Natural Rights: Part I, Life and Liberty

It is impossible for me to see one without the other. Every living thing exhibits these fundamental rights. From human to animal. Our society seems to have lost this instinctive and fundamental understanding. Perhaps, "lost" is not the correct word. Our society has decided to ignore these basic laws of nature.
Let me attempt to communicate my understanding of these 2 rights.

First of all Life. At the individual level, the right to life is simply the right to exist and the right to protect ones existence. It also includes the ability to propagate or have offspring which become extensions of one's own life and are therefore granted the same right of life as the parent. As a result the parent is obligated to protect the life of their offspring until the offspring is able to protect it's own life.

Secondly let's look at Liberty. Liberty, at it's root is the right of choice and the fact that no individual or group has the right to choose for another individual or group. All living things exhibit choice at some level. A fish chooses to swim up or down, right or left, eat, poop, propagate etc. There may not be a lot of contemplation prior to each choice but these are choices just the same. When we get to looking at humans, we do not only have the ability to choose but we have the ability to reason. This is where we get mucked up. We rationalize and hypothesize so that we can choose to believe these natural and fundamental laws do not apply to us. We can create "reasons" for violating these basic rights of others.

Our society as a whole has been working to take liberty away from one group to give to another for quite some time. Who or what defines one group or another and what is being taken or given is not the point. The point is that no individual or group has the right to take the life or liberty of another individual or group no matter how "legal" it may be. It still violates the natural law of things.

The understanding of these two natural rights is what lifted America to where it is in the world and the loss of this basic understanding of life and liberty is what will lead us to fall.

We have all been given Life and Liberty. Let's do more to protect it for others. Because, in the end, the more we protect others from the theft of these rights, the more we protect ourselves.

"Natural Rights: Part I, Life and Liberty" by Nathan L. Lowe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Based on a work at nathan-lowe.blogspot.com.