Having looked at rights in general and established proprietà or jural possession as the principle of derivation for rights, the natural thing to do is actually to derive specific rights. There are two kinds of derived rights, individual right and social right, depending on whether we consider the person in a dissociated way or in terms of society, so we turn to individual rights. 'Individual' here does not mean isolated or atomistic; since any person's right depends on the duties of other people, individual rights have to consider persons as co-existing with other persons, and only separate insofar as their particular interests are separate. There are two kinds of individual rights, depending on whether the relevant title arises from the human nature or from the human action of the person who has the right. The former, arising from human nature, are connatural rights, and the latter, acquired rights.
One of Rosmini's major concerns is to oppose those who hold that all individual rights are acquired. If we consider a newborn baby, it has done nothing to acquire any rights; but if we deny the infant rights, we have an absurd situation of having an intelligent being with no rights. It is true that we could have duties to infants without the infants having any rights, since rights require duties but not vice versa. But we do in fact recognize infants as having rights despite not having done anything to acquire them, and all attempts to deny that they have rights make one of two assumptions that we can see from other cases are not reliable: they make the possession of rights depend on being conscious of having them, and/or they treat having rights as implying that one knows them specifically as moral. In practice, we mostly recognize rights by recognizing the suffering of persons. If we have a person, that is, a being that is capable of understanding and will, even if only in the barest way, and can recognize them as suffering, we take other persons to have the duty not to make them suffer, in such a way as to recognize them as having rights.
When we recognize that there are connatural rights of some kind, i.e., rights where the title is innate to us, and consider the newborn infant again, we can start identifying what these rights are by asking about the proprietà of the infant. Personal activity is an element of rights, as we previously saw, but the personal activity of infants does not really extend beyond their own bodies and spirits, unless you count the air they breathe (cf. p. 20). Thus the connatural rights we see have a formal and material aspect. That is to say: personhood and humanity. One's own person, by definition, is part of one's proprietà. It is the center of the sphere of what is one's own. But it's not strictly that we have a right to our personhood; rather, our personhood itself is subsistent right (p. 21). This is tied to what we think of as human dignity; our first and most fundamental right is simply ourselves, considered as our own self. It is the seat of jural freedom, our liberty to do as we please within the realm of our rights, and anchors all proprietà. This is the formal aspect of every connatural right. The material aspect is due to the human nature that the person has, the faculties and capabilities that are natural and necessary to us. It is thus the seat of proprietà.
Rosmini argues that human persons, as such, have three ways of engaging in the world: (1) through the intellect, by our share in truth; (2) through the will, by virtue; and (3) through feeling, by enjoying bliss, i.e., satisfactory completion in things other than ourselves. "Truth, virtue and bliss are therefore the three terms of the human person, or rather of person in general; they are the purest founts from which flows to person its own excellence, its dignity and its supremacy" (p. 31). These are therefore the three points at which the person as such can be injured, in the literal sense of having our rights violated. With regard to the first, truth, someone can try to damage our understanding, as when someone attempts tto make us drunk so that we won't understand something, or they can violate our jural freedom, as when someone attempts to interfere through malicious caprice with our ability to know, or they can try to harm our actual possession of truth, as when someone lies to us. Likewise, with regard to virtue, someone can try to damage our disposition to virtue, for instance, by trying to put us in situations that erode our ability to act virtuously, or they can violate our jural freedom, as when someone tries to limit our ability to do the kind of training required for ability, or they can harm our us in our virtuous action, as when someone attempts to seduce us to do something wrong. Similarly, with respect to bliss, people can attempt to deprive others of present or future fulfillment, or to impede it, or to provoke the opposite. In all of these, someone is trying to injure either our ability, or our choice and action, or our possession of something fundamental to life as a person.
Likewise, when we turn to human nature, we find connatural right concerned with proprietà, which is injured when someone acts to our personal extension by way of our own human capabilities. The most obvious violation of the right to proprietà of our human capabilities is slavery, the treatment of another person as continually existing for one's own ends, and Rosmini argues on this basis that slavery is so injurious to human rights that it should be abolished immediately -- even gradual abolition is intolerable.
