Society And its Purpose
Book 2 - The End of Society
CHAPTER 11
Human rights
219. Because no social government has any legitimate power to prevent the individuals who compose a society from acquiring the true human good we have described and analysed, human beings who associate do not and cannot renounce, nor have they ever renounced, their right to tend to this end. It would in fact be completely absurd to think they had placed their perfection and happiness in the power of any government whatsoever. We can neither morally nor physically renounce our final contentment. There would no longer be any reason for submitting to a government that did not have as its only duty the defence of the right which we each naturally have to our own happiness, and to make available the means to this happiness.
220. Our analysis of the right that we each have to our own moral contentment and happiness shows clearly that the right is of its nature inalienable;(68) it is not only the first right but the most general of duties. The good which is its object results from two elements: virtue and the eudaimonological appendages of virtue. Because none of us can renounce our duty or dispense ourselves from the practice of virtue, our right to true good is simply `the right to perform our moral duties’; carrying out our duties produces the eudaimonological appendages just mentioned. Such a right is clearly inalienable.
We also said that this was the supreme and most general right. We can show this as follows. The concept of our right to or over a thing can arise in us only on condition that we give some value to the thing. Human beings never form rights relative to things which offer no good and have no value either in opinion or in reality. All the value we give to things, rightly or wrongly, can only come, however, from our opinion that these things contribute in some way to our contentment and happiness. Hence, we finally see that the formal part of every special right is rooted in the right to contentment and happiness We are conscious of having this right, which is the most general of all rights, virtually containing within itself and producing of itself all the others.
Notes
(68) Chap. 2.