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"I
challenge anyone who believes there is a natural right of self-defense to
explain to me why there is no right of rape." Having read this from a critic of natural rights, I turned to Mrs. Rozeff and asked her "Why
does a man not have a right to rape a woman?" She answered immediately
"Because she doesn’t belong to that man."
The
critic argues that rape is as natural as self-defense, or that there is no way
to infer natural rights from a state of nature. Yet Mrs. Rozeff unblinkingly
and unerringly found a way.
How do
we know that the rapist’s victim does not belong to him? Because she
has not agreed to have relations with him. They have no understanding. She
did not give herself to lie down with that man. And why does she not belong
to the rapist? Because her body belongs to her. And why does her body belong
to her? Why is her body hers and hers alone to do as she will? Because she
lives in it. Even though he took possession of part of her temporarily, she
lived in her body beforehand, during the rape, and she will live afterwards
therein. This is the basis of her right to her body. This is why she does not
belong to any man that comes along and decides to have her. If they do not
have her permission and agreement, then they are rapists.
And
how else may we know that her body is hers, that he intruded? Because she
protests, or fights, or defends herself against the rapist’s powerful
intrusion. We know by her expressions and by her demeanor. She tells us in
many ways that she regards her body as hers. She had prior control and
decision rights over her body, to use according to her own desires, feelings
and will. By not wanting to be with that man and by choosing not to be, she
expresses her right to her body and that he has no right to rape.
The
woman has a right to decide whom to lie with, and the rapist violated her
right. He has wronged her. Since there is no right of rape and he rapes, his
action is wrong.
Subsequent
to writing the above, I came across the words of a Slave Petition to the Governor,
Council, and House of Representatives of the Province of Massachusetts 25 May
1774: "That your petitioners apprehend we have in common with all other
men a natural right to our freedoms without being deprived of them by our
fellow men as we are a freeborn people and have never forfeited this blessing
by any compact or agreement whatever. But we were unjustly dragged by the
cruel hand of power from our dearest friends and some of us stolen from the
bosoms of our tender parents and from a populous plentiful and pleasant
country and brought hither to be made slaves for life in a Christian
land."
The
metaphor of rape applies directly to this description. Just as the woman was
deprived of her freedom to choose her own companion, so have these slaves
been deprived of their freedoms. Just as she never gave up her freedom by an
agreement, so did they never forfeit theirs by a "compact." Just as
a cruel power acted upon her, so it was with them. And even as the slaves say
they were "unjustly" treated, so we can see that both cases involve
injustice.
Our
natural rights critic who can not see that a right to defend arises in a
state of nature but a right to rape does not, fails to understand that the
state of nature includes human nature. He goes astray by perceiving human
beings as merely animals whose acts are either unconnected each to the other
by any morality or else are ruled by brute force. In short, he is a Hobbesian
and just as blind as Hobbes was to the realities of human nature and
cooperation. In fact, human beings connect in many ways, including through
the links of understandings, agreements, exchanges, contracts, property, and
justice.
Other
critics of natural rights think that we sit down around a table and construct
rights or construct our basic understandings through a bargaining or voting
process. Some think we tailor rights to suit our notions of what will make
some group or other survive. These stories are also far off the mark.
Then
there is Alan Dershowitz who argues that humans invented rights to correct
wrongs. Since there are many wrongs that he and others think need righting,
this theory leads straightway to a debasement of what rights mean. It leads
to so-called positive rights in the mode of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms
or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
We are
inundated with sophists who use the term right to mean an illegal and unjust
seizure of goods by the State. All these stories shamefully co-opt and debase
the meaning of rights.
Many
natural rights critics think that the existence and acceptance of slavery in
civilizations of the past prove that right and wrong are relative terms, to
be defined at will, that justice is adjustable like the volume control on a
television or like the machinations of our Supreme Court. They think that
because rights have been violated, that somehow those rights have disappeared.
If they are mugged, or beaten up, or raped, if their home is burglarized; if
their paycheck fails to appear at the usual hour, or does not show up in
their bank statement; if their identity is stolen or UPS fails to deliver the
goods they bought – they will quickly feel the sting, not simply of
loss, but also the injustice of having their rights violated.
In
Roman times, slaves were scourged and beaten and raped. Did the Romans have a
right to rape? If a woman was a slave from birth, did she have a right to her
body? After all, she belonged to someone else, according to the Roman law of
the period.
The
Romans did not have the right to rape; and the slave did have a right to her
body. The Roman law, like the legislative law of today, only expressed a
relationship of power. Although it allowed a master the legal right to use a
slave any way he wanted to, such a law simply said that might was right, that
is, it conveyed a bogus right which was an injustice that was called a right.
In our day, when the State has the legal power to imprison a drug user, it is
likewise a deplorable fact that it cloaks its illegal and unjust action in
the legal verbiage of law and right when its act is nothing more than a raw
exercise of power.
