Lenin is reported to have once said that ideas are more fatal than guns. His revolution proved him right. Although Lenin’s observation is overly negative (ideas needn’t be fatal; they can, after all, be life engendering) it is correct to say that ideas have consequences, and that values, too, have consequences, for in the last analysis, there is a relationship between what we think and what we value. Ideas form the basis for people’s actions, whether good or ill, whether explicit or implicit, and values result in various forms of human relationships and societies.

This essay is hardly meant to offer a thorough philosophical grounding for the moral basis of a free human community. In the light of space limitations I would be content merely to draw some useful distinctions, raise some infrequently asked questions, and test some dearly held axioms. I may provoke some questions and perhaps some disagreements, and this I welcome.

To probe this topic effectively, I have divided this essay into two sections. The first deals with clarifying some concepts and phrases which I believe have become blurred in common parlance. In the second section I hope to indicate some of the theoretical foundations of why it is that people can be said to possess rights, what these are, and what the necessary preconditions are for a truly humane society.

My final prenote is to observe that while the ideas that I present are drawn from the Judeo-Christian tradition, their application and significance go well beyond that tradition. My argument may be accepted by all people who are willing to banish the use of coercion and fraud to achieve social or political goals, regardless of their particular faith or lack of it.

It has been said that the mark of the mature mind is its ability to make distinctions, and it may be that as people become more and more acquainted with the intricacies of various aspects of reality, they begin to see various shades of meaning and are more able to distinguish among things that might have otherwise appeared to be indistinct. At least this is the case with the Eskimos who, I am told, have thirty different words for snow.

When we look, then, to human arrangements, it is imperative that we have a clear idea about what it is to which we are referring.

One hears a great deal of talk today about “rights.” My philosophy professor at USC, Dr. John Hospers, used to say that there has been a “rights inflation.” Yet, for all the talk about rights, what is oddly absent is a clear understanding of what rights are.

Rights are those claims which the individual has against others. In order for them to be unalienable, as the Bill of Rights proclaims them to be, rights must be seen as existing prior to and independent of any legal or institutional rules. Laws and institutions, by this understanding, may obfuscate, violate, or even protect an indi vidual’s rights, but they can neither grant nor remove true human rights. Rights, in order to be true claims which are unalienable and fundamental, must exist independent of the caprice of those who have coercive power. Additionally, in order for rights to be all that we have just said, they must derive from the nature of the case, which is to say that the human person must possess rights by virtue of his or her very nature.

I will elaborate on this in the second section of this study. For the present it is only necessary to understand the distinction between rights as just claims and as favors or privileges. A favor cannot be claimed. The nature of a favor or a privilege is that it is granted at the pleasure of the grantor. A favor may be withdrawn by the grantor when the one to whom it was granted falls out of favor. This not the case with rights.

Another basic distinction I wish to draw is that which exists between a community or society and a government or political order. This is to say that a society may exist with or without a particular political arrangement. Perhaps this is made more clear by seeing how Philippine society continued to exist despite the deposition of the Marcos political regime. The political order or government is that entity which maintains a monopoly of force in a given geographical area.

A community, on the other hand, is distinct in that its members hold certain values, mores, customs, and other such things in common, but is not essentially marked by its coercive capacity. Thus we can speak of “the Jewish community of Rome,” for instance.

Communality vs. Collectivity

For the purposes of this treatment, and in the interest of precision, I would like to draw a distinction between a commune and a collective, again using coercive capacity as the dividing line. We would then be able to speak of people who enjoy a life in common, sharing values, homes, philosophy, and even wealth, without thinking of them as collectivists. In the former instance people come together freely, whereas in the latter they are forced into a common life.

While this distinction is not mandated by the language, I think it is permitted, and for the purpose of this discussion, desirable for clarity.

Similarly under this heading I would like to include a distinction between cooperation and conformity, again where the former involves choice but the latter is enforced.

