[NOTE: This is the fifth in a series of posts intended to work out the principles of Natural Law. It builds off of the posts that have come before it.  If you have not already read Rights Bubbles: the Origin of Universal Morality, I strongly suggest that you do so before reading this post, as this post is a continuation of the former and everything that comes before it.  I also ask that you understand, while this is not technically a formal argument, neither is it a casual argument.  Thus, it is not necessarily the easiest thing to read, but then, this is because I am trying to explain some difficult concepts in a manner as easily understood as I know how.  I trust that you will bear with me.  In return, I will break the whole into smaller, more easily digested posts.]

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—

To this point in our construction of Natural Right and natural Law, we have been able to deduce that we have a Natural Right to our Life and our Liberty, as Jefferson so eloquently stated in the Declaration of Independence.  But what did he mean by “the pursuit of happiness?”  If he intended this phrase to mean we have a Natural Right to pursue emotional pleasure, then, according to the principles we have developed thus far, this would contradict with the Natural Rights of others to their Lives and Liberty.  So we shouldn’t be too quick to assume this is what Jefferson and our founders meant.  Rather, we should go back in history and look closer at what these men understood this phrase to mean.  But first, let’s look at a couple definitions, because they will be key to understanding Jefferson true intention.

Let’s start with:

Definition of MORALITY

2a : a doctrine or system of moral conduct

b plural : particular moral principles or rules of conduct

3: conformity to ideals of right human conduct

4: moral conduct : virtue

That last definition for morality holds the key to understanding what Jefferson was saying:

Definition of VIRTUE

1a : conformity to a standard of right : morality

b : a particular moral excellence

3: a beneficial quality or power of a thing

4: manly strength or courage : valor

5: a commendable quality or trait : merit

Therefore, a virtuous life is a life spent in the pursuit of building a moral character; of pursuing what is right; doing the right thing – especially when it is difficult or comes at a personal price.  This was considered to be the highest aspiration one could hope to achieve in life by the Greeks, and by many of the men who so heavily influenced the thinking of our founding fathers.

To better understand this, we need to understand that “the pursuit of happiness” – in this sense, the sense of pursuing a moral and virtuous life – was actually a legal concept in our founders’ time.  I wrote about it in more detail here, but the foundation of this legal principle can still be found in the writings of the most respected and most influential legal mind of our founders’ time, Sir William Blackstone.

From Blackstone’s Commentaries:

When the Supreme Being formed the universe, and created matter out of nothing, he impressed certain principles upon that matter…  When he put that matter into motion, he established certain laws of motion…  If we farther advance to vegetable and animal life, we shall find them still governed by laws;…  [The operations of inanimate and organic processes] are not left to chance, or the will of the creature itself, but are performed in a wondrous involuntary manner, and guide by unerring rules laid down by the Creator…  Man, considered as a creature, must necessarily be subject to the laws of his creator, for he is an entirely dependent being…  And consequently as man depends absolutely upon his maker for every thing, it is necessary that he should in all points conform to his maker’s will.  This will of his maker is called the law of nature.

Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765)

 The doctrines thus delivered we call the revealed or divine law, and they are to be found only in the holy scriptures…  These precepts…are found upon comparison to be really a part of the original law of nature,…  As then the moral precepts of this law are indeed of the same original with those of the law of nature…the revealed law…is the law of nature expressly declared to be so by God himself;…  Upon these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of revelation, depend all human laws…the law of nature and the law of God…

Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765)

In this context, the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of the moral and virtuous life; a life lived in agreement with Natural Law.  As only the moral and virtuous life leads to a deep and lasting happiness that can pierce through even the temporary pains of emotional trouble or distress.  It is the life of putting duty to others and to society before one’s personal desires; of seeking truth and wisdom; and of reaching above, of transcending our base animalistic nature to become the best than humans can be.  This is in perfect agreement with the understanding of Natural Rights and Natural Law that we’ve developed so far, and I contend that this is what Jefferson and our founding fathers actually intended when they wrote those words (I write a bit more about the value of the virtuous life here).

