Structural Rights

The term "natural rights" appears to give a great many people, most of whom appear to my eyes to be something of cynics, great heartburn. Though the world needs more jargon about as much as we all need additional holes in our heads, I would like to offer a term in the spirit of easing the violent rejection experienced by so many who rebel against notion of "natural rights".

The term I would like to introduce is "structural rights", a designation synonymous with "natural rights". Why, then, offer up yet another term for the same concept? Just as many people turn off at any mention of religion that is not cursing or damning it, so it has been with talk of natural rights, which I suspect is often intimately associated with "God-given rights", which brings us right back to the religion issue and the related aversions.

Whatever the true reason, a great number of people reject the concept of natural rights, often with protestations that run along the lines of the belief that there are no such things, replete with the notable absence of anything even vaguely resembling a valid argument in support of the assertion. That, of course, is quite untrue, but if one wishes to enter into discourse of the nature of our fundamental rights as human beings, one must first be able to get others to listen.

Therefore, if the exchange of ideas is the intermediate objective in order to bring others to a better understanding of what rights actually are, perhaps with a goal of persuasion, we have to be able to get the ideas on the table before people turn off or, ever more commonly today, go on a war footing.

For many, "natural rights", appears to have an air of some tacit and invalid bias about it, whereas "structural rights" is more neutral sounding, rather than something that's escaped the inner sanctum of the great temple at Hokum. When presented in this seemingly neutral cast, I have found in many cases that people remain off their guard and actually listen to what it is you have to say thereafter.

What can we say of our structure as beings? The short logic chain might look something like this:

1. We all live 
2. That which lives appears to universally wish to remain so, all else equal 
3. Wishing to remain alive, it follows that we claim our lives as our own; what I have termed our "First Property". 
4. Our claim to life is precisely our right to life because a right is defined as a "just claim". 
5. Therefore, by virtue of being alive and wishing to remain so, we assert our claims to our First Property, that is, our very structure as beings. 
6. By extension, we further stake our claims to that which sustains our structures as living beings. 
7. Our structure as living beings, part of which is the drive to remain alive, leads to our claims to life and all that which is necessary to not only survive, but preferably to thrive. 
8. 
   

The foregoing is by no means a perfect argument, but it is on the right path and is offered that one might get the basic gist of the argument that explains the nature of rights.

Our very structure as beings drives us to the claims we call our rights. It is precisely because we all share those drives in common, and act pursuant to the interests those claims seek to serve, that no man holds the authority to dismiss such claims of his fellows. This is the true meaning of "equality" between individuals. Our structural rights are equal between us because we share identical claims to life at the most abstract level.

One man cannot validly assert a greater claim to his life than I do to mine, for the contention makes no sense on the one hand, and cannot in any event be validly proven, on the other. Furthermore, one man may not validly assert a greater claim to the life of another than the other may to his own. It can be well argued that one man can assert a claim to the life of another man, certainly not without consent, and all else equal.

The very structures we share as living entities defines our rights and establishes the true and proper senses of our equality as living beings.

"Structural rights" as an alternative card to play may prove a good tool to keep up your sleeve in the event you run into one of those sorts who runs from "natural rights" as if he were on fire.

For what it is worth the alternative phrasing is offered, and as always please accept my best wishes.