Endowed by Our Creator

On most issues I lean libertarian. I believe that the job of our government is to protect our liberties.

What I have trouble grappling with is how my non-theistic friends can justify their libertarianism. This country was founded on the belief that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, and on that basis we give our consent to the government to enforce these innate rights. On a non-theistic paradigm, there is no external grantor of inalienable rights. Judge Andrew Napolitano delineates both a secular as well as a theistic argument for the natural rights that rest at the heart of libertarianism :



I find his argument from theism to be compelling, but I cannot see the rationality behind his secular argument. He argues that:

"I own my own body. I own what my body produces. I own the ideas that come out of it. I own what I produce with the sweat of my brow. I own the thoughts that I express. I own the property and wealth that I accumulate."

On first blush this makes sense. If indeed I naturally own my body and its effects, then I can contend that on that grounds, government has a responsibility to protect me from abuses from others. Therein lies the implicit assumption that people do own their body and effects. A theistic libertarian believes that inalienable rights are granted by God. I contend that there is no extra-governmental basis for these rights on atheism.

What is needed in order to argue for self-ownership is a distinction between humans and other living things. Some attempt to make that distinction under atheism, and I will address that later, but let's look at some of the absurdities that arise when one believes in property rights and yet has no basis for a distinction between humans and other living beings.

We rob a cow of its self-ownership when we cut it into prime rib. We rob a bee of what its body produces when we take its honey. We rob a whale of the ideas that come out of it when we use the design of its fins for windmills without paying royalties. All of these absurdities make life impossible for a libertarian. In fact, even a raw food diet would literally rob plants of the fruits of their labor.

Some non-theistic libertarians recognize this reductio ad aburdum and resolve it by pointing out differences between humans and other living things. These quasi-escape hatches fall under three (non-exhaustive) categories: an appeal to reason, an appeal to the entity's respect for rights, and an appeal to voluntary trade.

An Appeal to Reason
One argument often used to escape the absurdity of a bushes property rights to its berries is that in order for a living being to have property rights, it must be able to reason. I am not sure how this distinction is enough to justify recognizing people's rights without recognizing the rights of other living things, but even if it is, such a justification is insufficient to justify property rights for all humans. A comatose man has no ability to reason, or at the very least, his ability to reason is as apparent as that of a plant. If one's rights are based on one's ability to reason, then a comatose man does not have property rights. That means that if you are a little short on cash, the ring on the finger of a comatose man who does not have a will is yours for the taking. Or better yet, if you are one of the man's children and want to speed up the execution of his will, smothering him would not be a violation of the man's right to life. Clearly, the ability to reason is not a necessary feature of having property rights.

An Appeal to an Entity's Respect for Rights
Another argument that is used to exit the rights of plants, is the claim that an entity is only entitled to rights, if it respects the rights of others. This argument has its basis in the justification for criminal prosecution which allows the state to take away the rights of a criminal provided that the criminal took away the rights of someone else. While I would agree that an entity's respect for the rights of others works as a method of determining when someone who has rights loses them, it is insufficient as a means of determining who has these rights to start with. There are plenty of entities that do not harm the rights of others and yet cannot have property rights themselves. When a plant homesteads the sun and produces sugar, it does no harm to me. Choosing to violate the right of a plant to accumulate "property" i.e. sugar by consuming it is simply an exercise in arbitrary "species-ism" since the plant does not infringe upon your own property rights. Under this theory, all farmers are as much slavers in this century as they were in the 18th century. So it seems that the ability to respect property rights brings up another dead end for the non-theist.

An Appeal to Voluntary Trade
The third argument rests upon the belief that an animal's ability to voluntarily trade justifies its own rights. This falls victim to the same weakness that first of the three arguments fell to. A coma would prevent someone from being able to voluntarily trade. Not only does appealing to voluntary trade underprotect the rights of  people who cannot voluntarily trade, but it also does overprotect the rights of animals. Studies have shown that monkeys can voluntarily trade. One can also make a case that many symbiotic relationships are examples of voluntary trade among animals. On a more fundamental level, all cells within any multicellular organism engage in uncompelled trade with other cells. There is no case to be made for the ability to trade voluntarily being the basis of rights.

In short: I find disbelief in a deity to be incompatible with the core libertarian belief that people have rights and government is instituted to protect them.