Writing every day for a week has made me aware that I have a propensity to get kind of… serious? didactic? like I’m writing some kind of college-essay-meets-Forbes-think-piece? That doesn’t feel very much like me. So it will be interesting to see if I can write about things I’m interested in without abandoning the ‘pragmatic optimist with a sort-of dark/dry sense of humour’ outlook I have in actual life.
Recently I have been thinking about the idea of ‘rights.’ I’ve spent a lot of my life in contexts where there was a stated goal of defending/expanding rights, I have some ambivalence towards the concept, and I’m curious why.
Recently I read the book Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene, who describes himself as a Utilitarian, and also a leftist. While much of the book was a little too caught up in the Philosophy 101 of the trolley problem, I found his argument about the idea of ‘rights’ thought provoking.
When, and why, do the rights of the individual take precedence over the greater good? Every major moral issue—abortion, affirmative action, higher versus lower taxes, killing civilians in war, sending people to fight in war, rationing resources in healthcare, gun control, the death penalty—was in some way about the (real or alleged) rights of some individuals versus the (real or alleged) greater good… There are times when a deep pragmatist should feel free to speak of rights—and not just legal rights but moral rights. These times, however, are rarer than we think. If we are truly interested in persuading our opponents with reason, then we should eschew the language of rights. This is, once again, because we have no non-question-begging (and non utilitarian) way of figuring out which rights really exist and which rights take precedence over others.
In the United States, property ‘rights’ take precedence over other rights rather frequently. For the first part of the nation’s history, this property included people, which meant that the way the law around property worked had to accommodate the extreme removal of ‘rights’ for a huge number of people.
David Graeber has a lot to say on this:
Thomas Jefferson, that owner of many slaves, chose to begin the Declaration of Independence by directly contradicting the moral basis of slavery, writing “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights …” thus undercutting simultaneously any argument that Africans were racially inferior, and also that they or their ancestors could ever have been justly and legally deprived of their freedom. In doing so, however, he did not propose some radically new conception of rights and liberties. Neither have subsequent political philosophers. For the most part, we’ve just kept the old ones, but with the word “not” inserted here and there. Most of our most precious rights and freedoms are a series of exceptions to an overall moral and legal framework that suggests we shouldn’t really have them in the first place…
We are so used to the idea of “having” rights–that rights are something one can possess–that we rarely think about what this might actually mean… Historically, there is a simple–if somewhat disturbing–answer to this. Those who have argued we are the natural owners of our rights and liberties have mainly been interested in asserting that we are fre to give them away, or even sell them.
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Honor and Degradation
In most cases, when we create rights, they are subject to all kinds of subjective evaluation and disagreement about what they mean. For that reason, ‘rights’ are really better articulated in the negative, not as ‘you have the right to do something,’ but more like ‘no one has the right to stop you from doing something.’ This seems to require more disambiguation.
It’s perhaps difficult to talk about rights without making people with strong views angry, because rights are usually at the heart of polarizing arguments. I’m hearing my friends in my mind right now, saying “WHAT? You don’t believe in human rights?’
That seems like a weird view for someone who started an Amnesty International group in high school, has been active in queer organizations and cares deeply for freedom and self-determination. I think a lot about how incredibly layered our systems are with dominance, violence, and oppression.
And I also am naturally oriented to think about humans as not exactly divinely inspired or inherently moral or maybe just capable of getting out of our own myopia when it comes to our collective sense of being. At this point in our species-level development, we seem to me to be beautiful, capable of compassion, wildly creative, collaborative in impressive ways, short-sighted, impatient, and at least tending towards an overall narcissism that has produced many ways that we could cause our own extinction, after killing off the majority of diverse life on the planet. Did I say I was an optimist?
If we have “rights,” who decides what they are, who sets the criteria for whether they have been met, who is responsible if the rights aren’t met? What we’re actually talking about feels like a mish-mash of different categories, sometimes with conflicts that are unresolvable because they can be viewed from different categories
- “clearly this is beneficial for an individual on every available measure” (such as being not-killed or assaulted, physically healthy, housed, or able to access nourishment)
- “things that have evidence of being important to our sense of well-being” (acceptance of our identity insofar as it doesn’t infringe on someone else’s well-being, autonomy, ability to access education, having the option to pursue interests)
- “things that are important given the power structures in play” (access to jobs, property rights, perhaps even free speech?)
- “things that are important based on moral structures that are not necessarily universal” (fetal rights, right to reject laws based on belief structures)
Things get even muddier when we have categories based on identities themselves, largely made up of groups of subjects who have been denied opportunities or legal protection in the past (women, LGBTQAI+, animals, etc.). I am sure there are philosophy or sociology classes where this is articulated way more effectively than I am capable of.
Instead of thinking about rights, which to me take the conversation into a conceptual place that gets argumentative quickly, we should be taking the approach john a. powell suggests in his work on Targeted Universalism. Where do we want collectively to be (as a small community, locally, nationally, globally) and how would we actually accomplish that? Presuming that the outcome is favourable and desirable for everyone?
Of course, this gets tricky at scale, since ideally those working towards the future are the same people as those who are deciding what a good future looks like. For that reason, large-scale progress has to focus on more universally-agreed upon goals, like human survival, and perhaps Maslow-ian needs.
One thing that seems maybe obvious: there’s not really a future where ‘convenient consumerism will be sustainable. I don’t have a ‘right’ to get everything I want when I want it, and as we spend more and more of our resources trying to support that ideal anyway, we’re burning down the house from the inside and out.
This post hasn’t got a conclusion, I want to think more about this idea of ‘rights’ and how we can repair the harms we’ve done without any rights as a guide. In other words, think less about rights and more about responsibilities. Without getting too ponderous! This is the other side of the solopsism, the idea that everything depends on us, on me. It does in a way, but only for my own experience, a dream.