that one cannot agree to not exercise some aspect of ones rights in a specific situation as part of an agreement (I get to come in and shop in your store, but only as long as I pay for what I take and I don't cause you problems), or that the alternative would somehow be an acceptable situation where anyone can do anything on anyone else's property.
(Edited by Steve Wolfer on 2/11, 5:17pm)

Post 26

Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - 5:08pm

And I suppose bodies heavier than air can't fly either unless we find an Objectivist explanation for it?

Your sole right as a land owner is to make a reasonable demand that a person leave your property. If you have a walk and a doorbell and not a fence with a no tresspassing sign, you have implicitly invited callers to knock at your door. They retain all their rights unless they contract with you otherwise. People do not become your slave when they enter your land, just as you do not become public property when you step on a public street or in a public building.

I have heard elementary schoolers have more sophisticated legal discussions than this.

Post 27

Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - 5:17pm

Jordan, I'd say your rights end where mine begins. Rand described rights as "moral principles defining and sanctioning man's freedom of action in a social context." There's a bit of reciprocity implied here. If you do not recognize the moral principle that I should be free from coercion, I have no reason to recognize you ought to be free from coercion. If a visitor enters my land, and he makes speech that I had previously made clear to the visitor I wished to forbade, the visitor is coercing me, not the other way around. Once the visitor has forfeited his recognition of rights, I am morally justified in removing the visitor from my property, because he has failed to recognize I should be free from coercion. The only person recognizing rights here in this example is the property owner, not the visitor. The visitor has made it clear he does not recognize I should be free from coercion as he is disposing of my property in a manner I did not willfully consent to, and thus he is carrying out his speech against my will. He has deprived me of my freedom of action. He doesn't have a right to my property, if we said he did, we render rights to be a non-sensical concept. How could the visitor retain rights to my property if rights are "moral principles defining and sanctioning man's freedom of action in a social context." If he has rights to my property that I never consented he could use, we are saying he has the right to limit my freedom, and thus we have contradicted the Objectivist definition of rights.

Post 28

Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - 6:40pm

Jordan, I have to ask. What is your purpose with this? A rather large group of intelligent individuals have expressed basically the exact same principle in a dizzying variety of examples. Do you want to understand the answer you keep asking for? Or is this some sort of exercise in restating principles and questions? A right doesn't imply the freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want, where ever you want, regardless of other's rights. It is the capacity to perform an action as desired within the bounds of equivalent being's equivalent rights. You are an intelligent guy, I'm positive this would make sense to you if you were trying to make sense of it.

Post 29

Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - 8:19pm

Ryan,

My purpose is to figure out Objectivism's take on premises liability. While I find many discussers' responses to the issue very reasonable, I have not seen them successfully appeal to Objectivist principles. Strikingly, I have not seen that discussers really grasp the issue, and I'll stop pressing discussers on this soon enough.

Steve,

I'm talking about legal rights, not moral rights. And premises liability law compels all sorts of prudent behavior beyond the "general moral tenor," particularly because breaches of law subject violaters to liability, whereas breaches of morality tend to be a bit less "teethy."

. . .even though he was on private property, he had the right to come and go as he pleased.

I'm rehashing. On what Objectivist basis can one preclude an owner from saying that all visitors waive rights X, Y, and Z upon entering.

I don't think that it is difficult to reason that the nature of the right violated determines the kind and degree of rights loss that causes for the violator. (meaning that you don't blow the head off of someone that comes up to the door and knocks, just because you have a no trespassing sign.)

This misses the point. Either the owner can set the terms and conditions imposed upon visitors -- including consequences for breaking those terms and conditions -- or the owner cannot. And then the question is - what are the limits on the owner? To set "reasonable" terms and conditions? To post warnings if the terms and conditions are nutty? And how are those limits justifiable under Objectivism. (Since this is an Objectivist forum, I'm concerned with an Objectivist answer -- not necessarily the best or the right answer, just the Objectivist answer.)

What you are asking for is a view of rights that says on person can have a right to violate the right. . .

No. I'm trying to figure out what kind of control an owner has of others' actions on his land. This surely entails what rights a visitor keeps, regardless of what the owner says, and what obligations to visitors the owner has and cannot waive.

