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The
doctrine of natural rights provides a conception of freedom
that establishes the context for other senses of freedom.
Natural rights portray the appropriate setting for social
interactions and specify the conditions for meaningful
senses of moral virtue and human flourishing. Natural rights
delineate conceptually the moral space within which
individuals need to be free (and self-directed) to make
their own choices regarding their possible pursuit of their
self-actualization without interfering with the like pursuit
of others with whom they interact socially.
Natural rights do not
enforce themselves. Securing natural rights should be the
primary and central concern of the political and legal order.
The notion of natural rights should inform the formation of
law and government. Political liberty should involve a state
of organized social life in which persons are not deprived
of their sovereignty. Human flourishing can best occur when
there exists a minimal state that takes no actions except to
uphold the negative natural rights of all of its citizens.
Politics and law should not have a direct role in how people
ought to live their lives. Politics should be concerned only
with the limited ends of peace and security – politics and law should be separated from personal morality.
The book Norms of
Liberty embodies the most complete expression of, and
best statement to date of, Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas
J. Den Uyl's thesis that liberalism is a political
philosophy of metanorms that does not guide individual
conduct in moral activity. Arguing that politics is not
suited to make men moral, they proclaim the need to divest
substantive morality from politics. The purpose of
liberalism, as a political doctrine, is to secure a peaceful
and orderly society. Political philosophy should only be
concerned with providing a framework within which people can
make moral choices for themselves. This framework creates a
moral space for value-laden activity. Politics should be
concerned solely with securing and maintaining the
conditions for the possibility of human flourishing that is
real, individualized, agent-relative, inclusive, self-directed,
and social. Liberalism requires conduct so that conditions
may be obtained where moral actions can take place – liberalism is not an equinormative system. Metanormative and
normative levels of ethical principles are split because of
their different relationships to self-perfection. Rights are
metanormative principles – they are ethical principles, but
they are not normative principles.
What is required is the
existence of an ethical principle that aspires not to guide
human conduct in moral activity, but instead to regulate
conduct so that conditions can be achieved where moral
actions can occur. Rasmussen and Den Uyl explain that rights
are an ethical concept that is not directly concerned with
human flourishing, but rather is concerned with context-setting
– establishing a political/legal order that will not
require one form of human flourishing to be preferred over
any other form. A two-level ethical structure consists of
metanorms (also referred to as political norms) and personal
ethical norms.
Ethics are not all of one
category. Whereas some regulate the conditions under which
moral conduct may exist, others are more directly
prescriptive of moral conduct. Of course, the conditions for
making any type of human flourishing possible are less
potent than conditions that serve to advance forms of human
flourishing directly. Natural rights do not aim at directly
promoting human flourishing – the context of natural rights
is as universal as possible. Self-direction is the common
crucial element in all concrete distinct forms of human
flourishing and the negative natural right to freedom is a
metanormative principle because it protects the possibility
of self-direction in a social context. According to
Rasmussen and Den Uyl, the purpose of rights is to protect
self-directedness. Although they acknowledge that human
flourishing is man's telos, their argument for rights
does not justify rights for their being conducive to
achieving human flourishing. The natural right to liberty
permits each individual a sphere of freedom in which self-directed
activities can be undertaken without the interference of
other people.
A neo-Aristotelian
ethical perfectionism is consistent with, and supportive of,
a non-perfectionist view of politics. A person's human
nature calls for his personal flourishing which, in turn,
requires practical wisdom and self-directedness. The purpose
of rights is to protect self-directedness. It follows that
self-directedness can be viewed as an intermediate factor
between metanormative natural rights and normative human
flourishing. Self-perfection requires self-direction and
pluralism – diverse forms of flourishing are ethically
compossible under the rubric of universal metanorms.
Rasmussen and Den Uyl
have extended and refined ideas from political philosophy
that began in ancient times. These are the ideas that the
state should not use or permit coercion against peaceful
people and that the state should have nothing to do with
fostering individual personal morality and virtue – people participate in political life so that they are not harmed
rather than to be made to flourish. Elements of these
notions can be found in the writings of a number of
philosophers such as Lao Tzu, Epicurus, and especially of
Spinoza who strongly warned people about the dangers of the
moralization of politics.
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