Proposing a Paradigm Change

(This chapter was first published on Medium on 4/6/26, major update 6/29/26 at https://medium.com/@t.higginson/proposing-a-paradigm-change-of-existential-importance-to-life-on-earth-replace-inalienable-83bce2049d65)

I. Premise

Assuming a goal of a healthier, more peaceful world where everyone and everything flourishes, there seems an urgent need for implementing a new value system, a system that is not derived from “rights.”

The reason is that “inalienable rights” have failed to even remotely achieve that goal while protecting and preserving the rights of a few to exploit the rest. Grounds abound for arguing that “inalienable rights” are a version of George Orwell’s 1984 newspeak.

There is both a moral and an actual existential imperative for an altogether different value system, a system that is not based on rights at all.

That conclusion is inescapable based on centuries of experience and data, right through to the present moment of active genocides, hot and cold wars, the increasingly devastating effects of climate change (currently being felt by the peoples least responsible for climate change), devastating inequality of access to financial stability, food, clean water, basic medical needs and the other attendant prerequisites to what is needed to vest a human with their most basic selfhood.

II. A Quick Review of the Reliance on and Use of Inalienable Rights

The concept of “rights” is the standard, generally accepted metric of what it means to be fully vested in all that is core to the exercise of a human life. The Declaration of Independence uses the phrase “inalienable rights.”[1] The US Constitution includes a Bill of Rights.[2] The United Nations Charter is built around fundamental human rights and the commitment by member states to promote universal respect for human rights.[3] The Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifies a set of individual human “basic rights and fundamental freedoms.”[4]

However, there little agreement on their scope, who gets what rights in practice, and, most important, how to use rights to create a flourishing world.

The data the world over demonstrates that rights provide a convenient appearance of validity of existing systems, combined with a carrot that someday, somehow a utopia based on rights will come to pass in which everyone has their rights fully vested, protected and exercisable in practice. In practice, rights are frequently a cruel farce for most of humanity, a utility to maintain existing power structures.

For a longer review of the failure of rights-based regimes to create a flourishing world for all, please see Appendix A below.

III. The Need for a New Value System

On the basis of the widespread and on-going failure of enumerated “rights” to provide the vast majority of human beings a fair shake at leading a full life, a level playing field, let alone the well-being of the biodiversity of everything else on planet earth on which all life depends, it seems an unavoidable conclusion that there is a need for a completely new value system, a value system that frees us from the disastrous failure of a rights-based framework.

IV. Inalienable Obligations.

Inalienable obligations offer a unique opportunity to build an entirely new value system that solves for the established and factually indisputably intractable flaws of any system built around so-called “inalienable rights” and the “the rights of man.”

Rights face inward; they are held by an individual (frequently apportioned by an individual’s place in a subgroup, such as by recognized gender, age, etc) akin to owning real property. In contrast, obligations face outward. An obligation is something that must be undertaken. Obligations are due to others. An obligation is entirely different from a right. An obligation is not a claim on others. For instance, an obligation is not a claim to something that is held or owned such that in its absence a person is not empowered to be “human.”

Obligations flip the script.

Everyone and everything owes obligations, as a matter of existing. Humans are the only species on earth that do not undertake their obligations naturally and without deviation.

What would be included in a set of “inalienable obligations?” What would be the justification for saying one or more obligations are inalienable? How might they achieve a goal of a healthy, peaceful world where all (whether human or not) thrive as best as possible given that our planet has constraints?

I propose there is a single “inalienable obligation.” It is a daily obligation by everyone to uphold the respect for everyone and everything’s right to their time. Time is inherent in the existence of each and every thing on the planet, and, in fact, in the universe. If something (e.g., a human, a dog, a rock) has no time, then it has ceased to exist.

An obligation to respect everyone and everything’s time becomes rooted in practice, actionable, under the framework of what can be called “harmonious biodiversity.”

“Harmonious biodiversity” is at the very root of a healthy personhood and a healthy earth. Life on earth depends on biodiversity, inclusive of what are sometimes classified as “inanimate” objects. We would not be alive if it were not for oxygen, our planet’s magnetosphere, the minerals and other parts of soil, the atoms and molecules of which we and everything else are made. (For a more detailed discourse on Harmonious Biodiversity, see my essay at the link in the footnote.[5])

Rather than the human construct of “rights,” the earth for most of its geologic history until the last few centuries worked according to its own harmonious system of nature, as increasingly well described and understood by science. Each ecosystem had and has a balance where each niche is filled by harmonious use of the resources at hand, and change naturally occurs in balance in that framework over time. Each part of an ecosystem can be said to have obligations to respect the time of every other part, meaning not that no part can touch any other part, but, instead, that the interaction by any one part harmonizes around a healthy ecosystem. For example, a wolf pack may kill and consume part of a herd of deer, but that action creates a healthier ecosystem for all: the wolves, the deer, the rivers, the fish, the plants, etc. [cite to wolves in Yellowstone] Harmony is maintained, in a system that, while constantly in flux, stays healthy for the entirety.

In other words, obligations are inherent to and flow naturally from being in existence.

