We have, in Canada, enshrined in our Constitution, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Charter, among other things, guarantees any person in Canada certain fundamental freedoms including: freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of belief, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of peaceful assembly, and freedom of association.
Canada, unlike the US, also has a limitations clause (Section 1), that these freedoms are "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society." For instance, inciting hatred against identifiable groups or publishing child pornography are not protected by these fundamental freedoms.
I must admit to be a little puzzled at Freedom of Thought. What would Canada look like if that particular fundamental freedom were removed? After all the state has no idea what someone is thinking and no definitive way to find out.
As there is and never has been any state power over thought, why include it as a freedom? Even North Korea, which controls every facet of its peoples' lives, cannot know or control what those people are thinking. Sure the serfs prostrate themselves before Kim Jon Il's portraits, but how do the rulers know that the guy in the seventeenth row, fifth one in, isn't thinking, while groveling, "Geez, what a douchebag."
How would they possibly regulate thought anyway? Without Freedom of Thought, I suppose they could constitutionally pass a law making it illegal to imagine a colander. Wouldn't that be interesting. Were they imagining a future where the imagination could be read, and safeguarding against that? Were the writers of the Charter mindful of Orwell's of "Thoughtcrime" in his cautionary tale 1984? What were they thinking?
I also note that the Canadian Constitution contains no right to life itself. Interesting. The founding ideals of the American Declaration of Independence are the rights of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." (Just the pursuit of happiness; apparently actual happiness is unconstitutional.) Compare that to steadfast, boring old Canada's ultimate ideals of "peace order and good governance." Interesting.
In a related note does anyone know the difference between a right and a freedom? I was once told that a freedom guarantees that the state will not interfere (so if you say you don't like the current government, they will not, for example, arrest you), whereas a right is a guarantee the state will interfere (so the state will actively intervene against others threatening your freedom of expression).
This seemed to make intuitive sense to me, however I ran into some folks who were offended by that interpretation because it defined rights and freedoms in reference to the State. Fundamental rights and freedoms, they argued, arose not from the State but from being human. This is expressed in the US Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." Beautifully written.
So, this view holds, despite the fact that a given state does not grant human rights (such as in Syria, where the security forces have turned on their own citizens to horrific effect), those people still have these fundamental rights and freedoms. A fat lot of good it does them; a right won't stop a bullet.
If a person is born with these rights--if they are, in fact, unalienable--then where are they? I can see a baby's nose and her cute little toes. I can hear her heartbeat and feel her warmth. But in which toe can I find the right to freedom of conscience? What instrument can I use to find the gene that expresses her freedom of belief?
The idea that we are born with these rights is essentially metaphysical. A human right, by this definition, is not rational, but metaphysical. A freedom is not empirical, but ineffable.
More importantly, who put that freedom there? Where did it come from? Societal mores and ethics change incredibly over time and space--every virtue was once vice and vice versa. Yet these Human Rights are specific, unyielding, and absolute. (NB Brad H--note the use of the Oxford comma!) To my mind then, you can't say that every human is born with human rights without positing the existence of an Absolute Good, which is tantamount to God. Perhaps that is why ,in its preamble, the Constitution of Canada recognizes the supremacy of God. It's an inexorable precursor to an unalienable human right.
The Darwinian approach to rights is different. In this model rights started out as good ideas, which grew to habits, and evolved to tradition, and then were codified in law and ultimately became morals. The idea here is that morals are "good" because civilizations that adopted these morals were more successful than civilizations that did not. There is, for example, a commandment that says "Thou shalt not kill." My brother is a bit of a biblical scholar and he informed me that a more accurate translation would be "Thou shalt not murder." Every high-functioning civilization I can think of makes allowances to kill--war being the classic example.
However, a society cannot function if people can kill each other arbitrarily, without consent from the state. So the prohibition against murder makes a society, from a Darwinian perspective, more fit to survive. I would argue (without having the time to research this extensively) that contemporary states that that assert fundamental human rights are more successful, in terms of both peace, order and good governance and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Historian Will Durant agrees:
The development of external danger and competition unified the members of a group into some measure of fellow-feeling (sympathy), group-feeling (kindness), sociability, and mutual aid; those simple virtues... were really social necessities for group survival; and the strange paradox appeared that the very violence of competition and strife among societies was the cause of cooperation and peace within; it was war, or the possibility of war, that make morality, as it made morale. ...In the light of this biological approach it becomes sufficiently obvious that the natural and inevitable basis and definition of morality is the cooperation of the part with the whole
Nietzsche made a differentiation between the two types of good. There's good=successful, as in being a "good hockey player," and there's good=virtuous as in being a "good man." The Darwinian model says that rights and freedoms are good in the former sense; the Absolute Good model, in the latter sense.
This is exemplified in the doves versus hawk game in fundamental games theory. A dove will never fight for food and a hawk will always fight for food. The perfect civilization would be all doves, but it is unstable; a single hawk would wreak havoc. John Lennon could have sung "Imagine being able to perpetuate indefinitely the unstable solution of an all-dove society." Hard to rhyme I guess. The optimal solution is a some mixture of hawks and doves based on the boundary conditions.
In the Darwinian model, the precursor to human rights is the effective rule of law (law, being essentially, codified morality). And I also note that the other ideal, besides the supremacy of God, to which the Constitution of Canada commits itself in its preamble is "the rule of law." They covered both bases--the Absolute Good model and the Darwinian model! Maybe those drafters of the Constitution are more clever than I give them credit for. But I still have my questions about Freedom of Thought. You're free to think what you will of that.