Aristotle teaches us that justice is treatment in accord with desert. If I hire a man to mow my lawn for X amount of dollars, it is not charity, but justice that I pay him the amount agreed upon. Should I choose to add on to this just amount an additional gratuity—it is just that, a gratuity, an act of favor or charity on my part, but not something that is demanded by justice.

All these distinctions will aid us in understanding the theoretical foundations of a free society.

The Foundations of Freedom

A. Freedom: A Necessary Precondition for Morality and Virtue

Before we can speak intelligently about morality and virtue, it is necessary to speak about liberty and volition, The simple reason for this is that nothing can be said to be good, other than in a merely functionist sense, unless it is chosen. A morality that is not chosen is no morality. The moral status of those from whom Robin Hood robbed could not be said to have been elevated by the fact that their money went to help the poor for the simple reason that they did not freely choose to share their wealth. So, whatever other noble purposes one might want to identify with the forced sharing of wealth, morality cannot be one of them. In fact, the same question might be directed at the virtue of nobility, or heroism. Can a person be said to be noble or heroic if it were not a freely chosen action on his or her part that displayed either nobility or heroism? When freedom is absented from the context of morality, nobility, or heroism, the result is nonsense in the truest meaning of the word.

Only beings with volition can be said to be moral, and in order to act in a moral way one must have liberty. In this understanding, liberty is not so much a virtue per se as much as it is the only context in which virtue is possible.

B. Two Levels of Morality

As one who believes in liberty, for myself and for others, I see two levels or sets of values that should be identified.

The first is the general context of relations among people, the overarching milieu in which people are allowed to associate and establish relations with one another. In this general social context, everyone’s freedom extends precisely to the liberty of another. No one objects to the notion that people have the right to agree with one another; it is when people choose to disagree with one another that the clear line of freedom must be drawn. I submit that the only way in which a society can function that is consistent with human nature (which I will outline in due course) is the society wherein all relationships are voluntary and where the initiation of coercion is banned.

This human (and I contend, humane) arrangement will provide for a wide pluralism, sufficient in its various manifestations, I am sure, to disturb and offend everyone reading this article. However, this arrangement will not allow anyone to force me to lend my moral sanction to his actions, or coerce me into supporting activities of which I do not approve.

The second set or level of values are those which pertain to the individual as he or she exercises his or her liberty. Again, these values will be diverse. For some, these values will be acquired on the basis of their family, culture, religion, and the like. The only limit on the exercise of their values will be that individuals agree to the equal right of others to pursue their own vision of morality. Here again, initiated coercion and fraud will be banned.

Thus, while two levels or sets of values may be identified, both political and individual freedom mean the absence of coercion by one of another.

C. The Uniqueness of Human Beings

Santayana once said, “to be is to be something in particular,” and it is with this focus that we can explore what it is about humans that justifies their having rights and what those rights are.

One thing which the human person is “in particular” is a concrete body which puts the human person into some kind of relation with the material order. Observe how humans are related to the natural world in a way uniquely different from animals. Animals are bound to things by instinct; humans are related to things by reason, and this is the other thing which humans are in particular: We are self-re-flecting, thinking beings who survive by the use of our reason. The mind is the predominant element which makes humans distinctly human. Thus, we are generically and essentially distinct from the animal which cannot reason. (I prescind here from the debate over whether some animals can reason; my focus here is on the human person.)

The rational relationship between the human person and nature is what gives rise to property. It is our capacity to reason, our rational faculty, which causes us to relate to the material order in a way that is more than immediate and temporary: our relation to the material order is, rather, general and permanent. Stability and permanency are the expression in time of the universality of the relationship of humans to things.

Nor is ours merely a relationship of consumption, but possession and production. Property is the foundation and context of this relationship. By the relationship of the human person to nature, we leave the imprint of our individuality upon nature by means of the time, effort, and ability we extend which in turn produces wealth and property.

Wealth and property do not exist in the state of nature, where, Hobbes said, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” They come into existence only when people place value on things. This is seen in that black, sticky, smelly, unpleasant substance that was mostly an annoyance until a way was found to process and refine it in such a way that petroleum was produced. When viewed in this light, property rights are really an expression and a safeguard of the personal rights we discussed earlier. The defense of the right to property, then, ought not be seen as the defense of detached material objects in themselves, but of the dignity, liberty, and very nature of the human person who, to allude to Locke, has “mixed his or her labor with nature” to produce property. The right to property, then, is an extension and exercise of human rights.