John (and Steve since Steve brought this up too),

Jordan, I'd say your rights end where mine begins.

The question is: where is border? Can I demand you waive some rights upon entry to my land? Which rights? To what extent? Why not all of them?

I'll stop bugging you guys about this issue soon enough. I know this can get frustrating. I do appreciate the civility you've all brought to this discussion.

Jordan

Post 30

Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - 8:29pm

This is simply a matter of contract. A business can tell you that you enter its land at your own risk. They can require you to sign a waiver before you enter. But even their signs are still subject to the law, not a law unto themselves. This is all a matter of contract law and implied consent. The actual law will depend on circumstances and local custom. Law is not universal. There is much that is optional, variable, a matter of convention. The only Objectivist requirement is that it be objective - i.e., well defined, clear, not ex post facto, and the like.

I get the impression that you think perhaps according to Rand all must start form scratch. Rand never held this. She held most law except slavery and status law to be valid in all of its variations until the advent of antitrust which reestablished status law. You should read Isabel Paterson who addresses this with Rand's imprimatur. Rand never demanded that we do what you are asking, just as she never demanded that we begin any other technical science like physics or logic from scratch.

Post 31

Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - 9:09pm

I can see no substance to your problem, Jordan. There isn't a trouble relating Objectivism to the U.S. Constitution. And the other, I've answered unequivocably.
You've gotten awfully repetitive, and seem to ignore answers rather than argue against them. What's the deal?

(Edited by Mindy Newton on 2/11, 9:10pm)

Post 32

Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - 10:06pm

Jordan,

In your last post you said, "I'm talking about legal rights, not moral rights."

You are being disingenuous when you say that you are talking about legal rights and not moral rights, when your thread is about inalienable rights. There can be no such thing as an inalienable legal right - that doesn't even make sense. Legal rights are assigned, granted, contracted, waived, repealed, overturned, denied, legislated.... They are arbitrary and have to be judged as right or wrong.

Universal rights, natural rights, individual rights, moral rights have to be discovered like laws of nature. And it makes sense to ask about their discovered properties, like inalienability.

You're playing some kind of game - because there is no sense of you wanting an answer.

Post 33

Thursday, February 12, 2009 - 9:43am

Jordan,

Can I demand you waive some rights upon entry to my land? Which rights? To what extent? Why not all of them?

First of all, I agree with the critics here who are lambasting you for gross and perpetuated miscommunications. Ted has a great point about entering an advanced body of knowledge midstream (although, the way I'm wording will sound like I'm saying just the opposite of him). Jumping halfway into a body of knowledge (or law) and asking for justification like you're doing is suboptimal because there will be floating abstractions or stolen concepts. Here is an example:

How come Jesus did away with Old Testament, Mosaic law and changed our path to salvation from being one where we don't break any of the 10 Commandments (or repent if we do) -- to a two-step process where we just have to love our neighbor and love God (to get into Heaven)? How can Objectivism explain this Biblical shift in salvation-requirements?

The answer is that it's wrong to ask this of Objectivism (because of the floating abstractions or stolen concepts of "God" and "salvation" etc).

With this caveat in mind -- that you can't ask Objectivism to explain a "foreign" body of knowledge -- an answer to your question above is that you can demand that I waive the license (the "concrete" freedom of action) to do certain things on your land. It's because it's your land. The opposite is where I get to do what I want on your land (which is absurd).

At issue is the notion of "legal" rights. Legal rights are an offspring of positive law -- rather than of natural law (as the inalienable, moral rights are). Being positivistic -- rather than rooted in the objective nature of things -- some positive laws will be unjust (i.e., wrong). If this were not the case, then law -- including slavery laws -- wouldn't have ever needed to be overturned.

Ed

Post 34

Thursday, February 12, 2009 - 9:46am

... and the glib answer to the question of this thread -- Are all rights Inalienable? -- is: No, not all rights are inalienable, just our natural rights are. There are such things as "legal rights" stemming from "positive law" which are alienable (such as the historical right to own slaves).