The human concept of rights essentially fractures and distorts this natural “obligations” framework. Rights are self-oriented, and held against others. They are a human-centric construct. Obligations built around harmonious biodiversity re-establish and reinforce the natural framework in which a healthy world not only exists, but has been proven to thrive over the untold eons of geologic time scales long before the arrival of homo sapiens.

Appendix A

What Is the Basis for Concluding Rights Have Failed

(First 3 paragraph are duplicated from the first page of the essay)

The concept of “rights” is the standard, generally accepted metric of what it means to be fully vested in all that is core to the exercise of a human life. The Declaration of Independence uses the phrase “inalienable rights.”[6] The US Constitution includes a Bill of Rights.[7] The United Nations Charter is built around fundamental human rights and the commitment by member states to promote universal respect for human rights.[8] The Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifies a set of individual human “basic rights and fundamental freedoms.”[9]

However, there is little agreement on their scope, who gets what rights in practice, and, most important, how to use rights to create a flourishing world.

The data the world over demonstrates that rights provide a convenient appearance of validity of existing systems, combined with a carrot that someday, somehow a utopia based on rights will come to pass in which everyone has their rights fully vested, protected and exercisable in practice. In practice, rights are frequently a cruel farce for most of humanity, a utility to maintain existing power structures.

Arguably pre-dating a modern European concept of equal rights are, for example, the viewpoints of Indigenous peoples of the North American continent.[10]

There are ancient traditions, many practiced to this day in societies and cultures around the world, that accord what might be classified as rights to animate creatures. Some societies and cultures recognize versions of rights to what are frequently classified by “modern” frameworks as inanimate objects, such as rocks, mountains and rivers, the wind and rain. There are numerous movements to grant at least some level of legal protection to these non-human entities by way of legal protection through the allocation of rights to them.[11]

From one point of view, there has been a lot of progress made in giving more of humanity their own standing, there own independent animus in life, by enumerating rights and providing their rights legal protection. For example, women in many countries have (finally, and only recently) been given the right to vote, the right to own property in their own name, the right to procure credit cards and loans independently, access education, the right to control their own body and health on par with the right allocated to men, earn equal pay, and more. At varying levels, women’s rights to prevent discrimination based on gender in the workplace, in salaries, in medical research and other areas have gained some traction.

However, the scope and definition of rights, even ones that are arguably “inalienable” and explicitly protected in some countries and state constitutions and international charters, are constantly in flux in recognition, scope and protection, with widespread differences and global setbacks that can render many of them nearly meaningless. For instance, women’s rights deemed Constitutionally-protected in the U.S. under Roe v. Wade lasted 50 years before a set of justices (on exceptionally questionable, sophmoric reasoning[12]) voided the protection granted by a different set of justices. Many of the rights women enjoyed in such countries as Iran and Afghanistan in the 1950s have not been available to them in meaningful ways for decades. Granting and protecting rights to a more scientifically and medically (let alone morally) appropriate set of genders has proven not only problematic but actually a useful tool for culture wars, propaganda and reduction in other rights to other groups. Non-caucasians in the US have suffered right from the start of the colonies from “inalienable rights” that are expressly denied them both as a matter of explicit law and as a matter of practice, including slavery, genocide, intentional erasure of cultures, lynchings and a nearly innumerable catalog of other violations and denials of “inalienable rights” that continue to this day in one form or another, violations frequently known, intentional and enforceable under law.

Furthermore, wars, poverty, lack of access to clean water, sufficient nutrition, necessary medical care, education, voting rules and much more render the exercise of many “core” (or “inalienable”) rights limited, ephemeral, and many times highly constrained or impossible to exercise, and essentially meaningless in practice.

The competing ideologies of communism and capitalism can be understood fundamentally as opposite sides of the same materialistic coin: one allocates rights to property communally, and the other allocates rights to property individually. Both foundationally rely on the concept that how property rights vest determine whether and how humans have access to their full potential.

Extending a set of rights to non-humans can be seen essentially as a means to extend the human concept of property into the non-human world, relying on the existing legal paradigm of managing and balancing rights against rights, continuing the trajectory of a competition for scope and hierarchy of rights.

In other words, the concept of rights, and especially “inalienable rights,” has resulted in some intermittent progress in some countries and in some international institutions for some periods of time. Whether that intermittent progress derived from a concept of a list of “rights” of some defined scope outweighs the on-going wars, genocides, poverty, famines and infringement of rights of the last few centuries seems questionable at best.

Add in the global destruction of the environment, the scale of devastation of non-human species and inanimate parts of the earth, and it seems fair to conclude that a reliance on “rights” is a failed path, a dead end with horrors along the way masked by tantalizing ideals. It is hopeful to project that, despite a long, arduous and twisted path, there will be a future (a city on a hill, so to speak) in which rights will somehow be fully protected in a fair manner for all, whatever that might mean. Nevertheless, while there is some data in some regions of the world that suggest there may be a trajectory of that kind, towards “justice for all,” albeit a rocky one, the overwhelming data suggests that path is a utopian vision at best, and more realistically a version of Orwell’s 1984 newspeak at worst (and our actual experience for centuries unless you happen to have been born with a specific gender, racial DNA and a certain amount of property).

