The Fragility of Privilege

Rights are not a gift from government. They are a claim built into what it means to be human. You can suspend them by force, fail to honor them in law, or ignore them in practice. But you cannot erase their source without denying the person who bears them. That is the heart of the matter, and one of the oldest arguments in political thought.

The Origins of Inalienable Rights

Long before the Enlightenment, Stoic philosophers taught that there exists a law written into the nature of human reason, a moral order that binds every person simply because they are capable of understanding it. Roman jurists later called this the ius gentium, the law common to all nations. Its foundation was universality: some norms begin not at the border, but in the human being.

Medieval thinkers like Aquinas expanded that vision. Human goods such as life, knowledge, community, and integrity were seen as universal and intelligible to reason. Laws that violated these goods might exist, but they could never be just. From this came a lasting distinction between what is enacted and what is owed.

John Locke gave the idea modern form. In his Second Treatise of Government, he wrote that “being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Government, in this view, does not create rights. It exists to secure them. If a state can grant rights, it can also take them away, which means they were never rights to begin with.

Immanuel Kant reached the same conclusion from a different direction. For Kant, a person is never a means but always an end. To treat someone merely as a means is to violate the moral law itself. Translated into political language, rights become the boundaries that protect human dignity. Dignity does not depend on citizenship, so neither can the boundaries that guard it.

After the devastation of two world wars, the world tried to say this once and for all. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins not with nationality or creed but with being: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” The language is one of recognition, not invention.

Across centuries, the core idea has never changed. There is something in human nature, in reason, conscience, and agency, that makes certain claims morally nontransferable. Rights exist because we do.

What “Inalienable” Really Means

“Inalienable” does not mean untouchable. It means they cannot be rightly surrendered or revoked. You can sell a car, but not yourself. You can delegate a task, but not the essence of your freedom, without undoing the very agreement that pretends to authorize it. When law has claimed otherwise, in slavery, forced confessions, or coerced sterilizations, the verdict of history is clear. Those laws were wrong in principle before they were wrong in retrospect.

The Confusion Between Rights and Privileges

The modern confusion lies in mistaking existence for enforcement. Rights exist by nature; enforcement exists by design. States are tools we build to protect those rights, not to decide who counts as human. When people insist that only citizens “have” rights, they smuggle the limits of a political instrument into the nature of a person. From there, exclusion becomes policy. And policies, unlike principles, shift with power.

The Collapse of Privilege Systems

Every hierarchy built on conditional worth eventually consumes itself. The boundaries of exclusion always stretch. Foreigners become dissenters. Dissenters become the disloyal. The disloyal become anyone who refuses to conform. Each emergency that narrows the circle becomes the new normal, and each exception made in the name of safety teaches power that principles are negotiable. Those who once applauded the exclusions believe themselves safe because they resemble the majority in faith, in race, or in politics, until the circle contracts again and finds them outside it.

History repeats this pattern with cruel precision. Jim Crow segregation, apartheid South Africa, the Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany, each began with the promise of order and ended in moral collapse. Once privilege replaces rights, citizenship becomes a ladder, and ladders always invite kicking. A society built on hierarchy inevitably turns inward. It consumes those it once claimed to protect.

The Moral Architecture at Stake

There are only two coherent starting points. Either we begin with the human being and move outward to the citizen, or we begin with the citizen and decide who qualifies as human. The first model places government in service to dignity. The second places dignity at the mercy of government. The second can feel tidy, but it is built on sand because it makes worth negotiable, and anything negotiable can be taken.

Universality feels demanding because it imposes responsibility. To affirm the equal claim of others is to relinquish the luxury of indifference. Yet the alternative, a world where rights are rationed, carries a cost most people never see until it reaches them. Once exceptions become habit, they eventually come for everyone without the leverage to resist. That includes the very people who once felt protected.

So the question is not theoretical. It is personal.
Do we want a world where our safety depends on category, or one where it flows from what we are?

If rights are only for some, what makes us so sure we will always be among them?