Rights are inherent to the individual, and they apply to everyone. Everyone knows that! Even the Declaration of Independence understood that!
True, from the natural law perspective, rights are qualities possessed by individuals, they are self-evident, and they are unalienable. The only way to argue against the right to life, liberty, and property is to engage in contradiction, which invalidates your argument. I'm not going to go into much detail about the natural law argument here. What I'm saying isn't that rights aren't self-evident or vested in the individual. I don't disagree with that. What I'm saying is that rights are not unalienable. Rights are not absolute.
In many ways, this is an intuitive conclusion. After all, if someone tries to attack you, you are within your rights to defend yourself. However, there seems to be a disconnect between validating the right of self-defense and the idea that rights are reciprocal, not absolute. Any time I've brought this notion of reciprocity up, I've been met with an impressive amount of resistance. The usual boiler plate response is "well if rights are reciprocal, then you can take rights away at any time!" I'll address this objection separately, but I think the larger misunderstanding of rights comes from two sources: the unexamined deficiencies with pure natural rights theory, and a lack of deeper understanding of the relationship between rights and duties. A firm grasp of the shortcomings of natural rights and a solid understanding of how rights and duties relate to each other are both necessary to have a logically consistent framework of individual rights.
To the first point, most of us living in the Western world have a conception of rights that mirrors the words in the Declaration of Independence: *We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men...are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Setting aside the mistaken notion that happiness in this context refers to material happiness and not the Aristotlean notion of virtuosity, this formulation of natural rights is the one most think of. Every human being has certain rights that they have simply by virtue of being living humans, and generally it's the right to life (written differently, the right not to be killed), liberty (insofar as that liberty doesn't interfere with the liberty right of others), and the pursuit of a good life.
It's important to know what is meant by the term unalienable. An unalienable right is one that cannot be denied or taken away. More specifically, an unalienable right cannot be transferred to another (which invalidates slavery on its face), is intrinsic (as it cannot be given by another and must arise from the thing which has it), and is absolute. The first two points are not really sources of contention. However, the last point-that it is absolute and cannot be infringed-is a point of contention. To illustrate this, let's take the must fundamental unalienable right: the right to life. Certainly it's easy to see the right to life-to not have your life taken away-seems the most basic right there is, and this is not necessarily inaccurate. As I and others have written, exclusive control of one's body is a self-evident truth; attempting to argue against it invokes it, and thus invalidates any argument to the contrary.
However, this right is not, as I'm sure most of you would agree without realizing it, an absolute right. Let's break this down step by step. Person A attacks Person B. Both and A and B have an unalienable right to life. If that's true, then how could B defend against A's attacks? Certainly an unalienable right is one that cannot be denied or taken away, and B's use of force to defend against A would deny A's right to life if B had to kill A to stop him. However, no one in their right mind would argue that self-defense is somehow a violation of rights. Quite the contrary, self-defense is intuitively justified. This would seem to mean that A's right to life is, in fact, alienable in the sense that B can suspend that right if A has violated or attempted to violate B's right first. That's correct: A's right to life only applies when that consideration is reciprocated with B's right to life.
I'd like to point out that the Non-Aggression Principle is built on this idea of reciprocity, and it's built into the premise. One shouldn't initiate aggression. Why? Because by initiating aggression, one prevents oneself from crying foul when one's victim or another person intervenes with force.
This brings me to the second issue: there seems to be a lack of understanding of the relationship between rights and duties. People, especially those on the left of the economic spectrum, like to talk about a great many things as being "rights." However, rights, by definition, impose duties on the party opposite of the one asserting the right. In the case of universal, or human, rights, the right belongs to each individual and the duty arising from that right is imposed on every other person. To illustrate what I mean, let's take the aforementioned right to life. To make this a little clearer, let's formulate the right to life a little differently: every individual has a right not to be killed by another person. This certainly sounds like a fair rewording of the fundamental right that we were talking about earlier. If there is a more accurate formulation, I'm welcome to constructive criticism.
A right to life as defined above imposes a duty on everyone else not to kill another person. If this right were absolute, then every single person aside from the individual asserting that right must abide by that duty. If we accept the traditional idea of inherent, unalienable rights, that would necessarily mean that even self-defense is wrong, as it necessarily violates the right to life of your attacker. After all, if an individual's right not to be killed is absolute, that would mean there is an absolute duty to not kill that individual, regardless of circumstances. Since this would invalidate the notion of a right to life on its face, we can clearly see this is erroneous. Instead, and rather intuitively, we understand inherent rights to be conditional. In the context of our example, an individual has a right not to be killed only if that individual respects the right of other individuals not to be killed. In other words, an individual only has a right to life so long as that individual observes their corresponding duty to everyone else. Failing to observe that duty necessarily negates that right in the instance in which the duty is failed.
To the argument I spoke about at the beginning--that reciprocal rights implies they can be taken away arbitrarily--this is absolutely not true. We've already established that the conditions for asserting rights rely on observing the corresponding duties that come with those rights. Any other alienation of rights doesn't hold up to reason and logic. This condition of observing corresponding duty is a logical conclusion from the assertion that rights are, in fact, rights. It's part of the definition. A right denotes an entitlement to a certain act or course of action. Inversely, a duty is an obligation to not act or not pursue a course of action. Duties are the inverse of rights, and one goes with the other. This is also why only negative rights are logically valid, and why I formulate a right to life as a right not to be killed; the inverse to a right to life is a duty not to life, which doesn't make any sense except in the context I described. All that being said, only duties that arise from the assertion of rights are valid limits on those rights. Arbitrary limits set by governments or people are not valid limits, except in cases where an individual actually consents to limit his or her rights, such as by contract.
So where does that leave us? Simply put, rights are inherent, but they are not absolutely inalienable. Even our most fundamental rights are not absolute, as they require conditions to be met in order to continue to assert them. Those conditions are the duties that each right imposes on the rest of the population. When one fails at the duty to respect a right in others, one necessarily gives up the ability to appeal to that same right as justification for defense. The notion of self-defense is predicated on this; if I attack you, you are justified in attacking me to stop my violation of your property right in your person.
In other words, rights are necessarily reciprocal. It sounds strange, but your rights depend upon you upholding the duty to respect the rights of others. Once you fail to do that, you cannot appeal to your inherent rights in your defense.
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