[NOTE: for an excellent exposition of the historic development of this and other related concepts, please see Chapter 2 of Gary T. Amos’s book, “Defending the Declaration.”]

[NOTE: This is an extension of my post on the origins of morality.  If you have not already read Rights Bubbles: the Origin of Universal Morality, I strongly suggest that you do so before reading this post, as this post is meant to help explain the former in greater detail. ]

When it comes to matters of right and wrong, if you are seeing gray, it is a sure indication that you’re on the wrong side of right.

This is what I like to tell people who accuse me of having a black and white understanding of right and wrong, and I stand by it.  Where an issue of right and wrong is concerned, there is never any gray.  There is always a right and everything else is a wrong.  It’s just that our Creator’s law is impossibly difficult for humans to accept.  But this doesn’t change the fact that there is always a right in every moral question, and that gray is the justification of wrong.  I wrote this post to help explain why I say this.

As I have already stated, our individual Natural Rights are derived from our Natural Right to our free will as granted to us by our Creator.  Because the Creator is the source of our free will, we have a duty to protect and preserve the Natural Rights of other individuals.  Natural Law, the universal moral law that governs this universe, is derived from the intersection of our Natural Rights and the needs of others.  How we act toward one and other in relation to this conflict determines whether or not we are in accord with Natural Law.

So let’s apply this to a real world example relevant to our modern society.  Let’s discuss how this applies to the issue of abortion.  Yes, this is an emotionally charged issue, but I chose it for that reason.  I would ask that you read through this to see how I use my argument to resolve the moral questions connected to it.

Our society has decided that it will allow a mother to decide whether her unborn child is human.  If she does, then, in some States, the same law that would allow her to kill her child will also put another person in jail should they kill that same child – intentional or accidentally.  At the same time, should the mother choose to abort the child but it is born alive, then, in some States, that same law suddenly defines the killing of that same child as murder.  These are all contradictions created by violating the universal morality of Natural Law to justify our desires rather than honoring our duty to our Creator.  A mother does have a right to her free will, so she has a right to her body – up to the point that she creates another life as a result of exercising her free will.  Once a mother has conceived, she no longer has the right to abort because she will be placing a claim against the free will of her unborn child.*

Now, there are some exceptions that can be easily handled by the parameters of my argument for universal morality.  In the case of a real medical threat to the mother, she has the right to preserve her will, so this would justify an abortion.  In this case, there would be little difference – in principle – than the case of my not having to share my pineapple with another castaway.  Both are examples of justified self-preservation.  We can also justify an abortion in the case of rape.  If a woman becomes pregnant as the result of a rape, which is a violation of her free will, then the pregnancy is a continued violation of her free will.  This would be justification for an abortion.  However, should a mother risk death or sacrifice her free will to preserve the child within her, this would be an act from which we define the notion of virtue and nobility because she willingly places her duty to our Creator and thus, to others, above herself.  In this case, the mother would be worthy of higher regard than one who chose to save herself or rid herself of the burden of a child that was not the result of her free will.  Both choices would be justified, but only one would command reverence from other people.

Other than this, there is no justification for abortion as it ends the free will of another human.  This same principle can be applied to other issues in our society today:

Employment

You do not have a Natural Right to a job; you have a Natural Right to seek employment, or to start your own business.  Demanding that someone give you a job is demanding you be allowed to control their free will for your purposes.

Welfare

You do not have a Natural Right to food, clothing and shelter; you have a Natural Right to use your labor to seek them.  Demanding that others provide for your care is placing an unjust demand on their free will which – in principle — is little different from slavery.

Health Care

Same thing: you do not have a Natural Right to health care; you have a Natural Right to seek it and to freely contract with someone who is willing to provide their labor in return for whatever you agree to give them.  Demanding that others provide your care is placing a demand on their free will.

