I recently re-read Isaac Asimov's Robot novels, featuring Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw. This reminds me of an idea that has been bouncing around in my head for a couple of decades now, modeling the concept of rights after Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. For those unfamiliar with the concept, Asimov wrote about robots programmed to follow several rules so that they were not a danger to humans, the opposite of a recurring sci-fi theme of artificial intelligences gone wild. Those laws were as follows:
1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
I consider the purpose of government to be the resolution of the conflict of rights. We are not atomistic individuals theoretically capable of existing self-sufficiently and completely independent, but mashed together in society with conflicting wants and needs. Politics is, as Harold Lasswell famously defined it, the determination of "who gets what, when, and how". But how do we determine which right is supreme when opposing rights conflict? I saw the concept of life, liberty, and property (or "pursuit of happiness" in Thomas Jefferson's formulation) as useful and tried to arrange them similar to Asimov's laws:
1. All humans have a right to life. A right to life can be viewed to be more than just life vs. death but also a right to a minimal standard of material well-being that makes life worth living.
2. All humans have a right to liberty, so long as it does not conflict with another human's right to life.
3. All humans have a right to property (or the pursuit of happiness), so long as it does not conflict with another human's right to life or liberty.
Using these laws, it would be permissible to restrict civil liberties when life is endangered, such as times of war. Taxation can be viewed as a technical violation of a right to property that is justifiable when it is for the purpose of protecting life or liberty.
Many of Asimov's short stories involve dilemmas faced by conflicts between the Three Laws of Robotics. In "Runaround", the first story with an explicit description of the laws, a robot is affected by casually stated orders and a strengthened imperative for self-protection because the robot is expensive, a conflict between a weak Second Law impulse and a strong Third Law impulse.
I suggest that analogous cases may occur in my proposed hierarchy of rights. The degree to which liberty and property rights may be infringed upon to protect life as a matter of national security can be greater in times of war than in times of peace. To what degree in either case is a matter of debate, but differing circumstances can require different thresholds. What exactly constitutes a right to life is another topic that is debatable.
This hierarchy can be seen as a part of a preference for balancing tests over bright lines, a legal philosophy debate played out in recent years in the Supreme Court between Justice Stephen Breyer and Justice Antonin Scalia. The trend in recent decades has been towards balancing tests.
This schema places property rights at the bottom of the hierarchy of rights. This contradicts the libertarian fetish for property rights, which goes so far as to have life and liberty flowing from property through an interpretation of the body as property and a belief in having the right to do with one's property as one wishes.
Despite years of thinking about this, I have yet to decide whether this is merely a useful heuristic (and I find it very useful in determining my opinion on what government ought to do) or is actually a solid philosophical idea that can be part of a reasoned political philosophy. I'm throwing this out there in the hopes that someone can help me get past that roadblock.