Fundamental right

“ The moral law can do nothing more than indicate the form of the fundamental principles which our actions are intended to express,— that is to say, that these fundamental principles are capable of being based on a universal principle of legislation in such manner as to enable all rational beings to obey them under similar circumstances. ”

“ i.e., that, instead of destroying natural inequality, the fundamental compact substitutes, for such physical inequality as nature may have set up between men, an equality that is moral and legitimate, and that men, who may be unequal in strength or intelligence, become every one equal by convention and legal right.5
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“ No judgment can be just or wise, but that which is built on the conviction of the paramount worth and importance of Duty. This is the fundamental truth, the supreme law of reason; and the mind, which does not start from this in its inquiries into human affairs, is doomed to great, perhaps fatal error.
The Right is the supreme good, and includes all other goods. In seeking and adhering to it, we secure our true and only happiness. All prosperity, not founded on it, is built on sand. ”

“ and the civilized world seems at last to be proceeding to the conviction of that fundamental and manifest truth, that the powers of government are but a trust, and that they cannot be lawfully exercised but for the good of the community. As knowledge is more and more extended, this conviction becomes more and more general. Knowledge, in truth, is the great sun in the firmament. Life and power are scattered with all its beams. ”

“ The more I advanced in the study of American society, the more I perceived that the equality of conditions is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived, and the central point at which all my observations constantly terminated. ”

“ Let the weak and defenseless talk their fill of right, of justice, of equity; let these invoke reason, logic, common sense and fair play; but the world's rulers, the dominant class, know only one law, recognize but one rule—might. ”

“ These are all the rights which any man can ever possess, even in the most complex society. A right is nothing more or less than a defined natural power. It may vary in the degree of its definition. It may be enforced by all the authority of the whole community, and be called a legal right. It may be enforced only by the pressure of the opinion of the community or of a class, and be called a moral right. ”

“ Such have always been, and such must always be, the consequences of a want of this right of all men to share in the making of the laws, a right, as I have before shown, derived immediately from the law of Nature, springing up out of the same source with civil society, and cherished in the heart of man by reason and by experience. ”

“ The order of castes, the order of rank, simply formulates the supreme law of life itself; the separation of the three types is necessary to the maintenance of society, and to the evolution of higher types, and the highest types—the inequality of rights is essential to the existence of any rights at all.—A right is a privilege. Every one enjoys the privileges that accord with his state of existence. ”

“ The capacity to conceive a common good as one's own, and to regulate the exercise of one's powers by reference to a good which others recognise, carries with it the consciousness that powers should be so exercised; which means that there should be rights, that powers should be regulated by mutual recognition. There ought to be rights, because the moral personality,—the capacity on the part of an individual for making a common good his own,—ought to be developed ”

“ This renowned Declaration of Rights reads as follows:—
“Nature has made all men free and equal; the distinctions which are necessary for social order are founded alone on the public good.
“Man is born with inalienable and imprescriptible rights, such as the unshackled liberty of opinion, the care of his honor and life, the right of property, the complete control over his person, his industry, and all his faculties; the free expression of his opinion in every possible manner; the worship of the Almighty; and resistance against oppression. ”

“ The degree to which the individual judges for himself of the relation between the common good and the laws which cross the path of his ordinary life, is the measure of his intelligent, as distinguished from a merely instinctive, recognition of rights in others and in the state ”

“ The rule of law, Restrict your freedom through the conception of the freedom of all other persons with whom you come in contact! receives, it is true, a new sanction for conscience through the Moral Law; but the deduction of this sanction forms a part of the Science of Morality, and does not belong to the Science of Rights. ”

“ This is the field of study, debate, and reflection, on which moral convictions are constantly being formed; and when they are formed, they find their way into laws, constitutions, and institutions, provided that the political institutions are free, so as to allow this to take place. If not, there is opened a gap between the positive law and the moral convictions of the people, and social convulsions ensue. It is a constant phenomenon of all exaggerated philosophers of the state, that they obscure this distinction between public morals and positive law. ”

“ Out of all the discoveries of statesmen and sages, out of all the experience of past human life, she compiled a perennial political philosophy, the primordial principles of national ethics—she sought the vital elements of social forms and blended them harmoniously in the free commonwealth which comes nearest to the illustration of the natural equality of all men. ”

“ The rights themselves are regarded as the natural and inalienable rights belonging to every individual, or as political, and based upon or arising from principles inherent in the very nature of a system of free government. ”

“ We have inquired what it is in the nature of man that renders him capable of these rights, what are the moral ends to which the rights are relative, and in what form the rights should be realised in order to the attainment of these ends. In order to make the inquiry into rights complete, we ought to go on to examine in the same way the rights which arise out of the establishment of a state, the rights connected with the several functions of government ”

“ Conversely, everyone capable of being determined by the conception of a common good as his own ideal good, as that which unconditionally should be (of being in that sense an end to himself) , in other words, every moral person, is capable of rights; i.e. of bearing his part in a society in which the free exercise of his powers is secured to each member through the recognition by each of the others as entitled to the same freedom with himself. ”

