What is a Human Right?

The Declaration of Independence states that governments exist to “secure the rights of the people.” That is a highly significant statement. It suggests that if we citizens could uncover and disclose all of a person’s rights, then all government would have to do is secure those rights by allocating and distributing resources in a fair and balanced manner among all of the rights. If a government could achieve that feat then society could achieve “happiness”

In order for government to secure them, there must be a workable definition of “rights.” Otherwise, Americans will continue to select rights as they have previously done: arbitrarily and incompletely.

After spending a great deal of time analyzing what human rights share in common, I have drawn certain conclusions:
There are four components of every human right.
First: Human rights are individual. There are no group rights. There are no states’ rights. There are no corporate rights.
Second: Human rights are based on an individual’s essential personality attributes shared with all other persons. This suggests that those traits which are universal to every person are the foundation for all of our rights.
Third: Human rights are fundamental desires (wants or aspirations).
Fourth: In order for rights to be secured there must be a just expectation that the government will enforce that right. In order for a just expectation of enforcement of a right to exist, there must be general awareness of the right.

Once I discovered four components to a human right, I was ready to state a definition: A human right is an individual fundamental and universal desire whose origin is based on the shared personality attributes of all persons and whose enforcement and enhancement is secured by government.

Still, there was a very big piece of the human rights puzzle that remained missing even after I had a definition. What were the basic personality attributes common to all individuals? Here is what I concluded. Humans are mental, physical, emotional creative beings. This was not my original conclusion as I borrowed it from the Tarot; an ancient map of consciousness developed by B.C.E. Egyptians. The Tarot divides the human into four parts: mental, physical, emotional, and creative/intuitive. I decided that this composite human made more sense than any other definition of a human. I also like the fact that the emotional and creative corresponded to right brain behavior and that the physical and mental quadrants corresponded to left brain activity.

Working inferentially, I began making comparisons between the four basic attributes of the human to the four divisions of society as developed by W.I. Thompson (Commerce, Education, Media, and Government) and four rights of the Declaration of Independence. I concluded that the emotions correspond to the right to Life which is another way of saying that all individuals have social (government) rights. The creative self corresponds right to Liberty –a way of saying that all persons have cultural (media) rights. The mental quadrant corresponds to the right to the “pursuit of happiness” or educational rights. Finally, I determined that the physical corresponds to safety, or in macro terms: security (commerce) rights.

After this comparison exercise I began looking at the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution.) and became even more convinced that it was arbitrary, incomplete, and very much a reaction to civil and criminal law abuses by the British. For example, consider the Third Amendment which prohibits soldiers from being quartered in one’s house during peacetime. To this date, there has not been even one case arising under the third amendment. Not quartering soldiers may be a right because the Constitution says so, but it hardly meets the test of corresponding to a basic attribute of the personality or a fundamental desire. Furthermore, very few people are even aware that it is a stated right of the Constitution. I’ve looked at many other foreign constitutions and the Declaration of Rights of the United Nations and I found no right similar to the Third Amendment. Nor did I find anything comparable to the Ninth Amendment which states that the enumeration of rights in the Constitution shall not demean or disparage other rights retained by the people but not stated in the Constitution. The Ninth Amendment is a definite reminder that there are other unstated rights beyond the Constitution.

I also concluded that social, cultural, educational and security rights were overly generalized and that there would have to be a way of making rights more specific so they could be applied to our daily lives. I shall discuss my findings in an essay to follow. I shall call it, “What is a Human Right? Part II.”

Posted on 10th April at 10:04 am - 1 Your Comments

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