human rights

70:9.1Na­ture con­fers no rights on man, only life and a world in which to live it. Na­ture does not even con­fer the right to live, as might be de­duced by con­sid­er­ing what would likely hap­pen if an un­armed man met a hun­gry tiger face to face in the prim­i­tive for­est. So­ci­ety’s prime gift to man is se­cu­rity.

70:9.2Grad­u­ally so­ci­ety as­serted its rights and, at the pres­ent time, they are:

70:9.31. As­sur­ance of food sup­ply.

70:9.42. Mil­i­tary de­fense—se­cu­rity through pre­pared­ness.

70:9.53. In­ter­nal peace preser­va­tion—pre­ven­tion of per­sonal vi­o­lence and so­cial dis­or­der.

70:9.64. Sex con­trol—mar­riage, the fam­ily in­sti­tu­tion.

70:9.75. Prop­erty—the right to own.

70:9.86. Fos­ter­ing of in­di­vid­ual and group com­pe­ti­tion.

70:9.97. Pro­vi­sion for ed­u­cat­ing and train­ing youth.

70:9.108. Pro­mo­tion of trade and com­merce—in­dus­trial de­vel­op­ment.

70:9.119. Im­prove­ment of la­bor con­di­tions and re­wards.

70:9.1210. The guar­an­tee of the free­dom of re­li­gious prac­tices to the end that all of these other so­cial ac­tiv­i­ties may be ex­alted by be­com­ing spir­i­tu­ally mo­ti­vated.

• natural rights are old social rights
• no more than rules of the game

70:9.13When rights are old be­yond knowl­edge of ori­gin, they are of­ten called nat­u­ral rights. But hu­man rights are not re­ally nat­u­ral; they are en­tirely so­cial. They are rel­a­tive and ever chang­ing, be­ing no more than the rules of the game—rec­og­nized ad­just­ments of re­la­tions gov­ern­ing the ever-chang­ing phe­nom­ena of hu­man com­pe­ti­tion.

70:9.14What may be re­garded as right in one age may not be so re­garded in an­other. The sur­vival of large num­bers of de­fec­tives and de­gen­er­ates is not be­cause they have any nat­u­ral right thus to en­cum­ber twen­ti­eth-cen­tury civ­i­liza­tion, but sim­ply be­cause the so­ci­ety of the age, the mores, thus de­crees.

70:9.15Few hu­man rights were rec­og­nized in the Eu­ro­pean Mid­dle Ages; then ev­ery man be­longed to some­one else, and rights were only priv­i­leges or fa­vors granted by state or church. And the re­volt from this er­ror was equally er­ro­neous in that it led to the be­lief that all men are born equal.

70:9.16The weak and the in­fe­rior have al­ways con­tended for equal rights; they have al­ways in­sisted that the state com­pel the strong and su­pe­rior to sup­ply their wants and oth­er­wise make good those de­fi­cien­cies which all too of­ten are the nat­u­ral re­sult of their own in­dif­fer­ence and in­do­lence.

• society should fairly administer

70:9.17But this equal­ity ideal is the child of civ­i­liza­tion; it is not found in na­ture. Even cul­ture it­self demon­strates con­clu­sively the in­her­ent in­equal­ity of men by their very un­equal ca­pac­ity there­for. The sud­den and nonevo­lu­tion­ary re­al­iza­tion of sup­posed nat­u­ral equal­ity would quickly throw civ­i­lized man back to the crude us­ages of prim­i­tive ages. So­ci­ety can­not of­fer equal rights to all, but it can prom­ise to ad­min­is­ter the vary­ing rights of each with fair­ness and eq­uity. It is the busi­ness and duty of so­ci­ety to pro­vide the child of na­ture with a fair and peace­ful op­por­tu­nity to pur­sue self-main­te­nance, par­tic­i­pate in self-per­pet­u­a­tion, while at the same time en­joy­ing some mea­sure of self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion, the sum of all three con­sti­tut­ing hu­man hap­pi­ness.

