The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously derided the entire conception of “human rights” as “nonsense upon stilts.” I’d submit that a political system built on the idea that citizens have inalienable rights that no legitimate government can violate has shown itself to have quite a lot of utility. Today, though, people use the language of “rights” in totally muddled and illegitimate ways. Sen. Bernie Sanders came fairly close to winning the Democratic nomination for 2020 by peppering his stump speeches with various assertions that things such as “a good job” and internet access are “a human right,” as contrasted with a mere “privilege.” What he meant was “entitlement.” Classifying your own opinion as supporting some new “right” tends to be a way of classifying any other political opinion as heresy against an unstated dogma.
In the magazine of earth sciences, Eos, we hear about the new “Declaration of the Rights of the Moon” made on behalf of “we, the people of Earth.” A consortium of scientists is trying to assert the “fundamental rights” of the Moon, discordantly echoing the famous 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man that Thomas Jefferson consulted on in Paris. The Moon’s rights, apparently, “arise from its existence in the universe,” and they include “the right to be defined as a self-sustaining, intelligent, cohesive, intact lunar ecosystem, beyond current human comprehension” and “the right to remain a forever peaceful celestial entity, unmarred by human conflict or warfare.” Eos quotes an expert who mixes these legalisms with the weirdly prevalent mystical belief that word choices rather than incentives and thoughts subconsciously determine political behavior: “The Moon might not have inhabitants or biological ecosystems — or, at least, we haven’t found any yet — but that doesn’t mean it is a ‘dead rock,’ as it is sometimes described. ‘Once you see something as dead, then it limits the way you engage with it.’”
Scott Page, the one actual legal expert that Eos consulted in its coverage of the declaration, was hilariously deflating and worth quoting in full: “The idea that the Moon as an inanimate object possesses fundamental rights as a result of its existence in the universe doesn’t make any sense. Rights are something which attach to human persons. We can have an argument about animal rights, but this is saying that there should be something called rock rights — that a lunar rock has a right. It’s an interesting metaphor, but it doesn’t have any legal foundation, and it’s politically meaningless.”
People believe in absurdities about how the laws of war or international law will have some real effect in the world, while Syria’s Bashar Assad drops chlorine barrel bombs on civilians and China annexes the coastal waters of the Philippines over a U.N. court’s ruling. The point is that people can theorize as many rights as they like, but legal declarations are only as good as the power that backs them up. The scientists who drafted the Declaration of the Rights of the Moon think they can assure peace in space with a document. Clearly, they don’t know that war was ruled internationally illegal here on Earth in 1928 by the Kellogg-Briand Pact, otherwise known as the “General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy.” Signatories included the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan. And yet, you may have noticed, Earth did not remain “unmarred by human conflict or warfare” between those states since 1928. By all means, revere great historical documents. But don’t forget what matters when it comes to rights is not writing them down — it’s enforcing them.