These problems arise most critically because rights are somehow “owned” or “inalienable,” whether individually or collectively. Individual rights (and rights of groups) require difficult and contentious balancing acts: pitting individuals against individuals and groups, and vice versa in a never-ending cycle. They are like property, and hence lead to economic (pseudo-science and ideological) arguments for and against them, and how to allocate them (efficiently or otherwise).

While somehow being “inalienable” and “fundamental,” rights in practice atomize and balkanize, not only in their scope and balance, but in their very essence. While rights unite and protect some people for some scope and in some places for some periods of time, that same unity and protection divides and offends others, frequently to the point of violent societal, cultural, racial, ethnic, political, religious and other oppression, including, but not limited to actual genocide openly practiced with impunity in front of the world, the UN, individual nations and everyone and everything else.

Which rights are protected at what level? Which ones cannot be transgressed by other individuals, by laws, by private or collective enterprises, by vanguards? Which ones can be transgressed, but only partially and in certain circumstances, such as by a government practicing due process? Where are the boundaries? Does an individual (or a society’s or an ethnic group’s) right not to be killed by a bomb outweigh a different group’s claimed religious right to a land? Who will enforce such a right, or will it be an aspirational “inalienable right” that is trampled in practice depending on who has more bombs, money, propaganda and other sway (such as, in the United States, a vote by five unelected people appointed for life by a group whose sole actual qualification is that they have sufficient votes (apportioned by State according to a 250 year old compromise among the propertied class of men allowed to participate in the Constitutional Convention) in the Senate at a moment in time)? What if rights are accorded to corporate (non-human, fictitious) legal constructs existing solely as created by civil laws, some with such vast, multi-national wealth and power that they are essentially untouchable by individuals and less powerful collectives, or at least untouchable for decades and by country with proven track records of killing humans for profit (e.g., the tobacco, plastics, chemical and pesticides industries, and the technology industry as it relies on sourcing raw materials extracted by human labor in the basest of conditions)?

While the efforts to grant rights to non-humans (e.g., rivers, whales, etc) are laudatory, an expectation that adding in more competing “rights” (whether of humans, creatures and/or inanimate things), seems unlikely as a workable approach given that it builds around a zero-sum game of competition over a property-based set of rights that sets everyone and everything against each other, with a complex set of governing rules, but, in the end, rules that are set and enforced by the most powerful based on wealth and ability to deploy destructive power of states. Further, as climate change creates vast new levels of scarcity on almost every area necessary for life (fresh water, arable land, livable temperatures, etc), a reliance on a reliably protected apportionment of rights to new populations seems far-fetched.

Under the framework of “human” rights, we humans are actively destroying the earth’s biodiversity at a speed and scale that has a catastrophic end in sight in a single human generation, two or three generations at most, according to the entirety of reputable science.[13]

In the end, there seems little-to-no evidence that the concept of “inalienable rights” will lead to even a fraction of standardized set of agreed-upon protections lasting more than a few years within even a single country, let alone a healthy peaceful world. There is literally centuries of data to the contrary.

Appendix B

Some Contrasting Examples of Rights v Obligations in Action

Example 1:

Under an obligations analysis, both wolves and ranchers have an obligation to support and preserve harmonious biodiversity, as the optimal means (proven throughout earth’s entire biosphere history) to respect the time of both.

Under a rights analysis, to the extent wolves have any rights at all, they compete with the rights of ranchers to control their land and protect the economic value of the sheep, cows or other products they are raising to sell.

Example 2:

Under an obligations analysis, all genders of the human race have an obligation to support, and preserve harmonious biodiversity, as the optimal means (proven throughout earth’s entire biosphere history) to respect the time of both.

Under a rights analysis, most frequently, many genders are accorded few if any rights under law, and some genders (male) have far more protected rights than other genders (e.g., female).

Notes

[1] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript and https://medium.com/@t.higginson/all-men-are-created-equal-decoding-the-jurisprudence-of-the-conservative-justices-of-scotus-in-a-ed99238633e1

[2] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transcript

[3] https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights

[5] [citation coming]

[6] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript and https://medium.com/@t.higginson/all-men-are-created-equal-decoding-the-jurisprudence-of-the-conservative-justices-of-scotus-in-a-ed99238633e1

[7] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transcript

[8] https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything

[11] The UK recognizes octopuses, crabs, squid among sentient creatures, while at the same time not giving them any protections from being eaten: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/lobsters-octopus-and-crabs-recognised-as-sentient-beings. Rivers are being granted certain protections in various places, including the status of legal personhood: https://theconversation.com/rivers-are-increasingly-being-given-legal-rights-now-they-need-people-who-will-defend-these-rights-in-court-251736. There is a movement on to recognize the legal personhood status of whales: https://www.oceanvisionlegal.com/post/whale-personhood-part1. The status of “legal personhood” is a precursor under many systems of jurisprudence to having rights that are recognized and protected.

[12] https://medium.com/@t.higginson/the-inquisition-court-1-a320d29e7136

[13] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/10/more-999-studies-agree-humans-caused-climate-change