Natural Law
Natural Law is a standard of justice by which conduct and legislation can be judged, rather than a permission granted by a ruler. In its libertarian formulation, people have rights over their persons and property, and the corresponding obligation to respect those same rights in others. A legislature can authorize an aggression; its authorization does not make the aggression just.
Justice and legislation
A law in the legislative sense is an enacted rule. Natural Law asks the prior question: is the rule itself just? If a statute permits taking an innocent person’s property, pointing to the statute does not answer the objection to the taking. The dispute concerns the rule’s justification, not merely whether the official followed it.
Lysander Spooner distinguishes obligations of justice from duties of generosity or kindness. Respecting another person’s rights is enforceable in his account; every failure to be generous is not therefore an aggression.[1]
“ If there be any such principle as justice, it is, of necessity, a natural principle; and, as such, it is a matter of science, to be learned and applied like any other science. And to talk of either adding to, or taking from, it, by legislation, is just as false, absurd, and ridiculous as it would be to talk of adding to, or taking from, mathematics, chemistry, or any other science, by legislation.
Individuals and reciprocal rights
Rights belong to individuals. Joining a party, a government or another organization does not supply its members with a moral permission to do what would be an aggression if done privately. The claim to act for a collective still has to be justified in terms of the rights of the people affected.
Universality also requires reciprocity: someone cannot coherently demand respect for his own person and property while claiming an unrestricted entitlement to violate everyone else’s. The relevant distinction is between peaceful conduct and aggression, not between a favored class of people and the rest of humanity.
Equal rights do not require identical choices or outcomes. Two people can have the same freedom to contract while choosing different agreements and assuming different obligations. The difference then follows from what they have agreed to, rather than a privilege attached to race, sex, nationality or political office.
“ Est autem injustum, quod naturæ societatis ratione utentium repugnat.
- — Hugo Grotius, 1625
Property and consent
Property rights identify who may decide how a resource is used and whose consent is required. They make cooperation possible without requiring everyone to share the same purposes. A person’s wish to use something does not by itself establish a right to take it from its owner. The argument developed in Square One: Liberty through Property treats property rights as logical requirements of a coherent account of liberty:
“ Since property rights are thus a fact of logic, they are by extension a fact of nature, inescapable and absolute. This is what libertarians mean by the phrase “property rights are natural,” and that they have pre-existed their practical recognition or protection by any human institution. In the same way, two plus two has always equaled four, even thousands of years ago, whether or not any primitive tribesmen and women existing at the time could themselves have grasped the concept.
What makes the law natural?
“Natural” does not mean that whatever occurs in nature, or whatever human beings commonly do, is right. Aggression is common enough; its frequency does not justify it. The claim is that principles of justice can be discovered and assessed independently of an authority’s decision to enact them.
Calling justice a science does not dispense with argument. Its premises must be stated and defended, and its conclusions applied consistently. A description of human behavior cannot, without further reasoning, establish a permission to coerce other people.
Rand’s distinction between an unconditional command and a requirement conditional on a chosen end helps separate action and its requirements from mere obedience:
“ Reality confronts man with a great many “musts”, but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is: “You must, if—” and the “if” stands for man’s choice “—if you want to achieve a certain goal”. You must eat, if you want to survive. You must work, if you want to eat. You must think, if you want to work. You must look at reality, if you want to think—if you want to know what to do—if you want to know what goals to choose—if you want to know how to achieve them.
- — Ayn Rand, Causality versus Duty
The State is subject to the same test
An institution that claims to protect rights must be judged by its actual conduct. Defining a proper government as a protector does not establish that an existing government respects anyone’s rights, or explain how a coercive monopoly would remain within those limits. The same prohibition on aggression must apply to the official and the private person. See Proper government and Ayn Rand/Criticism.
