Letter Response
Dear Editor: While Spike Arnold’s admonition that “Individual rights are a great thing to have when they don’t Trump other individuals’ rights” sounds good, it’s not completely accurate, (Letter to the Editor, Nov 30.)
The exercise of one person’s actual, real, individual human rights does not – because it cannot – trump (or even “Trump”) another person’s real, actual individual human rights.
And that’s because to “trump” another’s rights is to violate their rights; and nobody – no individual, group, organization, or institution – has the right to violate the rights of another human being without due process under a rule of law.
Human rights do not – because they cannot – conflict. Nobody’s right to life gives them the right to physically harm or take the life, or the liberty, property, or privacy of another human being, except in self-defense.
Nobody’s right to liberty gives them the right to violate the liberty or the rights to life, property, privacy, or the pursuit of happiness of another human being, except to prevent or to punish the violation of the rights of other human beings.
Nobody’s right to property gives them the right to commit theft, fraud, extortion, embezzlement, or any form of violence against the property of – or contracts with – anybody else.
Nobody’s right to privacy empowers them to violate the privacy, or any other right of any other human being.
And everybody’s right to the pursuit of happiness gives them the right to do everything and anything that they want to do, as long as it violates nobody else’s rights.
So, Mr. Arnold’s declaration is faulty: nobody’s “individual rights” can morally, ethically, or legally take precedence over and privilege above – or “Trump” – anybody else’s, except via the processes and procedures of that rule of law.
The problems begin when the concept of human rights is extended and expanded beyond life, liberty, etc., to include the meeting of human needs and the satisfaction of human wants: nutrition and sanitation, health care, housing, education, financial, communications, transportation, and energy infrastructures, economic well being and stability, physical security of person and property, and leisure.
The problems begin when the right to the pursuit of happiness is taken to mean the right to happiness itself; and that the proper function of government is to guarantee that happiness, at least for some folks. Even if that violates the actual rights of others. That’s how Trumping occurs.
Jeff Moebus, Sitka