• grants to individual curtail all others

70:11.2Law is al­ways at first neg­a­tive and pro­hibitive; in ad­vanc­ing civ­i­liza­tions it be­comes in­creas­ingly pos­i­tive and di­rec­tive. Early so­ci­ety op­er­ated neg­a­tively, grant­ing the in­di­vid­ual the right to live by im­pos­ing upon all oth­ers the com­mand, “you shall not kill.” Ev­ery grant of rights or lib­erty to the in­di­vid­ual in­volves cur­tail­ment of the lib­er­ties of all oth­ers, and this is ef­fected by the taboo, prim­i­tive law. The whole idea of the taboo is in­her­ently neg­a­tive, for prim­i­tive so­ci­ety was wholly neg­a­tive in its or­ga­ni­za­tion, and the early ad­min­is­tra­tion of jus­tice con­sisted in the en­force­ment of the taboos. But orig­i­nally these laws ap­plied only to fel­low tribes­men, as is il­lus­trated by the later-day He­brews, who had a dif­fer­ent code of ethics for deal­ing with the gen­tiles.

• associated with social duties

81:5.4So­cial as­so­ci­a­tion is a form of sur­vival in­sur­ance which hu­man be­ings have learned is prof­itable; there­fore are most in­di­vid­u­als will­ing to pay those pre­mi­ums of self-sac­ri­fice and per­sonal-lib­erty cur­tail­ment which so­ci­ety ex­acts from its mem­bers in re­turn for this en­hanced group pro­tec­tion. In short, the pres­ent-day so­cial mech­a­nism is a trial-and-er­ror in­sur­ance plan de­signed to af­ford some de­gree of as­sur­ance and pro­tec­tion against a re­turn to the ter­ri­ble and an­ti­so­cial con­di­tions which char­ac­ter­ized the early ex­pe­ri­ences of the hu­man race.

• associated with social duties

81:5.6Might does not make right, but it does en­force the com­monly rec­og­nized rights of each suc­ceed­ing gen­er­a­tion. The prime mis­sion of gov­ern­ment is the def­i­ni­tion of the right, the just and fair reg­u­la­tion of class dif­fer­ences, and the en­force­ment of equal­ity of op­por­tu­nity un­der the rules of law. Ev­ery hu­man right is as­so­ci­ated with a so­cial duty; group priv­i­lege is an in­sur­ance mech­a­nism which un­fail­ingly de­mands the full pay­ment of the ex­act­ing pre­mi­ums of group ser­vice. And group rights, as well as those of the in­di­vid­ual, must be pro­tected, in­clud­ing the reg­u­la­tion of the sex propen­sity.

• woman got rights when time came

84:5.4But man did not con­sciously nor in­ten­tion­ally seize woman’s rights and then grad­u­ally and grudg­ingly give them back to her; all this was an un­con­scious and un­planned episode of so­cial evo­lu­tion. When the time re­ally came for woman to en­joy added rights, she got them, and all quite re­gard­less of man’s con­scious at­ti­tude. Slowly but surely the mores change so as to pro­vide for those so­cial ad­just­ments which are a part of the per­sis­tent evo­lu­tion of civ­i­liza­tion. The ad­vanc­ing mores slowly pro­vided in­creas­ingly bet­ter treat­ment for fe­males; those tribes which per­sisted in cru­elty to them did not sur­vive.

• men’s rights are not women’s rights

84:5.11Woman is man’s equal part­ner in race re­pro­duc­tion, hence just as im­por­tant in the un­fold­ing of racial evo­lu­tion; there­fore has evo­lu­tion in­creas­ingly worked to­ward the re­al­iza­tion of women’s rights. But women’s rights are by no means men’s rights. Woman can­not thrive on man’s rights any more than man can pros­per on woman’s rights.

84:5.12Each sex has its own dis­tinc­tive sphere of ex­is­tence, to­gether with its own rights within that sphere. If woman as­pires lit­er­ally to en­joy all of man’s rights, then, sooner or later, piti­less and emo­tion­less com­pe­ti­tion will cer­tainly re­place that chivalry and spe­cial con­sid­er­a­tion which many women now en­joy, and which they have so re­cently won from men.