Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness (Property) | The Right to Life is fundamental

in #freedom8 years ago (edited)

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The axiom of human rights

In the axiom of fundamental rights, the most fundamental human right which makes all other rights possible is the right to life. Without the ability to live, it is not possible to experience liberty, or own property. So while it is important for those who have a life to have a life filled with liberty, it is primary and necessary to have a life from which to experience liberty in the first place. Both Liberty and Property (and Happiness) depend on being alive from which to experience.

Security is primarily about protecting the right to life

When people are asked what is the function of security? It's primarily about protecting lives. By defending the right to life, we define what it means to be safe from danger. At the same time we must remember not to stop at merely protecting each others lives. When through our security routines we manage to lower the probability of violation of the right to life to a level where most people feel safe, then security must focus on producing and maximizing liberty for those whose lives are defended. So what this means is, it's not merely enough to keep those who you are protecting alive, but it is also necessary to protect their right to liberty as much as possible.

Why must we protect their right to liberty as much as possible? The pursuit of happiness depends on being free. A person who is not free cannot spend their time in a manner in which they choose and cannot pursue their own happiness. So if we are protecting others we have to remember it's not enough to simply focus on policies, software designs, or methods which keep them alive, but it is also necessary to produce an environment where the maximum number of people can pursue their own happiness. How does that work in a capitalist society?

Property rights and financial freedom

In order to truly be free in a capitalist society, it is required that there are strong property rights. This means it's not enough to simply allow people to pursue happiness without providing them with a means to do so. This requires protecting property rights on some level, and whether you believe in protecting "private" property or "personal" property, or you lean more towards anarcho-socialism or anarcho-capitalism, it does not change the fact property rights must be strongly defended.

Self ownership is the primary property of any free person. The difference between a slave and a free person is that the free person legally is a self owned individual while the slave is owned by the state, or corporation, or their families, or something else. It is important at least in my opinion, to promote liberation rather than slavery in any design, and in order to do this we must recognize at a fundamental philosophical level that each individual sentient being which has achieved person hood status, is their own person, they own themselves, they do not belong to us, and there is no exception to this.

Love and property rights

The topic of love is controversial but I will make a point, that there is possessive love which is the most common form we seem to find, and there is liberating love which is uncommon but which is in my opinion a better philosophical representation of love. Often when people speak of someone they love, they speak of these people as if they own them. They use phrases such as "she stole my boyfriend" or "they are trying to take our women". These sorts of phrases are sociopathic and treat love as ownership of another person. It is recognized, that sociopaths do not truly understand love and it is important to distinguish between the different philosophies of love because this is also important to finding the appropriate expression.

Love is about liberation

In the liberating form of love, it's accepted that each person we love is free to define themselves to us, to express to us how they want to be treated, and within reason to be treated as they want to be treated. In a world of self ownership, we do not own the people we love and the people we love do not own us. We each own ourselves, and merely want to defend the rights of the people we love, because we want them to do the same for us. When we see relationships where it seems the function of the relationship is for both sides (or one side) to reduce each others freedom, and violate each others rights, then we can see that some relationships are bad for security and promote values which may actually be the anti-thesis of liberty.

How to design secure solutions for people you love

The practical application of all of this is in how we design our solutions. In developing software, setting policies, or just trying to figure out how to parent a child, it is important to recognize that on the most fundamental level the basic rights which must be protected. Any child, any participant in a game, any user, should be entitled to feel as safe and as free as your solution can provide. In cases where you hear arguments which state, a solution must compromise one fundamental right for another, it is in my opinion crucial to always justify any compromise. If for instance it is necessary to restrict the liberty of your child in order to keep your child alive, you owe it to your child to explain in detail what the risk of death is, how high that risk is, and how your new security procedure is actually protecting their right to life by lowering their risk of dying. This could be for example a curfew if you are raising a child in a dangerous neighborhood, but the point is the restriction has to be explained and cannot just be put in if it's not actually producing security.

And just as with the microcosm, it is with the macrocosm. In developing secure software it is never going to be a situation where you can have something be 100% secure, or 100% free, or have property rights which are 100% absolute. The point is to remember that rights depend on other rights, and that in order to protect the lives of users of a platform you may have to violate the liberty and or property of other users of the platform. This means no right is an absolute right in a vacuum, but that security is about minimizing the violation of rights.

Conclusion

Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness (Property) are a set of rights which depend upon each other but which represent a hierarchy. At the top of the hierarchy is the right to life, without this right there can't be any other rights. And after life comes liberty, which is required to be able to pursue happiness, and of course property ownership is what makes liberty possible. None of these rights are absolute, and security is about maximization, and minimizing the violation of these rights. In a complex adaptive system, if there is liberty but no right to life, then the system may kill itself. For this reason liberty has to be restricted just enough to protect the participants from having their rights violated, the primary of which is the right to life. Property rights are to promote liberty, but when property rights violate the right to life or promote something other than liberty, then we may need to violate this right to protect the more primary rights of life and liberty.

References

  1. https://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/human-rights/victims-rights/right-life
  2. http://www.claiminghumanrights.org/right_to_life_definition.html
  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_life
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