{"id":62373,"date":"2021-03-31T01:00:36","date_gmt":"2021-03-31T05:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=62373"},"modified":"2022-04-07T09:44:16","modified_gmt":"2022-04-07T13:44:16","slug":"qotd-the-first-and-only-inalienable-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2021\/03\/31\/qotd-the-first-and-only-inalienable-right\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The first and only &#8220;inalienable&#8221; right"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 15px 10px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>Oversimplifying a bit for clarity, &#8220;republican&#8221; political philosophy after Hobbes is an attempt to use Hobbes&#8217;s tools and methods without arriving at his conclusions. That baloney about &#8220;inalienable rights&#8221; in the US Declaration of Independence is the most famous of these attempts. If you want to know how we got from there to here \u2013 from the Founders to the Tyranny of the Intersectional Genderfluids \u2013 just recall what those supposedly &#8220;inalienable&#8221; rights are: Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness.<\/p>\n<p>It would&#8217;ve been far better to have kept the trio in Locke&#8217;s original words \u2013 life, liberty, and <em>property<\/em> \u2013 but even that wouldn&#8217;t have saved us, because the proposition is flawed from the beginning. The full quote is:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>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 &#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&#8230; and pretty much all of that is wrong.<\/p>\n<p>As we&#8217;ve seen, it was a major part of Hobbes&#8217;s project to prove that men do in fact have such rights, because it&#8217;s not at all &#8220;self-evident.&#8221; That was the whole point of the Wars of Religion \u2013 heretics have NO rights, because they have put themselves beyond the pale of the human community. For the Wars of Religion to end, political legitimacy had to be secularized.<\/p>\n<p>That was Hobbes&#8217;s goal. That&#8217;s what the &#8220;State of Nature&#8221; thought experiment was about. Does man has any rights <em>in himself<\/em>, that flow only from his existence as a human being? In other words, does he have rights NOT endowed by his Creator?<\/p>\n<p>Hobbes argued that we DO have such rights, of course &#8230; but, crucially, we only have the full exercise of them in the State of Nature. For Hobbes, <em>all<\/em> rights are, at bottom, the right to self-defense. Getting out of the State of Nature involves laying at least part of that right down \u2013 &#8220;alienating&#8221; it, in the Latinate English of the 17th century \u2013 creating in the process a &#8220;corporate person&#8221; who &#8220;represents&#8221; us all. Far from being &#8220;inalienable,&#8221; then, Life and Liberty, at least, <em>have to be<\/em> alienated, at least to some degree, if civilization is to exist at all &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230; at least according to Hobbes, and do you see what I mean about people trying to adopt his terms while dumping his conclusions?<br \/>\nHobbes had plenty of examples to hand, writing as he was in the last, nastiest phase of the Wars of Religion. According to Hobbes, the Leviathan \u2013 who, let&#8217;s recall, can be a Senate or something just as easily as a monarch \u2013 absolutely has the right to your life and liberty, since your voluntary surrender of them is what creates the Leviathan in the first place. How else could wars be fought in the gunpowder age? A medieval king leading his personal affinity into battle didn&#8217;t have to worry about political theory. An Early Modern king, fielding armies of tens of thousands, did. Without an animating ideology, they&#8217;re just mercenaries \u2013 ask Machiavelli how that works out.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll skip over that &#8220;pursuit of happiness&#8221; crap, since that&#8217;s probably just Jefferson&#8217;s noodle-headed way of alluding to Classical political theory, and circle back to the start: &#8220;all men are created equal.&#8221; As we&#8217;ve seen, this was central to Hobbes&#8217;s &#8220;State of Nature&#8221; thought experiment &#8230; but, as is obvious to anyone with real-world experience, it only applies there.<\/p>\n<p>Severian, <a href=\"https:\/\/foundingquestions.wordpress.com\/2020\/12\/11\/hobbes-ii\/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Hobbes (II)&#8221;, <em>Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2020-12-11.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oversimplifying a bit for clarity, &#8220;republican&#8221; political philosophy after Hobbes is an attempt to use Hobbes&#8217;s tools and methods without arriving at his conclusions. That baloney about &#8220;inalienable rights&#8221; in the US Declaration of Independence is the most famous of these attempts. If you want to know how we got from there to here \u2013 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,7,10,41],"tags":[360,576,217,1462,1405],"class_list":["post-62373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-history","category-liberty","category-quotations","tag-christianity","tag-philosophy","tag-rights","tag-severian","tag-thomashobbes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-ge1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62373"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64936,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62373\/revisions\/64936"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}