Most moral issues where people claim to see gray can be handled in a similar fashion.  All you have to do is start tracing the claims placed against people back to their free will.  When you find the point where one person is trying to control the free will of another, then you have found wrong, not gray.  The real issue here is accepting and living with what is right.  As humans, we are self-centered and seldom want to place others before ourselves – even when we are dealing with their right to their own free will.  But then, I never said doing the right thing would be easy, only that you can always determine what it is by following the principles of Natural Law.

*NOTE: our founders followed a religious doctrine that held the unborn did not have free will until the quickening.  This is connected to the belief that free will is connected to the soul, and that the quickening is the point when the soul enters the body.  Our founders sometimes allowed abortion before the quickening, but seldom after it.  This position is totally in keeping with the argument I am presenting.

[NOTE: This is the fourth in a series of posts intended to work out the principles of Natural Law. It builds off of the posts that have come before it.  If you have not already read Extrapolating Our Natural Rights, I strongly suggest that you do so before reading this post, as this post is a continuation of the former and everything that comes before it.  I also ask that you understand, while this is not technically a formal argument, neither is it a casual argument.  Thus, it is not necessarily the easiest thing to read, but then, this is because I am trying to explain some difficult concepts in a manner as easily understood as I know how.  I trust that you will bear with me.  In return, I will break the whole into smaller, more easily digested posts.]

Now that we have defined our most fundamental Natural Right and we have extrapolated out to cover additional rights in connection to this most fundamental right, we need to determine the boundaries of these extrapolated rights.  Using what we have already deduced, we need to determine how far they extend and where they must end.

I start with something I call a “rights bubble.”  Think of this as a bubble that extends around your Natural Rights: your free will, your life, your body, your labor and all the property necessary to sustain your life that you have used your labor to gather or create.  Because it defines you as an individual, you are the only person who can lay just a claim to your free will.  For the same reason, you are the only one who can make a just claim on your life, your body and your labor.  This includes all of the property you necessary to sustain your life and exercise your will which you acquire or create through your labor.  Your rights bubble is an imaginary bubble that extends out and encompasses all of these extensions of your Natural Right to your free will.  You are the sole owner and authority over all of those things that lie within your rights bubble.  They are yours simply because you exist, and you are the only person who can make a just claim to them or decide how they should be used.

Now, this illustration works well as long as we imagine we are the only person on a deserted island, but what happens when we introduce another person?  If you will remember my earlier example that explains how, by using my labor to make a hoe, then using the hoe to grow a pineapple, I have created a Natural Right to the pineapple.  I used my labor to create a tool and my labor to grow the pineapple which I need to sustain my life, so I am the only person who has a just claim on that pineapple.  But what happens if another person is marooned on the island with me?  Do they have a Natural Right to eat that pineapple so they can sustain their life?  The answer is no!

This is the point where most people start to see “gray,” but there is no gray in Natural Law.  Under Natural Law, the pineapple belongs to me because I used my labor to acquire it so I can sustain my life.  Now, while I may choose to share it, or, if I have enough, I may give it to you, I have no obligation to do so.  In order for you to claim a right to my pineapple, you have to also claim a right to my labor, my body, my life and – ultimately – my free will.  And that is where our Natural Rights end: at the point that we can trace a claim to something back to another person’s free will.

This is why slavery is wrong: not just because you are claiming to own another person, but because you are claiming to own their free will.  It is impossible for you to own that which you cannot possess or control.  At best, all a slave master does is force his slave to use his body and labor as the master wishes, but, so long as the slave does not surrender his free will, the slave master does not actually possess or control that slave’s free will.  We can extend this to other aspects of our society.  When a person is forced to provide for the welfare of another, it is a violation of that person’s Natural Rights because – ultimately – it is a claim against their free will.  Murder is the ultimate form of claiming a person’s free will as it ends their ability to sustain and exercise their will in this universe, but it is still a claim against the victim’s will and, thus, a violation of Natural Law.

