Natural Rights Trump Greater Good

Tactics and Strategy

“It is just by Natural Right that body obey the soul,

that the appetite obey reason,

that brutes obey man, women their husbands,

the imperfect the perfect and the worse the better,

for the good of all.”

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Spanish Theologian 1550 *

The Utilitarian argument is the primary tactic of Mandatory Vaxxers. You must Obey for the Greater Good. Save the Babies and your Grandparents. Flatten the Curve! Herd Immunity! R-Naught!

It’s a slippery slope argument and we’re battling uphill. A Gordian Knot of snares and nooses that can only be cleaved with Natural Rights. The Right to Refuse Medical Treatments is Alexander’s Sword.

When Jeremy Bentham proposed utilitarian models to maximize pleasure and minimize pain of society in the 18th century, he was criticized by John Stuart Mills for treating individuals as a container that only contribute to social well being as an aggregate. It’s never been Common Law.

The Capabilities Approach is a legal theory of basic justice that nations have a duty to create sufficient choice around “life, health, bodily integrity, emotional health, affiliation and leisure time.” Today, animal rights lawyers have used CA theory to win natural rights for Marine Mammals against the U.S. Military’s cavalier sonar program, because whales were rendered “unable to live their characteristic lives of foraging, breeding and migrating.” #

If marine mammals’ Natural Rights trump National Security, humans have a Right to Refuse Mandatory Vaccinations. Our Medical Freedom is “particularly important” to allow “foraging, breeding and migrating” against VaxxPorts. If positive Capabilities are a natural right, what about 19th century John Keats’ Negative Capability, “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”?

Our Declaration of Independence lists Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness as Natural Rights in the lede. Thomas Jefferson read both Bentham and Mills, along with Locke and Key Masonic Secrets. Happiness or Luck and Love replaced Property as a Right. You will Own Nothing and Be Happy is a Natural Right. Novus Ordo Seclorum.

For those who only read headlines these Rights are implicit in Independence, not Interdependence. All fit under the Grand Umbrella of Natural Rights, protecting us from tyrants and despots, except those we elect.

George Washington ordered his soldiers to submit to smallpox inoculations, although fever, hunger, freezes, courtmartial hangings and dysentery were better than the British at killing Yanks than smallpox. Rumor has it George signed an Executive Order mandating Medical Freedom before Dr. Benjamin Rush bled him to death. That document may yet be found in a Dan Brown thriller.

The Constitution was written and signed by elite lawyers in “Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Liberty connotes Godless Fornication, outside the pale of mere Freedom. Summer of Love. Orange Sunshine and Corn Likker. Shooting Guns in the Air. No responsibilities, unlike dull old Freedom.

A government of Some People for Few People was ensured by the Founding Fathers with that contract of governance. They were not Benthamites, in fact served themselves well before the Greater Good. The Bill of Rights had to be added before it could pass. Natural RIghts are slippery, a struggle to gain and maintain, with arguments, debates and legal decisions preferred.

National Basketball Association Catholic referees suing the League for firing them rather than accept their Religious Right to Refuse Mandatory Vaccinations were grilled by NBA lawyers about minutiae of Papal Bulls. (Aborted Fetal Cell Sins are waived for Covid, but individuals in The Faith have the Right to Refuse.) A member of a Megachurch sect was questioned without a lawyer over his use of ivermectin, as a gotcha of “polluting his body.” Not with fetal cells, though.

Referee’s call was moot, anyways. The League refused religious or medical exemptions for players and referees, presumably on down to security guards manning the gates of The Bubble’s hermetically sealed Door. Their legal model was California Senate Bill 277, banning philosophical and religious exemptions from mandatory school vaccinations in 2015. That legislation was cooked up in the bowels of the NIH & CDC in the Naughts. Legal challenges went nowhere in state or federal courts.

Utilitarians arguments are typically supported by What about Seat Belt Laws? It’s frequently said that driving is a privilege, not a right, but Supreme Courts have repeatedly ruled that driving is a natural right.

“The right of a citizen to travel upon the public highways [whether walking, cycling or driving] is not a mere privilege which may be permitted or prohibited at will, but a common right which he has under his right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Protected in his person and " in his safe conduct on public highways or in public places, while neither interfering with nor disturbing another’s rights.”

After all, if a nation spends virtually all transportation, policing, advertising and investment funds on motor vehicle movement over alternatives, then the People have a natural right to drive, regardless of medical, social and environmental damages to others. It’s an Unnatural Natural Right that can be impeded with sufficient cause.

The Supreme Court ruled against Sitz, since “the magnitude of the drunken driving problem” and “the States’ interest in eradicating it”, while “the intrusion on motorists stopped briefly at sobriety checkpoints—is slight.” Apprehending one drunk per hundred drivers was an unavoidable harm, like vaccine injuries.

There’s empirical evidence Covid Vaccination causes more medical carnage than drunken drivers. Opting out, like wearing seat belts or walking on freeways potentially harms no one but the individual. People might even drive safer, knowing they’ll be thrown around like a rag doll in a collision. People might practice healthier habits without inoculations to keep them safe from Infectious Diseases and Hospital Ventilators.

*Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, Eduardo Galeaon, Nation Books, 2013

# What We Owe Our Fellow Animals, Martha C. Nussbaum, New York Review of Books, 3/10/22