Perhaps the greatest economist of this century, Ludwig von Mises, drew the connection between economic and personal liberty very clearly when he said, “Choosing determines all human decisions. In making his choice man chooses not only between various material things and services. All human values are offered for option.” Milton Friedman put it this way: “Choice is fundamental to economics because it is fundamental to the moral nature of man.”

It is crucial to recall that before becoming what some have called “the first economist,” Adam Smith was a moral philosopher. Although he wrote the famous Wealth of Nations, few people realize that his companion work is entitled Theory of Moral Sentiments.

This brings us to what a society organized on the basis of these principles would look like.

The Effects of Freedom

Throughout this article I have attempted to keep in focus the human person as the central actor. Hence, we are justified in asking how a free society would affect people. In discussions of the ideal of a free society one frequently hears voiced the contention that, while the theory is consistent and admirable and although maximum freedom is desirable, it is impractical given the present structures of our society. The liberals, these skeptics would argue, would be delighted with freedom in the bedroom but not in the marketplace, and the conservatives want freedom for big business, but not in the bedroom.

To this objection I would say, “A plague on both their houses.” It will continue to be improbable to bring about a consistently free society if those of us who believe in the ideals of freedom refrain from questioning the wisdom of the status quo and buy into the standard left-right political continuum. Both sides of the political spectrum, to various degrees depending on the issue, become oddly similar when it comes to the means they intend to use to achieve their goals, namely force. There is an alternative. It is radical, in the sense that it goes to the root of the problem, and it is somewhat, dare I use the word, unorthodox.

But isn’t this the case with all human progress? Most often an individual comes on the scene with a new idea, by definition unorthodox at the outset. Those in the status quo point out how this has never been done before and that if it were a good idea, someone would have already thought of it. This was probably the case when the first wheel was invented (We can hear them asking, “What’s that for? Who needs it?”); when the combustion engine was developed (“It will scare the horses,” they said at the time); the airplane (“Those Wright brothers are crazy anyway—people flying? Nonsense!”); and the development of the microchip. (This article was prepared on my faithful Kaypro computer, but the technology remains a mystery to me.)

If orthodoxy is coercively enforced, progress will be stifled and people will stagnate. Enforced orthodoxy, whatever form it takes, and it comes in a variety of shapes, sizes, and packages, simply means that someone or some group has decided to substitute their reason and perception for someone else’s.

I sense the question forming in some minds at this juncture: Shouldn’t the needs of the poor be met, and how will this take place in the kind of society organized along the lines you have sketched? I commend this social concern. Yet, for the poor to be lifted out of poverty, more than social concern is needed. Action is needed, specifically economic action.

People speak as though wealth is the natural state of humanity, as though it always existed and that the exception to this rule is its absence. Yet, even the most superficial overview of history belies this fantasy. It is wealth that is the exception: poverty and scarcity have been the norm. Capitalism hardly produced poverty; what it did do, however, was to produce sufficient wealth to show that poverty was not a necessity, that the masses were not condemned to live in abject material want. Poverty was the norm until a change took place in the ordering of social relations. Roughly speaking, this occurred in its most systematic and intellectually observable form in the founding of the United States and in the philosophical and moral thought which preceded it and was its zeitgeist.

Despite this clearly observable fact (i.e., that wealth has been the exceptional human circumstance and poverty its most frequent), very few moralists have ever asked: What are the moral conditions crucial to the production of wealth? Even within my own, expansive, Roman Catholic tradition, most of the discussion has centered on distributive justice, with very little attention to productive justice. I suggest that such an approach is to have the cart before the horse.

At the outset of this essay I referred to Lenin’s observation that ideas are more fatal than guns. This is the case when ideas are warped, when they fail to include the whole picture, or when they are employed coercively.