Although I’m still focussed on 1p2U.com, some time later this year I hope to set up the website culturalliberty.org – a site dedicated to the restoration of everyone’s cultural liberty, especially from its constraint by anachronistic privileges such as copyright and patent (which should have been abolished along with slavery).

There’ll be a wiki upon which I hope ethical law can be developed (for legislative protection of all individuals’ natural rights concerning the possession, production and communication of information and intellectual works).

So, in getting started, I thought I’d sketch out some definitions, i.e. without explanations or examples (which can come later). Suffice it to say, these definitions will be tweaked.

Definitions

1. Individuals are human beings, a priori equal.
2. Human Rights, the rights of all individuals, are naturally: life, privacy, truth, liberty.
3. Right always and exclusively refers to right in the natural sense, implicitly qualified as natural right.
4. Life is the naturally optimal functioning of an individual human being, the preservation of its health and integrity, the necessary maintenance and protection of its body’s boundaries, sustenance and environment, and the perpetuation of its operating period.
5. Privacy describes the individual’s natural ability to exclude others from particular objects, information, and spaces that they possess, occupy, or are otherwise able to physically defend or secure. Privacy may be enjoyed jointly as well as singly.
6. The right to Truth is against interference with, or impairment of, anyone’s natural ability to perceive, pursue or apprehend it, e.g. against fraud or misrepresentation.
7. Liberty includes an individual’s freedom of movement, speech, or senses, in their natural habitat among their fellows, and entails that these freedoms remain without physical constraint – until the individual has been found in violation of anyone’s rights, and only then to the least extent possible and necessary for their rehabilitation and the protection of others’ rights.
8. Freedom is the natural, unconstrained condition of the individual, i.e. one not subject to government. It is delimited by all individuals’ natural power and interest to protect their natural rights – who may collectively empower a government.
9. Rights are inalienable. That means the individual cannot be parted from them, neither by themselves nor by their government.
10. Rights take precedence: Privacy must cede to Life (invasion may be warranted in the protection of life). Truth must cede to Privacy (the public’s interest does not outweigh the individual’s interest in excluding it). Liberty must cede to Truth (where its impairment through deceit or fraud risks harm or social disharmony). In this way each right delimits the next, and all rights delimit freedom.
11. Rights are imbued by nature in all individuals equally. They are not conditional, e.g. on gender, skin colour, religion, payment of taxes, nor good behaviour. If rights are not protected for the pariahs of society they are not protected for the paragons. If a government exempts terrorists from its protection it terrorises its own citizens as a consequence.
12. A harmonious society is epiphenomenal. It is that which results when a government carefully protects the rights of the citizens that empower it. Their protection is primary – not secondary to protection of society nor to the existence of the government they create, and thus rights should not be derogated in pursuit of social harmony, benefit to society, ‘the encouragement of learning’, ‘progress’, ‘the common good’, nor upon a wish by the people to engage in a ‘social contract’ to surrender, waive or relax their rights to that end, whether in whole or part.
13. Privileges (legislatively enacted analogues of rights) are always referred to as ‘privileges’, not as some call them: ‘legally granted rights’, ‘legal rights’ or simply ‘rights’. Privileges are instruments of injustice and not to be found in an egalitarian society nor any legislature primarily concerned with the protection of individuals’ natural rights.
14. A Contract is an equitable agreement (voluntary) between two individuals concerning the conditioned exchange of their property, whether material or intellectual. A contract cannot surrender, abrogate, nor derogate from any individual’s rights – it is not a promise (as would alienate liberty). A government has no power to enforce completion nor penalise incompletion, only to arbitrate in any dispute as to equity or agreeability, and to mandate a remedy to that end as far as is practicable.
15. A government is created and continuously empowered by its individual citizens, and those individuals are the only source of its power, which may be removed or redirected by them.
16. A government may be empowered to collect taxes to provide and care for its citizens’ common interest: the protection of their rights, their safety, health, and social well being, e.g. policing, defence, energy, utilities, transport, and communications infrastructure, healthcare, education, environment, etc.
17. Corporations or any other legally created entity are not individuals nor even comparable let alone equivalent, and being unnatural are not imbued with rights. All such entities should be regulated to ensure their activities and motives are aligned with the common good, i.e. not simply maximisation of share value.