But there is one last point necessary to understanding the origin of morality.  If we left things here, we still wouldn’t have a moral code because we would be leaving our claim of right and wrong at the feet of human reason and, as we already discovered, logic has inherent limitations that will prevent us from declaring our notion superior to any others.  However, we have not relied solely on human reason to deduce that we have an inalienable right to our free will; we have relied on the assumption that our free will is a gift from our Creator.  And as a gift from our Creator, we owe it to the Creator that we not only show respect by using our free will wisely, but we must also show reverence to our Creator by showing respect for the Natural Rights of other individuals.  It is this duty to preserve and protect the Natural Rights that our Creator gives to every individual that gives birth to the universal moral code governing this universe.  How we treat each other in relation to our individual Natural Rights is the essence of Natural Law.  To sum it up tighter than this:

Our individual Natural Rights are derived from our Natural Right to our free will as granted to us by our Creator.  Because the Creator is the source of our free will, we have a duty to protect and preserve the Natural Rights of other individuals.  Natural Law, the universal moral law that governs this universe, is derived from the intersection of our Natural Rights and the needs of others.  How we act toward one and other in relation to this conflict determines whether or not we are in accord with Natural Law.

It might also help to think of it this way:

[NOTE: This is the third in a series of posts intended to work out the principles of Natural Law. It builds off of the posts that have come before it.  If you have not already read Defining Natural Rights, I strongly suggest that you do so before reading this post, as this post is a continuation of the former.  I also ask that you understand, while this is not technically a formal argument, neither is it a casual argument.  Thus, it is not necessarily the easiest thing to read, but then, this is because I am trying to explain some difficult concepts in a manner as easily understood as I know how.  I trust that you will bear with me.  In return, I will break the whole into smaller, more easily digested posts.]

Now that we have established a definition of a Natural Right, we need to explore the limits of the concept by expanding it until we find the point where our definition breaks down.  But before we start, I would like to quote something Jefferson said about the nature of a right:

“The right to use a thing comprehends a right to the means necessary to its use, and without which it would be useless.”

It is from this principle that we derive a claim to our life, for without our life, we cannot sustain and exercise our free will.  And from our claim to our life, we derive our claim to our body, which is necessary to sustain and exercise our free will.  From our claim to our body, we derive a claim to our labor, which is necessary to sustain our body, to sustain our life, to sustain our free will.  Do you see how this works?  It is a simple extension of Jefferson’s principle, and it is from this principle that Jefferson summarizes everything we have discussed in our first three posts on Natural Law:

“Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the Author of nature, because necessary for his own sustenance.”

 –Thomas Jefferson  (Legal Argument, 1770. FE 1:376)

But there is one more important aspect of this principle, and that is the derivation of our claim to property.  If I have a Natural Right to my will, thus to my life, then to my body, and then to my labor, then I must have a Natural Right to that property which I obtain and/or make through the use of my labor as it is necessary to sustain my life.  I like to use growing pineapples as an example.  If I am stranded on a desert isle, and I use my labor to make a hoe so I can grow pineapples, both the hoe and the pineapples are my property: I have a just claim to them through the use of my labor to do that which is necessary to sustain my life.  However, just because I am the only person on the island, I cannot have a just claim to it as my labor had nothing to do with creating it.  Therefore, while I have a Natural Right to use its resources to sustain my life, I do not have and can never impart a Natural Right to the island as property.  This is the distinction Jefferson and Franklin were both explaining when they wrote these words:

“A right of property in moveable things is admitted before the establishment of government. A separate property in lands, not till after that establishment. The right to moveables is acknowledged by all the hordes of Indians surrounding us. Yet by no one of them has a separate property in lands been yielded to individuals. He who plants a field keeps possession till he has gathered the produce, after which one has as good a right as another to occupy it. Government must be established and laws provided, before lands can be separately appropriated, and their owner protected in his possession. Till then, the property is in the body of the nation, and they, or their chief as trustee, must grant them to individuals, and determine the conditions of the grant.”

