186,000 miles per second. It's not just a good idea, it's the law. (a brief meditation on natural law.)

 by John MacBeath Watkins

I used to have a poster that said, '186,000 miles per second. It's not just a good idea, it's the law.'

That is, in old-fashioned imperial measurements, roughly the speed limit of light. It can be made to go slower in some media, but not faster. At the time the poster came out, America had adopted a national highway speed limit of 55 miles per hour to save fuel during an oil crisis, and the poster was a play on the motto chosen to gain acceptance for the law.

The speed of light is an example of the sort of thing we usually regard as a law of nature -- a law that can't be broken, because it is physically impossible to do so. T.S. Eliot, in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, may have told us that McCavity could do so...

McCavity, McCavity, there's no one like McCavity

He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity

...but outside of fiction and poetry, it is impossible, as far as has been so far determined, to break the law of gravity or the cosmic speed limit of light (shut up about spooky action a distance, no one understands that beyond 'because of quantum.')

In political theory, the stuff we talk about as natural law does not have this characteristic. In fact, natural rights stemming from the concept of natural law are violated all the time. This conception of natural law goes back to the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, and it is a contemplation of what it is to be human.

St. Thomas Aquinas formulated natural law as a consequence of humanity possessing reason. Reason, (he reasoned,) is a spark of the divine, and every human possesses that spark. In that respect, all humans are equal, and each is infinitely more precious than any other thing.

John Locke was not Catholic, his father having served in the Puritan cavalry during the English civil war. But he certainly knew of the long tradition of natural law and natural rights.

Locke did not just write about politics. He also did groundbreaking work in epistemology, and in the process did a great deal to shape our modern conception of the self.

Science seeks objective knowledge of the world. We see a certain kind of light, and we may perceive it as having color. The frequency of the light is objective, say for example 540-610 THz. To me, light in that frequency looks green. One of my grandfathers was color blind, and to him, it looked gray, which made picking berries with the right degree of ripeness a challenge for him. This is one difference between object and subject. All things that cannot be recorded as the physical properties of objects are subjective, leaving to the subject such things as color and taste, but also such things as beauty, morality, and meaning. The subjective, which is a large part of the world humans experience, is that which depends on the interior life of a subject.

That's a long walk compared to simply saying humans have a spark of the divine, but it does explain how different the human subject is from an object, and raises the question of how we should respond to the difference between subjects and objects. An object, for example, doesn't feel pain or object to its treatment.

But even a one-celled creature responds to stimulus. If bacteria feel pain, is my immune system a mass murderer? I think not. A bacteria does not meet the threshold of a consciousness worthy of personhood.

Which begs the question, what is that threshold, and who should be treated as a person? Slavery was an institution probably older than writing, but it involved treating people like objects. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, sought to justify slavery in the "Cornerstone Speech" by defining enslaved people as less than human, because in a moral universe reshaped by the enlightenment thought of people like Locke, treating people like objects seemed morally repugnant.

"Our new government['s]...foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

Historically, most slaves had been very similar to the people who enslaved them, usually from a neighboring tribe or city-state. The stoic philosopher Epictetus, of Greek extraction, spent his youth as a slave, and by some account had his leg deliberately broken by his Roman master. But while his master did not regard a slave as his equal, he did not deny the humanity of Epictetus, who he allowed an education and eventually freedom.

But by the time slavery was disappearing from the Western world, Stephens found it essential to deny the humanity of the enslaved people in order to achieve the moral flexibility his cause required. In fact, a great many Americans, not just in the South, bought into white supremacy. It was a belief that made it easy to justify not just slavery, but the western expansion and the taking of what had been Native American land. At an earlier time in history, such justifications for slavery and conquest were not needed. But Locke's thought had done something very difficult; it had changed what people regarded as ethical treatment of their fellow human beings.

This happened because the project that gave rise to liberal democracies was never about building the strongest empire, the most wealthy economy, or the tribe that conquers other tribes. It was about building a society that allows people to exercise their humanity to the utmost, by respecting what is interior to the person.

What Locke would have called natural rights we now more commonly call human rights -- the rights one needs to live as a human being. Locke said these rights are inalienable -- that is, you cannot sell them or otherwise alienate them from yourself, because it's always going to be you looking out of your eyes, and you cannot assign your humanity to anyone else, even if you want to. Nor can anyone else strip you of your humanity, because being a person is not to do with how you are treated, it's inherent in what you are. That's why Stephens, in the Cornerstone Speech, attempted to assert that slaves were not people.

In religious terms, the question is, who is ensouled? In scientific terms, what level of consciousness qualifies a being as a person? Happily, Stephens and the Confederate government he served lost that argument, although in some ways we are still fighting that war. 

What rights do we need to live as human beings? Life, liberty, and property are the basics, according to Locke.

Clearly, we need to be alive, else what rights can we exercise? The right to live our natural lives leads to questions of when life begins and when it ends, and what we need to remain alive. Should the state ensure that people don't starve, that they have sufficient shelter not to die from exposure, that enough medical care is provided to treat readily treatable illness? Are we still alive when our heart is beating but our brain isn't functioning? Should an ectopic pregnancy, which might have a heartbeat, but no brain activity, a being worthy of human rights even though there is no chance that it could result in a live birth and its existence is a threat to the health and life of the mother? These are all questions that have been hotly debated in American politics of late.

Liberty doesn't mean we can do whatever we want, because (for example) serial killers want to kill other people, which deprives them of their rights. Locke, after all, was a social contract theorist. The idea is that in what Thomas Hobbes called 'the war of each against all,' no one is able to exercise their rights, even the right to be alive. People form a social contract so that their rights are protected from the actions of other people, and in return, they are restrained from engaging in actions that will interfere with the rights of others.

When I hear that someone has dozens of weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition, I can't help but think this person is preparing for the war of each against all, in the mistaken belief that it is possible to win that war. If an epidemic is under way, we all have an obligation under the social contract not to engage in behavior likely to spread a potentially deadly disease, because while you have a right to die from said disease, others have a right to live.

Liberty is the basis for many of the rights enumerated in the U.S. Bill of Rights. We have a right to say what we wish (no promises about consequences that may stem from what you've said, like getting sued.) The First Amendment also prohibits the establishment of a state religion, because to have freedom of conscience, you must be free from having a religion imposed upon you. Liberty is also the basis for the right to privacy, essentially the right to be let alone. This right is not enumerated in the Bill of Rights, but the courts have made it part of American law.

Property may seem an odd thing to mention in the same breath as life and liberty, but recall that Locke felt one's property started with one's self. Historically, it seems one could be property or one could own property, not both. Slaves were treated as property and not as people until slavery was ended. Women did not get the vote until their right to own property was sorted out. If you did not own yourself, you could be treated as property and denied all human rights.

Many human relationships were based on treating people as property, including the wives and children of patriarchs, which is why liberalism continues to change the institution of marriage.