Natural Rights vs Artificial Rights

The What, How, and Why of Natural Rights and Artificial Rights

I’m going to define what ‘right’, the word, means first and where it comes from. This is to make sense of why people would use the word for ‘human rights’.

Definitions: Right

• Right – true or correct as a fact.
• Correct –  in accordance with fact or truth.
• Truth –  the quality or state of being true.
• True – in accordance with fact or reality.

History of the Concept of the Word ‘Right’ Meaning ‘Correct’

In the long long ago, people aligned the idea of ‘right’ with ‘correct’ because a mass majority of humanity is right handed. People are said to have a right hand man for a reason. The reason being that people to the right of you are most accessible to your dominant hand.

For kings, this was of great symbolic importance. People to the right of them were seen as on their side. People on their left were seen to be inaccessible and not aligned with them. (That would rely on context because otherwise the king would always be to the left of any group of people they were with and that wouldn’t make much sense.) 

‘Rights’ then would be things that are in accordance with fact or reality. When it comes to ‘human rights’ that would be things that are in accordance with fact or reality relating to humans.

When people talk about ‘rights’, they are most generally talking about agents of some sort. Most of the time talking about humans as those agents. People use the term ‘rights’ in two main different ways.

‘Natural Rights’ and ‘Legal Rights’. I’m going to refer to them more specifically to what they are, which would be ‘Natural Rights’ and ‘Artificial Rights’. ‘Natural Rights’ also are called ‘Negative Rights’. ‘Artificial Rights’ are also called ‘Positive Rights’.

Natural Rights (negative rights)

By using the definition of ‘rights’ given, natural rights would be things that naturally are in accordance with fact or reality.

Definitions: Negative

• Negative – consisting in or characterized by the absence rather than the presence of distinguishing features (Origins: … Latin negativus, from negare ‘deny’ (see negate))
• Negate –  nullify; make ineffective (Origins:  … Latin negat- ‘denied’, from the verb negare)

Definitions: Natural

• Natural –  existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind. (Origins:  … Latin naturalis, from natura ‘birth, nature, quality’ (see nature))
• Nature – the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations. ( Origins: … Latin natura ‘birth, nature, quality’, from nat- ‘born’, from the verb nasci)
• Artificial –  made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, especially as a copy of something natural. (Origins:  … Latin artificialis, from artificium ‘handicraft’ (see artifice))
• Artifice –  clever or cunning devices or expedients, especially as used to trick or deceive others. ( Origins: … from Latin artificium, based on ars, art-‘art’ + facere ‘make’)

Negatives are seen as the absence of something sometimes and other times are seen as an inverse of a particular positive position. It can be seen as an inverse because the inverse is what negates or nullifies the positive state to a non-existent or zero state. In short, a negative of something is its negation form.

When it comes to negative rights, it seems that it is called that because it takes negative amount of action, or in other words, a non-existent action to make the ‘right’ exist. The ‘right’ exists because the human exists with the abilities to do such things as they are able to do.

The term negative right is also the inverse of positive rights because a negative action is just a non-action whereas a positive action is just the idea of making it very clear that the action is of an existent nature instead of a conceptual nature or an action that causes a negative effect.

The human is able to freely and with implicit consent do many things naturally. Such things as express themselves, transport themselves places, associate with people they want to associate with, seek to acquire medical care, etc.

These rights ends where they would end up interfering with other people’s rights. So for instance a person is able to associate with people they want to associate with, as long as the people they want to associate with also consent to such an interaction.

A person is able to seek medical care from someone as long as that someone is consenting to give them medical care. A person is able to transport themselves places as long as it is done in a way that doesn’t interfere with another agents property rights to the space they are going to transport themselves through and by the means in which they are allowed to. For example, maybe the transportation is limited to just bicycles, or just cars.

A person has the right to eat food, but that doesn’t mean you get to force someone to give you their food or their resources in order to purchase food. It also means you can’t break into someone’s home and take some food and then claim to the resident and law enforcement officers that you have a right to eat and therefore they have to provide you with food to eat.