:-)

Ed

Post 35

Thursday, February 12, 2009 - 10:06am

Mindy, you simply aren't grasping the issues. It's difficult to think people here aren't evading because few have actually answering my questions directly. But I'm trying to hold that feeling at bay.

Ted, I am not suggesting we start from scratch. I'm suggesting we start from Objectivist fundamentals. If contract law controls, my question hardly changes -- are there any terms and conditions between any implied or actual landowner-visitor contracts that should be unenforceable? Why? (I think Steve suggested that any agreement that's not value-for-value should be unenforceable. This might be an interested thought to follow.)

Steve, honestly, no games here. There're indeed plenty of inalienable legal rights. The law says these are the rights you have and cannot give up. Some of these rights *cannot*, by their nature, be given up, like your right to your moral agency, your thoughts and feelings. These are what thinkers of yesteryear construed as inalienable moral or natural rights. (These are not really at issue here.) Then there're rights that are inalienable in the sense that the law *disallows* you to give up, even though you would otherwise be able to -- currently, like your ability as a healthy adult to engage in deadly conduct with another (e.g., no duels or suicide pacts). (I believe these addresses Ed's contentions as well; we cross-posted.)

Jordan

(Edited by Jordan on 2/12, 10:08am)

Post 36

Thursday, February 12, 2009 - 10:10am

Jordan:

John (and Steve since Steve brought this up too),

Jordan, I'd say your rights end where mine begins.

The question is: where is border? Can I demand you waive some rights upon entry to my land? Which rights? To what extent? Why not all of them?

What are you talking about? What are you suggesting by asking for where the "border" is? A physical border? It's unnecessary to even ask that, rights are a conceptual construct, the border is where you decide to cross it and violate my rights.

You don't waive any rights if you enter my land, you are just required to respect mine and not limit my own freedoms lest I kick your butt off my property. And it's reciprocal, your property is yours, not mine, so you dictate how your property is to be disposed of, not me. Get it? As Rand said: "I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." It's my property, not yours. If you get to do anything you want on my property it is no longer mine and instead becomes yours through an initiation force, that means you restrict my freedoms. I'm not sure why that's so difficult to understand.

If you want to discuss what it means to own property and why something is my property, and what property ownership means, than I'm sure me and the other posters here can expound on that if you'd like.

Post 37

Thursday, February 12, 2009 - 10:16am

Ed, I appreciated your Post 33 and sanctioned it.

However, I need some clarification here:

At issue is the notion of "legal" rights. Legal rights are an offspring of positive law -- rather than of natural law (as the inalienable, moral rights are). Being positivistic -- rather than rooted in the objective nature of things -- some positive laws will be unjust (i.e., wrong). If this were not the case, then law -- including slavery laws -- wouldn't have ever needed to be overturned.

I consulted a Wikipedia article on legal positivism and found this excerpt:

Legal positivism implies that law is something that can be separated from ethics. In this view it is possible that there are laws without ethical content or legal rules that have no ethical component as well as laws that are considered evil, such as the laws of slavery and segregation.

[...]

Against this view, it may be argued that law has its own internal morality; for example, laws must be promulgated, announced to the public; intelligible; and not baldly self-contradictory. Unless laws fulfill these requirements, they cannot fulfill their role in the social order, for without fulfilling these requirements, it would be impossible for anyone to know the laws or obey them. These requirements are ethical requirements, and they constrain law even without regard to any rules of ethics exterior to the legal process.

Is this the sense in which you used the term "positivistic"?

(Edited by Luke Setzer on 2/12, 10:17am)

Post 38

Thursday, February 12, 2009 - 10:18am

No, John. I used "border" in the abstract. Geez. Where is the "border" between your freedom and my control of my property? Reiterating: What freedoms do you keep when you enter my property, irrespective of the terms and conditions I set for entering? You appear to claim that you don't keep *all* your freedoms because then somehow my property wouldn't be *mine*. So which freedoms can I make you part with upon entry? All of them? Some of them? And if some -- which surely you will claim -- then which!? It'd be lovely if you would answer this directly.

Jordan
(Edited by Jordan on 2/12, 10:20am)

Post 39

Thursday, February 12, 2009 - 10:50am