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Thursday,
November 8, 2001
Civil
liberties are simply laws
Ed
Van Wesep is a columnist for the Brown Daily Herald at Brown
University.
It seems
as though the indoctrination extends deep within the college
community.
Most people
seem to agree that civil liberties are inherently necessary
for a just society and that under no circumstances may we
remove them from our legal system.
What
people fail to realize is that laws protecting civil liberties,
as with all other laws, are (theoretically) designed to provide
citizens with the best possible society. These laws are no
more sacred than laws regarding fraud or jaywalking: Only
the propaganda of the past and the misplaced belief in God
or universal morality keep people from realizing that the
Bill of Rights is just a tool that aids us in being happy.
Three
facts will be shown in this piece: that civil rights are laws
similar to any others, that philosophers and political leaders
have been right to try to convince the public otherwise, and
there exist times when these laws must be abridged.
To begin,
we must ask: What is a “right” and why is it special?
The answer is that a right is a package of laws protecting
citizens from intrusion by other people, the government or
other institutions and ideas. The right to free speech is
in fact just a quick way to write a package of a nearly infinite
number of conventional laws. The fact that slander, yelling
fire in a theater, verbal harassment, conspiracy and many
other forms of speech are illegal shows that we are not protecting
speech entirely, but only protecting it in cases where society
is better off from protecting it.
This
leads to my second point: We have rights because they are
good for society, not because a God or some fact of the universe
requires them. There are many good reasons to protect rights;
some rights have obvious benefits (like the right to talk
to your neighbor about the weather, where the benefit is happiness
and the cost is nil).
Other
rights, like the right of the KKK to march, have less obvious
benefits, but the fact that they are not obvious does not
imply that they are nonexistent.
This
piece is not the place to argue that there is no God, but
certainly I can be confidant in saying that no legal system
should be based on the teaching of a religion. Laws stemming
from one religion necessarily would conflict with another
religion’s teachings — because basing law on religion
requires choosing a religion, it cannot be a reasonable practice.
The next
question is why, leaving phenomenal pompousness aside, we
have this notion that rights are somehow different from other
laws. The answer is that political philosophers and politicians
have forced the idea into American culture for centuries.
Human
rights are a naturally appealing concept, so people quickly
sided with the philosophers, but we must remember that the
concept did not always exist in its current form. The philosophers
were writing in response to the awful living conditions faced
by citizens in European society.
The arguments
made by Hobbes and Locke and all those guys were convincing,
so people were able to force their governments to agree that
laws must protect our “rights.” As we can see, society
improved markedly after these laws were put in place —
from the start the American Constitution was a model for other
nations, and even nations like Britain with no formal constitution
shifted their legal structures toward the American ideal.
Now it
should be clear why we believe in rights and why rights are
not at all special. The final step is to argue that sometimes
rights must be abridged. Specifically, they should be eliminated
whenever they no longer serve to maximize social welfare.
Rights
are not inherent and therefore should be treated as all other
laws are treated.
As soon
as they are no longer beneficial to society they should be
removed. The change I propose is in the way we think about
issues, not the issues themselves.
Ed Van Wesep is a columnist for the Brown Daily Herald
at Brown University.
This column was distributed by U-Wire.
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