Really: It ain't like pie

EQUAL RIGHTS FOR OTHERS 

DOES NOT MEAN LESS RIGHTS FOR YOU

IT'S NOT PIE

This saying, displayed on a T-shirt (the image of which I posted on Facebook) stirred up some very smart, well-meaning people who said it's really not true -- they believed that basically life really is like a pie and as more people get wealth or power it naturally reduces the same from those who are more privileged.

That's a rational sounding argument -- and if the statement really was about pie -- and privilege -- then they would be correct.

However, the statement is about RIGHTS, not PRIVILEGE and they are very different. Privilege is ever-changing. Privilege is not a fundamental human or civil right. That's why it's called "privilege." 

Like pie, privilege is diminishable because privilege, which we use here in terms of wealth and power, is finite. Wealth and power are transferrable and can be acquired through birth or endeavor or by grant, but so too can it be lost. Some privileges are inheritable, while others earned, some awarded. 

The statement that granting a right to one person or group doesn't take away any corresponding right from any other is correct because it is based on an understanding that there are certain FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS that are not transferrable, do not change with the vagaries of life, and can be granted by no monarch, president, or other earthly powers or authorities of any kind.

Fundamental rights are inherent universal rights that flow from rational moral absolutes grounded in the West in the development of ethics as well as the great monotheistic faiths.

Whether those systems that serve as the seminal forces that brought us to this understanding are also flawed in some measure matters not: They have given birth to a concept that is morally perfect, completely just, and should be patently obvious to any morally developed person.

 So, I repeat: We do not “grant” inherent rights. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, the Creator invests those rights in all men. We can neither grant nor deny them and still say we bow to a Higher Power or any rational embrace of true humanist principles.
Our founding fathers, men of the Enlightenment, accepted the inherency of certain rights as prima facie truths when Jefferson drafted the following in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence:

“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.” (Emphasis added) Note: The wording does not set any limits as to these rights; rather, it only sets forth three and states that they exist “among” others.

Men of great privilege signed that extraordinary document and surely they were as flawed in their day as we are in ours. However, they were not writing about the conditions of their times, they were writing about their great intellectual understanding that there is something that greatly transcends the privileges of birth and human talents – and even periods of time -- and that people lacking in those advantages were as much made by a Creator as the men of privilege and what the Creator endowed, no man could restrain.

Yes, of course, we know that the men of our nation’s founding were protecting only those who were in their own image and kind; they spoke of men and not women and in their later document, the Constitution, narrowly defined even which men would benefit and which men in their physical form as men were not truly men under the law.

If we were literalists and of great narrow minds unable to evolve with time we would still be living in the 18^th century or earlier.

However, wise Americans that came later understood the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are launching pads for humans to soar, not glue boards to trap mice.

Returning to the idea that fundamental rights are not slices of pie (which is finite, as is temporal privilege), we must all surely understand that a moral society does not “grant” human rights but “recognizes” their inherent existence. Understanding this leads to realizing protecting inherent rights in one does not diminish protections or guarantees about those same rights in others.

In concrete terms, this means a person’s right to control their own reproductive biology doesn’t take away or in any way restrain that same right from anyone else. Protecting the right to vote for any one person or group protects and strengthens that same right in others. So too, same-sex marriage doesn’t invalidate the right to marry whomever you wish of the opposite sex. If I have a right to free speech, peaceful assembly, and religion – so do we all. If one of us doesn’t, then none of us do because what is inherent in one is inherent in all.

This is the ultimate ethical test of an inherent, inalienable right: That the protection or exercise of such right in one will cause no diminution of that same right, or personal harm, to another. If the exercise of an inalienable right by Person One is seen as impinging upon the exercise of a right Person Two believes he possesses, then Person Two is wrong to believe that action he may desire to take is “his right.”

Privilege is altogether different; few rational minds seriously believe privilege is bestowed by a Divine Creator or justified as an inviolate right in moral philosophy; it certainly finds no unequivocal shelter under any ethical concept of social justice, even when balanced against the ethical principle of autonomy.

Social justice trumps autonomy in any moral calculus. Some people will always be born into great wealth, excellent health, superior intelligence, social advantage – these are the vagaries of the human condition. However, human rights and civil rights level the playing field morally and legally. It may be true that when all of us are in a position of parity with the most privileged among us that the economic pie's divisions will reduce excesses of privilege in some -- but that is because resources are finite and that is what the principle of social justice addresses. Social justice recognizes the moral need to ration resources to benefit the many.

Fundamental human rights are inherent and not negotiable; they cannot be rationed like finite resources and the test of morality of any human law is that these rights are protected.

And this is what forms the moral basis for civil disobedience.

OK, so now I'm going to get a slice of pie... this much thinking hurts my head...

Catch ya'all later.