“ Again, there are the legal and political principles of morals—freedom, equality, rights of persons; 'Every man to count for one and no man for more than one,' 'Every man equal in the eye of the law and of the legislator.' There is also the other sort of political morality, which if not beginning with 'Might is right,' at any rate seeks to deduce our ideas of justice from the necessities of the state and of society. ”

“ Of course it is possible to undertake to regard the moral law, or such objects as justice, in the same light in which we have just been viewing the facts that result from social law and from convention. ”

“ Common elements in all codes of rules for conduct are the consciousness of authority, whether that of a God, of a ruler or government, or of conscience, the more or less definite sense of power or coercion on the part of this authority, and the representation of public opinion. These elements, combined in different proportions, result in an idea and a feeling of obligation, forming a body of thought and feeling which may be termed pro-ethical, and which, with the mass of mankind, stands in place of the ethical. ”

“ Nothing need be said to shew the value of the three kinds of liberty which I have distinguished under the names of Physical, Moral, and Religious Liberty. They are, without doubt, the foundation of all the happiness and dignity of men, as reasonable and moral agents, and the subjects of the Deity.—It is, in like manner, true of Civil Liberty, that it is the foundation of the whole happiness and dignity of men as members of civil society, and the subjects of civil government. ”

“ The capacity, then, on the part of the individual of conceiving a good as the same for himself and others, and of being determined to action by that conception, is the foundation of rights; and rights are the condition of that capacity being realised. ”

“ We hold these rights by virtue, of our manhood, it is said; they are inherent in it, and constitute it. But my rights bind you, and yours bind me, and yet you and I are equal; our manhoods are equal. How, then, can the manhood of either bind or morally oblige the other? ”

“ The respect for rights supposes, or produces, the respect for law, the habitual source of rights. The real and the possible, rights and law, such are the subjects upon which the political spirit is constantly exercised, and which become the habitual objects of its inquiry and its veneration. It thus maintains, or re-establishes, a moral principle of fixity in the relations of individuals, and a moral principle of authority in those of the state. ”

“ In saying this, I mean only to designate the general spirit of human law. Every principle, on its application to practice, must be limited and modified by circumstances; our reason by our common sense. ”

“ It is for us to be governed by correct principles, and as far as it lies in our power to extend to all men this right, and then maintain, on correct principles, our own rights, the rights of others and the rights of God. ”

“ That the doctrines of political economy are inconsistent either with the precepts of revelation, the laws of nature, or the rights and happiness of any portion of the human race, we do not believe. We hold them to be based on equal justice, and their practice the carrying out of the rules which God and nature have manifestly prescribed. ”

“ WHAT, then, are the permanent Foundations, on which perfect Liberty can arise?—I answer, it can only arise on the Power of such a System of Manners and Principles effectually impressed on the human Mind, as may be an inward Curb to every inordinate Desire; or rather, such as may so frame and model the Human Heart, that its ruling Desires may correspond, coincide, or coalesce, with all the great and essential Appointments of public Law. ”

“ We, on the contrary, starting with the principle that society implies equality, can, by our reasoning faculty, understand and agree with each other in settling our rights; we have even used our judgment to a great extent. But in all this our conscience plays a small part, as is proved by the fact that the idea of RIGHT—of which we catch a glimpse in certain animals who approach nearer than any others to our standard of intelligence—seems to grow, from the low level at which it stands in savages, to the lofty height which it reaches in a Plato or a Franklin. ”

“ In the past men have set a barrier to her right of knowledge, her right of action, her right of independent being; and in the light of that history it seems probable that she will best discover her full value by insisting on right of knowledge, on right of way, and on right of economic independence. ”

“ They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. ”

“ By the side of interest, which is the law of sensibility, reason has made us recognize the law of duty, which a free being can alone fulfil. From these ethics has sprung a generous political doctrine, giving to right a sure foundation in the respect due to the person, establishing true liberty, and true equality, and calling for institutions, protective of both, which do not rest on the mobile and arbitrary will of the legislator, whether people or monarch, but on the nature of things, on truth and justice. ”

“ Whatever Means, therefore, are most effectual in curbing and subduing the selfish Desires of Man, are the most effectual Means of regulating his Actions, and establishing civil Liberty on its most permanent Foundations. ”

“ And we must grant to an individual the theoretical freedom which cannot be taken from it in practice, we must admit that it is as free now as it has ever been, that laws must be adapted to the needs of the social individual and not to the vague, unreal, and impossible abstractions, such as justice or morality. What is justice? The embodiment of all that is considered right, an individual conception, which assumes different forms in different persons. ”

“ There is a system of rights and obligations which should be maintained by law, whether it is so or not, and which may properly be called 'natural'; not in the sense in which the term 'natural' would imply that such a system ever did exist or could exist independently of force exercised by society over individuals, but 'natural' because necessary to the end which it is the vocation of human society to realise. ”

“ The second ambiguity is that of confounding a right of any kind, with a right to enforce that right by resisting or punishing a violation of it. People will say, for example, that they have a right to good government, which is undeniably true, it being the moral duty of their governors to govern them well. ”

“ From these distinctions, applied to each political society and its members, are derived the most certain and universal rules, by which we can judge whether a government is good or bad, and in general of the morality of all human actions. ”