Where do rights come from? That’s a foundational question for anyone who advocates individual freedom. If “unalienable rights” exist, every action that would conflict with them should be legally constrained. If rights don’t exist, they’re merely pragmatic rules of a game that can be changed at someone’s whim.
On this day in the United States, we celebrate the pronouncement by the Founding Fathers that the 13 colonies were joining together to declare political independence of Great Britain. The Declaration of Independence is one of the most important documents in the history of classical liberal thought, because it not only asserted a right to break away from the controlling political entity binding those people at the time, but it laid out the philosophical case for why people had the right to be free. (Read the text and think about what it’s really saying. It’s quite well-written, even if your history or civics teachers bored you to death with it at the time.)
When it comes to the question of rights, the text says the following:
“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.”
Thomas Jefferson’s original wording said, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” and it was Benjamin Franklin who suggested the change to “self-evident.” To me, that says that they, too, were struggling to figure out how to explain something that they understood intuitively. (I’m not going to get into the issue of their personal contradictions because of their failure to see women and those of other races as equal, but let’s acknowledge that that blind spot was huge.)