This article was originally my half of a November, 1983 debate, at a supper club meeting of Los Angeles-area libertarians, on the question “Is Copyright A Natural Right?” I revised my debate presentation for publication as a booklet published on December 2, 1983, under the title Toward a Natural Rights Theory of Logoright and, on March 16, 1989, for on-line publication through the Connected Education Library,1 but it is still helpful to understand that these arguments are largely directed to libertarians who already agree with the fundamental concepts of natural rights, or at the very least presume a sympathy with libertarian and natural rights philosophy and philosophers.
It is generally thought that discussion of rights is a political or ethical issue. In fact, the argument must begin at the level of basic epistemological and metaphysical premises and proceed from there.
Antebellum debates on slavery hinged on the question of whether Blacks were People, thereby having rights, or whether Blacks were only animals, and therefore could be the property of People. Political analyses were being made by Southerners in which they attempted to demonstrate that, economically, slavery was good because it benefited the Southern economy. And even moral debates hinged on the metaphysical question: if slaves weren't people, but were animals, then what could be morally wrong in owning them?
It did no good to discuss the morality or economics of slavery until one had arrived at the simple metaphysical fact that skin color does not definitively answer the question: What is a Human Being?
Moral and political questions often hinge on such differing perceptions of reality. This is one reason such discussions are often so heated: differing premises at these levels will make one question the sanity and logical faculties of someone who disagrees with one's own obvious conclusions. The feeling for someone who has a divergent vision of reality is: “He must be blind or crazy if he can't see something as clear as daylight!”
So it is that on an issue involving “rights,” one feels an opponent is not merely wrong, but unbelievably wrong. Even among professed advocates (and practitioners, one hopes) of reason, it makes it hard to understand how one who disagrees can be so obstinate on so easy a question.
That there are disagreements about natural rights even among strict advocates of them proves that the question is harder than we might have originally thought.
Therefore, let advocates of human rights not trade insults, but get down to the business at hand, which is establishing the premises from which we're arguing. Then one can either see whether our views are fundamentally incommunicable to another, or find basic agreements and proceed from there.
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