VOLUME V, CHAPTER 3, SECTION 2
Rights Are in Nature, Not in the Law
The previous section set law back into the net of culture, economy, politics, and law. This section chases something more fundamental. Law speaks daily of protecting rights, but where do rights actually come from? Does law give them? The question looks simple, and the answer presses law's position down one layer further.
One. First Look at How the Word Rights Gets Used Today
Open any contemporary legal discourse, and rights are almost always tied to law. Civil rights, statutory rights, constitutional rights, as if a thing only counts as a right once it is written into a legal clause, and what is not written in does not count. Following this way of speaking, a person easily forms the impression that rights are something law grants, and you have as much as law decides to give you.
This impression rolls off the tongue so easily that almost no one stops to ask whether people had rights before law existed. Humanity has had written law for only a few thousand years, and people have lived on this earth far longer than that. In an age with not a single written statute, a person still did not want to be killed without cause, still guarded that mouthful of food, that patch of ground to sleep on. Did these things have to wait for someone to write them into a legal clause before they counted?
This is the impression this section means to loosen. Because by the ancestors' position, the matter runs the other way.
Two. The Ancestors' Position, Rights Are Not Given by Law, They Are Given by Nature
A person living needs to eat, needs to drink, needs shelter from wind and rain, needs not to be killed without cause, and none of this was handed down by any law. It comes bundled with simply being born human. These existed before law appeared. Law did not create these rights. At most law does two things. One is to confirm, writing down and guarding what a person already had. The other is to violate, taking away and pressing down what a person already had.
Put another way, law's relationship to rights has only two modes, confirming and violating, and never creating. Law is not the source of rights. It is the gatekeeper of rights. A gatekeeper can guard the gate faithfully, or can pilfer from behind it, but what sits inside the gate was never put there by the gatekeeper.
Take the plainest case. A person works hard and grows a field of grain. That grain is already his, not because some law wrote that property is protected and thereby made it his. Law writing that clause is confirming. Law changing one day to say all grain is confiscated is violating. In both cases, whose the grain truly is never changes. What changes is only whether the gatekeeper is doing his job.
Three. A Line from Laozi Sets the Root of Rights Back Into Heaven's Way
Around 500 BC, Laozi wrote the line cited earlier.
Heaven's way takes from what has too much and adds to what has too little. Laozi, Daodejing, Chapter 77.
Heaven's way, at root, aims at evenness. Every person born into the world should by rights receive roughly an equal share, a share of the right to live, a share of the right not to be wronged at will. This share comes from heaven's way, not from any law of the human world. The previous section noted that man's way often runs the reverse, taking from those with too little to serve those who already have too much, stripping the weak of their little to offer up to the strong. But even when man's way leans this far off course, it changes nothing about where that share comes from. Its root sits in heaven's way, not in a legal clause.
So the root of rights is planted in natural law, planted in the very first layer set down in the first section. However law is written, it is only adding branches and leaves on top of that root. Law can protect this share, law can wound this share, but law simply cannot conjure this share out of nothing.
Hidden here too is the deepest root of the equality of rights. The share heaven's way gives each person is, at root, roughly equal. No one is born entitled to more, no one is born entitled to less. That later ages split people into ranks of noble and lowly is man's way leaning off course, not heaven's original intent. So the line that all are equal before the law, taken as nothing more than law's own gift, sits too shallow. Its real root lies in that originally equal distribution belonging to heaven's way.
Four. A Line from Mencius Gives This Share Its Full Weight
Around 300 BC, Mencius wrote the line cited earlier.
The people are the most valuable, the altars of the state come next, and the ruler is the least important. Mencius, Mencius, Devoting the Heart, Part Two.
The people being valuable is not a nobility handed down by some ruler's grace. The people are valuable to begin with. Mencius placed the people above the state and above the ruler, which is to say that the weight an ordinary person carries simply by being born outweighs the machinery of state, and outweighs even the one who holds power. The state and the law exist in order to protect that weight. That weight does not exist to be handed out as charity by the state and the law. Whoever reverses that order has mistaken the servant for the master.
Mencius held this layer more firmly than anyone. Meeting King Hui of Liang and King Xuan of Qi, he never once lifted a ruler to the highest place. Instead he reminded them again and again that once the people's hearts scatter, the state cannot be held. In his eyes both the ruler and the state were tools serving the weight that belongs to the people. A worn-out tool can be replaced. That weight cannot be touched.
Five. If Law Calls Itself the Source of Rights, That Is the Servant Posing as the Master
Reversing this layer carries real consequences. If a group truly believed that rights are given by law, that would mean whoever can change the law can take your rights back at any moment. Written into the clause today, you have it. Struck out tomorrow, you do not. The most fundamental thing a person has would be tied entirely to someone else's pen.
Turn it around, and if a group remembers that rights are in nature, not in law, then even on the day a law deletes some right, people's hearts still know clearly that what was deleted is not the right itself, it is law failing its duty to confirm and guard it. That right still sits with heaven's way, still belongs to every person as it should, only it is, for the moment, unguarded. This one difference in belief is the line that decides whether a group can still stand up straight when facing a bad law.