The right to defend yourself comes from your natural state of being alive without interference. This could mean protecting yourself from wild animals, another human, a space alien, bacteria, etc.

If the methods of protecting yourself interferes with someone else’s property, health, etc. then you would be going against their rights.

How a person defends themselves is with various tools. A pointy stick, a gun, animal traps, anti-bacterial products, etc.

When I am outlining ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ I am doing it quickly without digging much further into the terms. From a philosophical point of view, the current definitions are accurate enough for use in this conversation about rights, but are not precise enough to be universal when it comes to other conversations. For the sake of brevity I am just going with what has been outlined for the definitions so far in this exchange about rights.

Now back onto the main topic at hand, rights…

NOTE: Many people on the right half of the political spectrum, (using the persistent political spectrum one that encompasses all possible political positions possible to hold in reality) hold natural rights or negative rights as the default concept of rights and many will not even agree that artificial rights or negative rights should be classified as rights at all.

Artificial Rights are rights that exist because they were created artificially. That is to say the rights were created by humans (if you use the conventional and unrefined definition of artificial, but agents if you use a refined definition of artificial). So why are they considered rights if rights are things that correspond with reality for an agent that holds those rights? Well if there are entitlements or permissions granted by an authority to the agents under its authority, then that would be the reality for those agents. The reality in terms of what they were allowed and capable of doing because they are agents was created artificially, that is, by humans (or agents) and not by nature itself.

Quick note in case there is any confusion about what just happened there… Humans have certain abilities to operate in this universe naturally because humans are a product of nature. However since humans are agents that operate using decision making instead of just a series of cause effect relationships (sure, that determinism argument can be made, but not here, so for sake of argument, hold onto that for a different time).

So since the rights given to some humans in some group by other humans instead of from just existing, we classify those rights as artificial. These rights must be generated instead of just existing. The rights are not something that is just protected by law as negative rights would be, but instead generated by agents and then protected by law. When the law goes away, the generation and protection of those artificial or positive rights cease to exist.

• The artificial rights are generated by agents.
• The natural rights are generated by nature outside of agents and just exist.

When it comes to things like anti-discrimination laws that are supposed to protect people’s rights, that is a special territory that gets quite confusing. It is essentially supposed to protect natural rights but combined with a bit of an artificial environment.

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Examples:

Grocery store: A grocery store has a set of things it offers as a service and in a particular way. If it is a store that is open to the public, then all of the public must be serviced as long as the public follows the rules that apply to all people that enter that store. That could be things like not allowing pets, other than what is legally mandated to be allowed such as service pets, wearing clothing’s such as shoes and top clothing in addition to the normal bottom clothing people would wear. It does not allow barriers that are artificially created to discriminate against a certain group of people such as some racial group. The rules have to apply to all people, not just certain demographics.

Cake baking: A baker is allowed to have a menu of their services that can do custom work. If someone requests to do work outside that custom services they offer, they will be denied. This is why the cake baker was able to not bake a cake for someone that goes against their particular offered services. For instance their services could be for just weddings, just birthdays, a range of occasions, and a range of types of weddings and types of messages and even design styles. Maybe they really hate fondant and refuse to make cakes with it.

Now if someone requested a cake to be made that fell into the service categories they will make cakes for, but then don’t make the cake because of the person’s demographics or maybe the person is ugly or some other kind of reason particular to the individual, apart from things like being unruly or what not, that would be an artificial barrier, and not just following their offered services.

Vehicle mechanic: A mechanic is allowed to work on any set of vehicles they want, do any particular range of work on those vehicles, and can refuse to work on things if someone is asking to work on something that doesn’t fall into their range of offered services. If they mechanic refuses them because of they are a woman or a Asian person or some other similar reason like that, then that would be unacceptable because it is an artificial boundary and not a boundary set by the range of services they offer.

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A country can make all sorts of rights available to their people because of various reasons. The reasons could be that it is for the benefit of the stability of the nation or would increase the capabilities of the people within the nation. Rights can be made to particular groups of people such as policemen or politicians, or some other group of individuals for various reasons. Artificial rights can be created reasonably or unreasonably because they are created by agents. What makes a good artificial right is a different conversation.

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