Greta Thunberg Meets John Locke

The Nature of Rights and the Rights of Nature.

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What are rights, and where do they come from?

Philosophy has long been lampooned as pointless navel-gazing, mere playing with words, and puffed-up twaddle masquerading as profundity. To be fair, some of it is. But at its best, philosophy has given us concepts and ideas that have improved the world. One example present in virtually all discussions of ethics or politics is the notion of rights.

The Civil Rights movement, the fight for women’s rights and gay rights, and the U.N. Declaration of Universal Human Rights—all of these seek justice for those who have been oppressed by the political structure, and all of them use the philosophical concept of rights as a tool to allow for human flourishing that has long been constrained. ​​But what are rights, where do they come from, and can we make use of them in some of today’s most pressing issues like climate change?

Discussion of rights blossomed in the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe when the social order was being challenged. Traditionally, by the Divine Right of Kings, God (according to the Pope or Archbishop of Canterbury) selected the monarchs and thereby granted to the royals all of the political and social power, as well as the land and wealth. And once they had it, nothing changed. The rich stayed rich, and the poor stayed poor. The line between the powerful and powerless was frozen in place.

But as scientific and technological advancement challenged long-held theological beliefs and planted the seeds of the Industrial Revolution, wealth—and thereby power—was starting to fall into the hands of clever, hard-working commoners. Civil wars put more control in the hands of elected bodies, away from the monarchs. Money and legislative influence, we were coming to believe, ought to be more fairly distributed, so the nature of rights became a live topic.

John Locke vs Adam Smith

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Two thinkers central to that conversation were John Locke, whose Treatises on Government were central to the development of the American political system, and Adam Smith, whose masterworks The Wealth of Nations and A Theory of Moral Sentiments are foundational to the American economic system. Interestingly, they profoundly disagreed on the nature of rights.

​John Locke championed the concept of “natural rights,” according to which they are an innate part of being a person. Human nature comes with rights attached; you’re a human, rights come with you; buy one get the other free. All humans are born with the same rights by virtue of their humanity.

There is a lot to like in this approach because it means that rights are universal. They cannot be claimed only by a monarch or distributed according to the often biased and unfair whim of the monarch. Everyone has them. Locke makes it easy to use the idea of rights to fight against oppression on moral grounds. The U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, for example, buys into this approach Locke, stock, and barrel.

Adam Smith, on the other hand, takes our rights to spring from human, social conventions. Rights are constructed by us. We decide who gets how many and which ones. There is a multiplicity of possible social arrangements where rights are differently distributed, each of which has advantages and disadvantages, and it is our job to figure out which is best for us.

One nice feature of this approach is that we can correct social wrongs by reallocating who gets what rights. In America, we can look with a mix of pride and embarrassment at the 15th and 19th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which enfranchise voters of color and women—proud at the re-working of our social contract and conventions in the name of justice and embarrassed that we had to make such changes at all. ​So, when we look at questions of our moral responsibilities around climate change, should we adopt Locke’s or Smith’s view of rights? The answer is yes.

Climate action and social contracts

The Climate Action Summits bring together leaders from around the globe with scientists and advocates. The discussions concern both coming to a common understanding of what emission reduction goals have to be in order to be effective, but also the political nuts and bolts about who can and should be expected to do how much. China, India, the United States, Iran, and Brazil not only have different interests ecologically and economically but also have quite different governmental structures that also produce different distributions of rights. What makes such negotiations difficult is, in part, that we are trying to develop a global social contract or new conventions among groups with radically distinct sorts of local social contracts. Reaching such an agreement is essential, but the trickiness involved shows Smith’s approach in action.

At the same time, the drive to get that sort of deal done is driven precisely by Locke’s understanding of rights. The effects of global warming are real and devastating. ​But it is those who are the most disadvantaged already who will bear the biggest brunt of the effects of climate change. The global poor and vulnerable suffer disproportionately from what we are doing to the planet. Why should those of us living privileged lives of relative wealth and safety have to sacrifice to help them?

The answer seems to come from Locke’s approach to rights.​ The right to swing my fist, Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, ends at my neighbor’s nose. The effects of global warming pack a serious punch. And, it turns out, the countries that first industrialized are the ones who threw it. The carbon that has historically entered the atmosphere comes largely from those countries that economically developed earlier. Bearing more responsibility for causing the mess entails a bigger responsibility in sacrificing to fix it. If we are more responsible for the violation of the natural rights to life of those impacted by global warming, then we need to do what we need to do.

But the Earth is the home of living things, not a living thing itself…or is it?

But can we move away from the moral responsibility we have to other people and speak of obligations to the Earth itself? In other words, does nature—ecosystems, species, or natural wonders like the Grand Canyon—have rights? Can non-human things even have rights?

If you saw someone kick a homeless person, you would rightly think, “What an immoral jerk.” If the person then proceeded to kick a stray dog, you would probably think the same exact thing. What’s more important for us is that you would think it for the same exact reason. What was wrong when it is a human victim is the same wrong when it is a dog. So, if we can understand the first one in terms of rights, then it seems like we can understand the second one in the same way. Thinkers like Peter Singer and Tom Regan have been arguing for decades that we need to think of our obligations to members of other species in terms of animal rights.

Your body is made up of about 30 trillion cells of its own that make your heart, lungs, etc. Another 30 trillion one-celled organisms - that aren’t your cells - live in your gut and are essential for the functioning of your immune system, nervous system, and digestive system.

Is this not exactly the same with the Earth? It has its own systems as well as micro- and macrobiotic life that perform functions to keep the system healthy. Environmental ethicists call this the “Gaia hypothesis.” If we see the Earth as a complex living mechanism, then it could have rights as much as the person or the dog.

Since everyone on the planet inherits the same debt to Mother Earth, it seems that the resulting right would then have to be universal. The rights of nature must therefore be natural rights. Greta Thunberg, meet John Locke, who demands that we respect the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and a decrease in global carbon emissions.

Editor’s note:

Both Locke’s and Smith’s approaches seem insufficient as generators of rights. Smith’s is more straightforward. Humans impart or withhold rights. The obvious issue with that is there are countless examples in human society where rights were not extended to unfavored groups. In places like Weimar Germany, this lead to particularly egregious results, despite the “legality” of all that transpired. Most people would agree that some things are “just wrong,” even if they were arrived at by democratic means.

Locke’s approach avoids that pitfall but doesn’t seem to provide any evidence for what undergirds Natural Law. “We hold these truths to be self-evident” is how the Locke-inspired (second paragraph) of the Declaration of Independence begins. It would seem as though anyone could assume that any “truths” were “self-evident.” How would we know either way? There are practical implications of holding that the Earth itself has rights. If it does, do we then have the “right” to compel people to behave towards it in particular ways?

Perhaps a solution can be found seven words later in Jefferson’s Declaration “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Let’s start here. What are those rights, and how can we prove them?