History has no shortage of such moments. A single bad law comes down and wipes out something some group ought to have. If everyone believed that law says it is gone, so it is gone, that group could only bow its head and accept it. But as long as someone still remembers that the root of that thing sits in heaven, not in the law, that bad law cannot press the human heart down for long. Sooner or later, people push it back. A legal clause can delete words. It cannot delete the older ledger kept inside the human heart.
Six. Turn the Camera West, and It Touches the Same Layer
Around 1690, Locke spoke of natural rights, that a person's life, liberty, and property exist prior to government, and that government is set up to protect these, not to hand them out as charity. In 1776, the American Declaration of Independence carried a widely known line.
All men are created equal. The Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration goes on to say that people are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that government's just powers derive from the consent of the governed. Locke and the Declaration both set the order plainly. First comes what a person ought to have, then comes government and law, and government and law exist to guard that. Should they instead turn and seize it, the governed have grounds to withdraw their consent. Whether it is called endowed by the creator, or given by heaven's way as the ancestors said, the two languages point to the same thing. What a person ought to have comes from a place above law and government, not beneath them. East and West each found their own way to this layer. It is close to the thing itself, and there is no need to argue over who arrived first, or who stands higher.
Seven. This Ruler Connects Straight Back to Volume IV's Tormenting No One
Volume IV set a layer, that good governance must torment no one, must not make trouble for people simply living their honest lives. Applied to law, tormenting no one means law keeping to its own duty as gatekeeper, confirming and guarding the share each person naturally carries, not taking without cause what a person ought to have.
A ruler was given earlier for whether a law stands right, by looking at whether it shelters people. This section sharpens that ruler a notch further, looking at whether it shelters what a person ought to have. Law that confirms this share, that guards this share, stands right. Law that instead seizes this share, that shaves down this share, however complete its procedure or grand its signboard, has already gone from gatekeeper to a thief guarding his own theft.
This ruler works well because it does not read a law's title, it reads only where the law lands. A law can carry a loud name, anti-discrimination, antitrust, social security, and if it truly lands on sheltering what an ordinary person ought to have, it is tormenting no one. Another law can carry a name neutral in every syllable, and still land on guarding what those who already hold more keep holding, blocking the road of those who were cheated from getting their own back. That law is tormenting people. The reasonable distribution set in Volume IV also depends on this kind of law to backstop it. Catching people in that backstop is sheltering. Letting them fall through, or worse, backstopping the wrong way, is seizing.
Eight. But Nature Giving This Share Does Not Mean It Arrives in Hand Automatically
A sober line needs adding here. Heaven's way gives each person a share, but the human world holds both the strong and the weak, and the strong side is always ready to seize the weak side's share too. Precisely because that force of seizing is real, law is needed as a gatekeeper, to confirm this share, to block that seizing. If law does its duty, this share holds. If law fails its duty, or worse, aids the seizing, this share does not hold.
So rights being in nature is a plain truth, but for that truth to land in the human world, it still has to pass through a whole set of human-made matters, who legislates to confirm it, who quietly seizes it, what the weak do once it has been seized. These are exactly what the next part will unfold, section by section. This section only plants the root firmly. The root of rights is in heaven. The work of guarding it is in the human world.
So do not hear this section as an empty comfort. Rights being in nature does not mean a person gets that share just by lying down. Quite the opposite, precisely because it can be seized at any moment, a person needs all the more to see clearly where it comes from, so as to know, when it is seized, where to demand it back, and on what grounds. Seeing the root in heaven's way is what lets a person's back straighten.
Nine. The Position Set by This Section
This section sets the ninth layer. Rights are in nature, not in law. Law does not create rights, it can only confirm rights, or violate rights. This layer carries the first section's claim that natural law is the highest position of law forward, and lands it on rights. What a person ought to have comes from heaven's way, and law is the gatekeeper, not the one who issues it. Hold this layer together with the ones before it. Natural law is the highest position of law, and a right is exactly that natural-law share landing on each individual person. Law is wei, a man-made matter, so it can guard this share, and it can also wound it. Layer locking into layer, all saying the same thing, that above law there is still heaven, and beneath law a person still keeps the share that was always theirs.
Laozi spoke of heaven's way taking from what has too much to add to what has too little. Mencius spoke of the people being most valuable. Locke spoke of natural rights. The Declaration of Independence spoke of all men created equal. Across more than two thousand years, East and West, one and the same vein, rights sit above law, not beneath it. Hold this layer firmly, and from now on, whenever you read a law claiming to grant a right, ask one more question. Is it truly confirming what a person ought to have, or is it borrowing the name of granting to shave down and seize what was already theirs?
The next section is the capstone of this run, living law, in a world where no one is perfect, how a person lives with clear eyes inside the law's net. Carry every tool set firm across these nine layers, and walk into the next section.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section Three. The Living Law. How a Person Lives Inside the Web in a World Where No One Is Perfect.