There are no such things as civil rights. The entire phrase is, at best, simultaneously an ill-conception and a misnomer. At worst, and what I believe to be more likely among those enflamed souls with wits enough to read whole sentences, the very notion of civil rights is a linguistic trick—a bit of word wizardry, bewitchment with which pseudo-intellectual malcontents bait the herd into frenzied stampedes, like a piece of overripe fruit, sweet scented yet inside, rotten!

In pursuit of determining the truth of such a contentious thesis, I make refence to the two major western influences on our current conception of rights: they are the English philosopher John Locke and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Respectively, I will draw out their notions of rights from their most famous works, Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and Rousseau’s The Social Contract.

These two, it is believed, are in large part responsible for spurring two very different Enlightenment revolutions: Locke, the American; and Rousseau, the French—disparate revolutions that consequently produced socially and politically disparate nations, each with its own conception of equality, justice, and—most relevant here—rights.

Defining Terms

What is a right? That is the question and contention under discussion, but before it can be answered, we must understand how a thing is defined.

A definition is our linguistic encapsulation of a concept, covering and retaining as much as possible of what is intended and excluding as much as possible as is not intended (e.g. when I say “table,” I mean to communicate the concept of an elevated surface on which to rest objects and not to communicate the concept of a “chair,” an elevated surface on which to sit). Now a new question emerges: what is a concept?

A concept is a mental model of a thing-in-itself (i.e. that which is objective). In other words, a concept is an abstract tool by which we subjective human beings navigate the objective world. It is a phenomenological map of the ineffable noumena.

As a tool, concepts serve a purpose. A better or worse conceptualization, therefore, is determined via its utility in said navigation—that is, in the conception’s reliability to predict the outcomes of causal relationships (i.e. a good concept seem to correspond better to empirical facts than competing concepts do).

Definitions are how we think about and communicate our concepts; good definitions, then, accord highly with their conceptions, which in turn ought to accord highly with what is in fact.

Does it feel as if strayed far and afield from our topic of discussion? Stay the course friends; for stray, I haven’t.

This has all been to establish that a good definition has something at the bottom of it. It refers to a thing that exists separate to mere conception, which is what makes it useful. A bad definition, failing to fulfill its utility, inevitably requires modification or replacement (e.g. if Truth is to be defined as, “one’s perception of the Truth,” then now we need a new word to describe that which exists outside of a perceiver’s perception, to which the word “Truth” formerly referred).

Now, with all that groundwork laid, we can begin to define “right.” We accomplish this by asking ourselves, “What concept do we mean to encapsulate?” To understand that, we look to the utility of the word. When do we refer to rights? We do so when there is a dispute or potential dispute of rightness, correctness, or justice. He who has the right of inheritance is justified in seizing, retaining, and protecting what has been bequeathed to him. He who has the right of way is correct in his traffic-related actions and thereby not responsible for the damages of a vehicular collision, the one without the right of way being in error. The right to self-defense or the defense of others is to say that the violent acts of the defending party are justified. When we describe the right to free speech and expression, we are describing the moral acceptability of one exercising his natural powers to speak and the moral violation of preventing that person from using what is naturally his own property (in this case, his body, his pen and paper, his typewriter, etc.).

In all these examples (and in the groundwork here laid of establishing good definitions), there is a presumed objective standard to which to compare. There is an assumption that some actions are morally right and others wrong, from thence comes the concept that some actions are justified while some are not. A few readers may here protest, wielding what I call the Post-Modern Problem: the accurate observation that the noumena, by definition, is not knowable and therefore may in fact not even exist. To this I say that bullets care not for any individual’s interpretation. If you disagree, then stand before me and face away, and the .44 caliber hollow point fired from my S&W M29 will, according to you, not devastate your brain, because you will neither see it nor hear it (the bullet will being travelling faster than sound). Of course, you don’t believe this, my hypothetical word sorcerer; and hopefully no man who has stayed this course will fall for your word sorcery ever again.

But getting back to our defining of “right,” it is clear we are trying to refer to something which resolves disputes in a way which accords with the objective Truth—in other times and places what is named God or Nature, or both interchangeably—whatever the term, That-Is-Which-Is being the standard.

Herein enter Locke and Rousseau.

What is a Right?

As opposed to civil rights, though that term comes about much later, John Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government goes about establishing what he called and is still named today in America and elsewhere “natural rights”:

To understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man. . . .

But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of license: though man in that state have an uncontroulable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not the liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it. The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions: . . . (Locke 9-10)

Locke goes on at great length to extrapolate from these first principles rights to self-defense and rights to acquire and maintain property (pp10-11, 15-16, 21-22, 30). However, this brief introduction to his definition is sufficient to understand what is meant when we to this day use the term “natural rights.”

