CONNATURAL RIGHTS
Chapter 4
The first seat of freedom, and of ownership
59. The distinction between formal innate right and material innate rights clearly indicates the seat of freedom and of ownership. These two words play a large part in any discussion on rights, but their concept has not perhaps been sufficiently clarified.
60. We can safely say that the human person is the first, proper seat of jural freedom, and human nature the first, proper seat of ownership, if we consider human nature as pertaining to and subordinate to person, that is, as something proper to person.
61. Jural freedom is something simple, and consists in a supreme faculty of action.
62. Every supreme faculty is necessarily free, and no active principle can physically and morally violate and subjugate it. Conversely, if a faculty is completely free, it is supreme.
63. Ownership on the other hand is not a simple concept because it includes two things: something that has ownership and something proper to that which has ownership.
64. Person alone, therefore, if considered without any addition and in relation to its simplicity, cannot strictly speaking supply us with the concept of ownership; it can only supply the concept of freedom. Indeed, to say that `the human person is master of itself', or `has ownership of itself' is, when closely examined, to say nothing. If the person is master, it is not mastered, and if it is owner, it cannot be what is owned; the two concepts are the opposite of each other. They cannot therefore concur in the same subject, nor compose a valid proposition. They can only be the matter for a proposition whose terms contradict and cancel each other.
65. This explains why we placed the supreme principle of rights in person, in personal freedom.(26) When we investigated the principle of derivation and determination of rights, however, we turned to the concept of ownership.(27)
66. Right is a faculty of free activity. Personal freedom therefore must be the formal principle of all rights.
67. But because this formal, universal principle is the element common to all rights, it does not determine special rights. Rights are specified by their different matter, which cannot be considered in itself but only as united to the form of right, to person, to personal freedom and governance. We called this union of the matter of right with the form of right (that is, the connection which brings the matter into the sphere of right) ownership. Hence ownership taken generally was understood by us as `the principle of the determination of rights'.
Notes
(26) Cf. ER, 224-237.
(27) Cf. ER, 318 ss.