–Thomas Jefferson: Batture at New Orleans, 1812. ME 18:45

“All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.”

–Benjamin Franklin, letter to Robert Morris, 25 December 1783, Ref: Franklin Collected Works, Lemay, ed., 1

There is a crucial distinction between Natural and Civil rights in these words.  As we have already determined, a Natural Right is that to which you can lay just claim and to which no one else can lay the same.  However, those rights that exist only because of and as an act of government are not Natural but Civil Rights (government having been formed from the Natural Right to freely enter into a contract with others, and hence, the concept of the Social Contract).  Thus, Civil Rights are subject to modification and/or change, whereas Natural Rights cannot be altered or abolished because there are inherent to our being.

So, now we have a principle by which we can test whether or not a right is Natural or Civil.  Next, we need to define morality.

[NOTE: This is the second in a series of posts intended to work out the principles of Natural Law. It builds off of the posts that have come before it.  If you have not already read Free Will: the First Principle of Natural Law, I strongly suggest that you do so before reading this post, as this post is a continuation of the former.  I also ask that you understand, while this is not technically a formal argument, neither is it a casual argument.  Thus, it is not necessarily the easiest thing to read, but then, this is because I am trying to explain some difficult concepts in a manner as easily understood as I know how.  I trust that you will bear with me.  In return, I will break the whole into smaller, more easily digested posts.]

 Now that we have established that the first principle of Natural Law is our free will, we need to develop our definition of a Natural Right.  As a matter of habit, where matters of definition are concerned, I start by citing the definition of a natural:

Definition of NATURAL

2a : being in accordance with or determined by nature

b : having or constituting a classification based on features existing in nature

5: implanted or being as if implanted by nature : seemingly inborn <a natural talent for art>

7: having a specified character by nature <a natural athlete>

b : formulated by human reason alone rather than revelation <natural religion> <natural rights>

 Next, the definition of right:

Definition of RIGHT

1: qualities (as adherence to duty or obedience to lawful authority) that together constitute the ideal of moral propriety or merit moral approval

2: something to which one has a just claim: as

a : the power or privilege to which one is justly entitled <voting rights> <his right to decide>

3: something that one may properly claim as due <knowing the truth is her right>

 Now, using these two definitions, let us define a Natural Right.  First, we exist in corporeal form, and as such, are subject to the laws of physics as they govern mater in this universe.  Thus, whatever form we take is a matter of what we call nature.  Second, as our free will is a part of our total make up, and is – at least in some way – connected to or dependent upon our corporeal form, it is a matter of nature that we have free will.  And as our free will is unique to each of us – indeed, it defines us as individuals.  We cannot be separated from our will for, without it, we cease to be.  It is inalienable to who we are.  Therefore, we can say that our free will is a natural part of our being.  So, in every sense, our free will meets the definition of “natural:” both because it is a natural part of this universe, and because it is inalienable to who we are as individuals.

Next, as our free will is unique to ourselves, it is not subject to control by any outside influence — unless we allow it (in which case, it would still be an act of free will: the act of  surrendering to that outside control).  Our will is the very essence of who we are, and as we are given free will by our Creator, this imparts a just claim to control over our will.  We are sovereign over our will.  Thus, we have a right in our free will.  And since that will is a natural part of this world and who we are, we can say we have a Natural Right to our will.  What’s more, again, because our will is a gift from our Creator, our claim to our will cannot be said to be greater or less than the claim anyone else has to their own will.  Nor can they make a just claim to ours.  We are all equal in our claim to our will.  Jefferson explained it this way:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

And thus, we have our definition of a Natural Right:

A Natural Right is that to which one has a natural and just claim as a function of their being – both in physical existence, and in will.