Roman
law was no different. Such legal maneuvering only confuses and hides the fact
that there still exists the woman’s ownership of her own body, which is
known by one or more of the ways mentioned above, including that she inhabits
her body and that she has her own desires, feelings and will. The slave, like
the raped woman, did not agree to the condition of being brutalized as a
slave, and by this absence of a mutual understanding do we also know that she
maintained her self-ownership right.
The
rights of Roman slaves were frequently suppressed or rendered incapable of
finding expression, but they were not gone. If a slave maintained her spirit,
her resistance, her will, her desires; or if she disliked her position as
slave and wanted to end it; or if she was anxious for her freedom; or if she
was unhappy being beaten, then surely her right to herself was being
violated. And even if none of these signs was present, if upon being freed
she chose to lead her own life, then this again shows that self-ownership
rights are inherent in the person.
Having
a right and exercising it are two different things. To have a right is to be
due a proper action, whether it is the freedom to choose one’s own mate
or to live in one’s own land or raise one’s own children. To exercise
rights requires a will and the freedom to decide for oneself. Slaves have the
will but not the freedom. Their ability to exercise their rights is
suppressed. Their rights are always present but made largely inoperable. If a
person is blindfolded, they cannot see; but they maintain the capacity to
see.
Evolutionary
psychology, a new science, is providing concrete
evidence consistent with the approaches taken by natural law theorists for
thousands of years. One conclusion of this work is that "all humans
share certain views and assumptions about the nature of the world and human
action by virtue of these human universal reasoning circuits..." More
specifically,
But
everywhere it has been tested (adults in the US, UK, Germany, Italy, France,
Hong-Kong; schoolchildren in Ecuador, Shiwiar hunter-horticulturalists in the
Ecuadorian Amazon), people do not treat social exchange problems as
equivalent to other kinds of reasoning problems. Their minds distinguish
social exchange contents, and reason as if they were translating these
situations into representational primitives such as "benefit",
"cost", "obligation", "entitlement",
"intentional", and "agent." Indeed, the relevant
inference procedures are not activated unless the subject has represented the
situation as one in which one is entitled to a benefit only if one has
satisfied a requirement.
Moreover,
the procedures activated by social contract rules do not behave as if they
were designed to detect logical violations per se; instead, they
prompt choices that track what would be useful for detecting cheaters,
whether or not this happens to correspond to the logically correct
selections.
Numerous
experiments show that we are hard-wired to understand intent, obligation
(contract), cheating, and much else. Such understanding is widespread in
human beings. It helps us decide whom to trust and thus helps us to predict
how someone will behave. This knowledge is highly valuable in social exchange,
which is why we have survived with this capability.
This
evidence provides support for the notion that justice can and should be
pluralistic as Proudhon
suggested. It need not be monopolized by an absolutist State as a way of
stopping violence in society that arises from competing ideas of justice.
Human beings as a rule know what justice and injustice are and what good and
evil are. Violence in a pluralistic self-governing setting will largely arise
from people who do evil things, not from people fighting over what is good or
evil.
Gravity
arises from a natural physical law. Throw yourself off a building and you pay
the price. Self-defense stems from a natural law too. In a stateless world, attack
someone and you will pay a price too. You will be hunted down by him, his
friends, his relatives, or his agents. You will be killed by someone else who
can justifiably do it. You will be shunned or ostracized. Crime brings
punishment. That is a consequence of natural law because human beings know
what crime is. Natural law is not the phony law declared by kings, dictators,
Congressmen, or Parliaments.
You
may not always follow a natural law, but when you disobey it, you either pay
a price or raise the chance of paying such a price. You may take a calculated
risk, but it is still a risk. Most people, for their own good, will find that
following natural law is appropriate. Hence, the aggregate of everyone will
be better off if each follows natural law. The rule that "honesty is the
best policy" is a rule that reduces a person’s risk of receiving a
bad outcome because it is a strategy consistent with natural law.
When
States take over law-making and supply their perverse brands of justice, they
directly generate massive injustice by their laws, all of which are unjust.
Worse still, they supplant the mechanisms of true justice and degrade the
operation of natural law, so that true justice is impoverished throughout the
land.
Every
person knows that for the State to kill an innocent man is unlawful. If a
people fails to punish such wrongdoing, if a people looks the other way as
the State kills innocents, at Waco or Iraq, it abandons the most basic human
survival instinct. Such a people is making believe that it cannot be next. It
endangers itself. In today’s world, people do not realize the dangers
confronting them. They don’t see the risks. They have illusions –
that the State is doing good, that they are in control, that no harm will
come to them. They make the mistake of identifying with their enemy, the
State.
Michael
S. Rozeff
Michael S. Rozeff is a retired Professor of Finance
living in East Amherst, New York. He publishes regularly his ideas and
analysis on www.LewRockwell.com .
Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com. Permission
to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is
given.
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