How Qualified Immunity Perverts Natural Rights

The point of inalienable rights is that they exist independent of the acknowledgement of formal governing bodies. Governing bodies may choose to acknowledge the people they govern have rights, and to orient their actions around their recognition and preservation, but rights are held by the individuals because individuals are born free and independent.

There are no hive minds or oversouls. No man can look at another and know what the other is thinking or feeling. The individual nature of existence renders it impossible to see the world through anything other than personal experience. As Adam Smith so eloquently observed in the opening paragraphs of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.”

This establishes two important principles as apply to government, particularly those who wish to respect the rights of their citizens.

First, that rights must flow from the nature of individual being. The individual is identifiably distinct and, philosophically speaking, unknowable. The inability to step into the mind of another and understand the unique set of circumstances that make up his mind means no man can govern another. Individual…