The UN Makes Happiness an Entitlement

Looking at an article on the recent U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development, previously mentioned at VFR, I came upon this sentence:

[The globalist bureaucrats’] first premise is Principle 1 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development: “Human beings … are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature.”

As I read this formulation I knew there was something seriously wrong with it, but for a moment I couldn’t articulate what it was. After all, I thought (along somewhat muddled Jeffersonian lines), a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature is a good thing, isn’t it? It’s something that people require by the very fact of their being human, isn’t it? So isn’t it a right proceeding from our nature, just like the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

Then the fog lifted and I saw what’s going on here: the U.N. has illegitimately combined the Jeffersonian idea of unalienable rights with the Aristotelian idea of the good. A healthy and productive life is, we would all agree, a good. It is, moreover, an especially valuable good because it represents the sum and condition of many other goods. As such, it is similar to Aristotle’s idea of the highest good, happiness, which he defines as the exercise of one’s talents along lines of excellence, as the true fulfillment of one’s nature. Partial goods, such as knowledge, health, wealth, and friends, as well as the highest good, which is happiness, are goals that the virtuous man aims at. But the global bureaucrats are telling us that the highest good is not something we should aim at; rather, like the right not to be imprisoned or to have our property seized without due process of law, it is something to which we are entitled. They are saying that we are entitled to a productive life, that we are entitled to the fulfillment of our nature, that we are entitled to happiness. And since a substantive entitlement implies a substantive obligation, it must be the obligation of all the governments in the world—meaning the obligation of all of us—to ensure the happiness of every human being on earth. In practice, of course, this means the obligation of everyone living in the functioning, free, law-abiding, and successful countries to ensure the happiness of everyone living in the disfunctional, unfree, lawless, and unsuccessful countries.

By transforming the procedural right to pursue a healthy and productive life (or, rather, the right not to be arbitrarily prevented from pursuing it) into the substantive right to have a healthy and productive life, and by placing that substantive right in a global context of obligations that are intended to become more and more enforceable over time, the U.N. has enunciated the essential principles of a world socialist tyranny.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 08, 2002 12:46 AM | Send