Natural rights are those liberties we are born into. That is to say, they are those freedoms intrinsic to our being and wills. They are properties of us, bestowed by nature, or God, as sometimes Locke describes it. Either way, we are describing what is often called “free will,” which I call embodied will. We are naturally, biologically, the exclusive masters of our bodies and minds—to the degree that each of us is considered a united being; but we won’t delve into ego-consciousness and its relationship to the personal and collective unconscious here—As such exclusive masters, we each possess the sole ability to voluntarily dispose of our time, effort, and property (e.g. our bodies) as we will. Do not miss the word “voluntarily,” because it is that key component which establishes, by the same nature or God, that it is in violation to natural law that men infringe upon one another’s volition.

In short, we naturally own ourselves and thereby come upon the natural rights of man to do what he will that does not violate the natural rights of other men. Voluntarism is at the heart of this, and it is upon this concept of voluntarism which principles such as the libertarian Non-Aggression-Principle are founded.

Rejection here requires the rejection of voluntarism as a reality—it is to say that voluntarism is a bunk concept. To him who takes that route, I ask if there is really no difference between theft and repossession, between murder and self-defense, between consensual sex and rape. Because to abolish voluntarism as a concept is to erase the border between most moral concepts on which they are founded, as it happens, on Lockian natural rights.

So that is Locke’s assessment of it. What of Rousseau? In The Social Contract, he describes the bestowal of civil rights as we now name them via the social construction of the Sovereign, a kind of disembodied, general will:

Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole. (Rousseau 11)

If the State is a moral person whose life is in the union of its members, and if the most important of its cares it the care for its own preservation, it must have a universal and compelling force, in order to move and dispose each part as may be most advantageous to the whole. As nature gives each man absolute power over all of his members, the social compact gives the body politic absolute power over all of its members also; and it is this power which under the direction of the general will, bears, as I have said, the name of Sovereignty.

But besides the public person, we have to consider the private persons composing it, whose life and liberty are naturally independent of it. We are bound then to distinguish clearly between the respective rights of the citizens and the Sovereign . . .

Each man alienates, I admit, by the social compact, only such part of his powers, goods and liberty as it is important for the community to control; but it must also be granted that the Sovereign is sole judge of what is important. . . . (20)

Furthermore, the citizen is no longer the judge of the dangers to which the law desires him to expose himself; and when the prince says to him: “It is expedient for the State that you should die,” he ought to die, because it is only on that condition that he has been living in security up to the present, and because his life is no longer a mere bounty of nature, but a gift made conditionally by the State. (23)

Yes, you read that right. The concept of civil rights is that of a guarantee by the state or whatever authority is fulfilling that role. In other words, civil rights are the description of what is socially constructed to be so, not what is intrinsic to any person. The idea is that the authority, the State or Sovereign—Rousseau uses different names depending on whether the entity is in action or at rest—is like the mind and that the individuals that make it up are like the body. This constructed mind determines the rights of men much like God or nature does in the Lockian concept of rights, and it gains this power via the alienation of all natural rights by the members of the body politic.

Given that which rights are to be stripped and which to be bestowed are mutable and arbitrary in accord with the will of the Sovereign, what “civil rights” actually encapsulates is a potential range of contingent states of affair. Unlike natural rights, civil rights don’t describe a thing, but instead describe whatever happens to be guaranteed by the authority and thereby enforced to be so.

That means, if the state “gives” you certain rights, you have them. If the state doesn’t give them to you, you don’t. Such rights have nothing to do with what is right, correct, or justified—for the Sovereign decides what is important, and therefore what justice is—but instead have everything to do with power. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that civil right amounts to little more than a description of who is granted what power by the supreme, most powerful authority around.

Dispelling the Illusion

Civil rights aren’t real, because civil rights aren’t rights. The purpose, the utility, of the word “right” in this context is to describe the concept of rightness, correctness, and justice. It is to describe the standard which determines who is in the right in a dispute. Natural rights fulfill this utility by appealing to an objective standard: that being nature, or God if you like. Natural rights are predicated on That-Is-Which-Is, thereby we can determine who is innocent and who is in violation of natural law—in violation of another’s property, e.g. his person.

Civil rights do not serve this function. There is nothing to appeal to. There is only that which is enforced. If a particular state claims it is your civil right to be enslaved, it is so. If not, then it is not so. If a state says you have the right to speak, it means it will stop someone preventing you from doing so; but if the state does not guarantee your “right,” then you don’t have it, and thereby have no grounds to appeal for it, because it isn’t your right. And if the state says you have such a right but fails in its duties to guarantee it? Then you don’t have it! Nor do you have grounds to claim an injustice, because evidently you didn’t have the civil right after all!

As you can see, “civil right” doesn’t actually define anything but whatever happens to be. It is entirely amorphous, contingent upon the circumstance as is the shape of water to its container. It is a poorly conceived term used to encapsulate contradictory concepts, making it a useless map that leads the users nowhere in particular. This is why anybody anywhere can lay claim to anything as a civil right—if only they realized they have opened the gateway to all those who directly oppose them. It is philosophical explosion in the political domain!

But enough! I am done with this charlatan’s trick. Civil rights do not exist.

Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government and A Letter Concerning Tolerance. (1689). 1764 edition. Republished in the United States, Monee IL, 2021.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. (1762). translated by G.D.H. Cole. Republished in the United States, Orlando FL, 2022.