It's important to grasp that for interferences with these things (our capacity for truth, virtue, and bliss, or our use of our capabilities) to be violations of rights, they must do so under conditions that relate to the features belonging to rights. It is, of course, possible to interfere with these accidentally or completely unknowingly; this is obviously not a violation of rights. Even deliberate harms are not necessarily violations of rights. If you deliberately harm yourself on any of these points, you have done a moral wrong, since you have a duty to fulfill your promise as a human person, but not all immoral acts are violations of rights. You can do yourself wrong, but you cannot violate your own rights, because you have authority over how they are to be exercised. Likewise, if you fully consent to someone harming you in these ways, they have still done moral wrong and violated their moral duty to you, but they have not injured your right. Another way to put it is that they have violated their moral duty to you, but not their jural duty to you. They are doing wrong to you, but they are not invading your proprietà, because they are (so to speak) invited.
Allowing for this, there are nine kinds of violation of connatural rights, or immediate injuries:
an attempt to deprive us of truth
an attempt to deprive us of virtue
an attempt to deprive us of fulfillment or bliss
an attempt to interfere with the power to achieve truth
an attempt to interfere with the power to achieve virtue
an attempt to interfere with the power to achieve bliss
unjust prevention of those acts of our jural freedom that would aid us in achieving truth
unjust prevention of those acts of our jural freedom that would aid us in achieving virtue
unjust prevention of those acts of our jural freedom that would aid us in achieving bliss
In each of these case, our rights with the respect to the powers, acts, and objects in question give rise to the right to use force in defence of both ourselves and justice with regard to truth, virtue, and human fulfillment. The exact extent of the force to which we have a right depends on the serious of the problem with which we have to deal, and can range from simply speaking the truth about it, to reproving wrongdoing, to imposing punishment, to enforcing restoration. There is also inevitably the complication in that it is easy to overestimate the extent to which one's right to use force applies when one's own rights, or the rights of people important to one, are being violated; another's violation of your rights doesn't give you free license to violate theirs, for instance, nor to do things that harm the common good or involve actions morally wrong in themselves.
Rosmini argues that all rights, connatural or acquired, fall into four classes:
(1) rights consisting directly in proprietà or jural possession of some good
(2) rights consisting in absolute jural freedom, that is, our capacity to act in ways directly relevant to our persons and proprietà
(3) rights consisting relative jural freedom, that is, our actions with regard to our persons and proprietà, protecting them from the error or stupidity of others
(4) rights for force and sanction.
He therefore divides our specific connatural rights according to these classes:
Connatural Rights of the First Class. "When we are born we have [proprietà], or jural possession, of our total self. All the natural activities, faculties, powers, forces, together with ever natural good, are connatural rigths; they cannot be weakened or taken from us" (p. 80). We therefore have (I) a right not be pushed into evil with regard to truth, virtue, and fulfillment. This comes with at least four rights: the right not to be misled by word or action in necessary truths; the right not to be entrapped or provoked into vice; the right not to be made unhappy by trial and test of moral strength; and the right to reputation, praise, glory, and reward of virtue. We also have (II) a right not to suffer attacks on our human nature, which comes with a large number of lesser rights, diversified by our various human capabilities.
Connatural Rights of the Second Class. "An innate absolute jural freedom exists which includes all acts of right have a jural title to the rights mentioned in the previous class" (p. 80). Thus we have (I) title to all acts tending toward truth, virtue, and fulfillment. This gives us a number of rights: the right to meditate on and communicate truth; the right to search for truth in reasonable ways; the right to judge what is just and decent as best we may; the right to do what is just and truthful in an orderly way; the right to perform virtuous acts; the right to choose the means and state of life that seem to be suited for our moral improvement. All of these rights are absolute, but qualified in that our exercise and defense of them have to respect the rights of others. We also (II) have title to all acts done with our innate human powers, where these are internal to us or, if external, necessary for our existence as human beings.
Connatural Rights of the Third Class. "We have a connatural relative freedom, that is, a right to do all that we can with the upright use of our powers unhindered by another's caprice or wickedness" (p. 82), where this does not interfere with another's proprietà or jural freedom. This class has many, many rights -- it covers the whole field of good that comes into our proprietà. Some of the more important are the right to speak and seek help, the right to bodily movement, and the right to what is both lawful and either useful or pleasant.
Connatural Rights of the Fourth Class. "Relative to the preservation of innate rights, the right of sanction is also innate, because, as we said, it is simply the 'energy present in the physical faculty which is the first constitutive element of right'" (p. 84).
Thus connatural rights, which are also call natural rights, human rights, and so forth. These serve as the general framework for acquired rights, which arise not from human personhood or human nature but from human action.
to be acquired
***
Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right, Volume 2: Rights of the Individual, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham, UK: 1993).
