Kharin
Archon
Posts: 407
Reputation: 8.29
Rate Kharin
In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
  
|
 |
Do the Right Thing
« on: 2003-10-20 06:42:23 » |
 |
Some interesting discussion points here...
October 18, 2003
Two recent court cases in the United States show how the talk of rights has gone right off. In Florida a woman confined to a wheelchair sued a bar for discrimination because they wouldn't hire her as a lap dancer. And in Ohio a mother caught breastfeeding, talking on her mobile phone and taking notes while driving at 100 kmh fought her fine in court, saying her constitutional rights were at stake.
It's true that this represents the reductio ad absurdum of rights language, but it signposts a significant development in the past 50 years. That is, the way almost any moral discourse, and especially any claim, is expressed in terms of rights.
The language of rights has become so second nature that it is hard for many to conceive that there is an issue here. Even the church, against whom the language of rights was developed, has embraced it.
What has happened? How did rights become so dominant in our moral thinking and why is it a problem?
Human rights are a vital and necessary concept without which much human progress would have stalled. The civil rights movement that fought racism in the US is an obvious example. Rights are a powerful tool against oppression. It's just that they are not the appropriate tool in every debate.
The problem is that a right is always a claim an individual or group makes against other individuals or groups, so that conflict is built in. The abortion debate shows how intractable such a problem becomes. Already a difficult area, with arguments on both sides, once these are put in terms of a woman's right to reproductive control against the foetus's right to life they become irreconcilable.
Second, rights talk can often disguise a selfish agenda, which would be revealed if other language were used. Consider how brilliantly the gun lobby in the US has employed the concept. Now people talk in all seriousness about their right to own a four-wheel-drive or buy a surrogate baby.
Further, a rights claim is supposed to be an absolute claim, in the sense that it trumps all non-rights claims. This means people often use rights talk to avoid justifying their position. It reverses the burden of proof.
Both the blurring and the clash of rights is evident in the political debate over unemployment and mutual obligation. Do people have the right to a job? It's hard to know what sort of right that could be, when people are unequally qualified and there are at least seven unemployed for every job.
What then of support for the unemployed? Given that society has the necessary resources, most people believe the jobless should be helped because the government has an obligation to ensure everyone has the opportunity to live a decent life. And correspondingly, most believe the community is entitled to expect an obligation in return, that the individual will seek work, will seek to maximise the opportunity, even will "earn" the dole with part-time work.
But Melbourne philosopher Jeremy Moss has shown that, in practice, obligation is hardly mutual. In a paper Ethics, Politics and Mutual Obligation, he argues that obligations by government, the community, business and individuals are treated very differently. Though more government money goes to business than to people on the dole, no enforceable obligations are set for business, yet individuals face harsh penalties. Moss finds a lack of mutuality in penalising people looking for work but not the organisations that find it more profitable not to provide it.
The clash here is between fundamental principles, and it creates complications to frame these in terms of rights. The first is that of dignity, treating people with respect and providing the help they need. The second is fairness: it is not fair to taxpayers if unemployed people take this help for granted and don't try to render it unnecessary.
This is further complicated by the question of personal responsibility: the old question of deserving and undeserving poor. Does the fact that someone has contributed to her own problem lessen the community's obligation? Moss believes not. Just as we wouldn't leave a negligent driver bleeding to death by the side of the road because it was her fault, so we shouldn't jettison the undeserving jobless. The principle of dignity means accepting that some will abuse the community's generosity and outweighs the principle of fairness.
The mutual obligation debate is largely built on perceptions. The government seems to believe massive numbers are rorting the system, and welfare advocates insist by far the majority would much prefer to work. Wherever the truth lies, it would be clearer and less confrontational to talk about unemployment in terms of interests and expectations than rights.
This issue also demonstrates the opposite poles from which the rights debate has been conducted for 300 years: liberalism and communitarianism.
Communitarians argue that the interests of individuals are subservient to the needs of society. Liberals take an atomistic view, in line with Margaret Thatcher's famous dictum that there is no such thing as society, only men and women. Society is an association of individuals who together can obtain goods they could not get by themselves, such as security or hospitals. Each of these individuals has a conception of the good life, which should be facilitated as far as possible without infringing the ability of others to pursue their conception. But society as a whole must have no particular conception of the good life, or this will be imposed on individuals.
Philosopher Charles Taylor has shown that this view is implausible. Society is more than a collection of individuals. The atomistic view cannot survive the important and pervasive distinction between matters that are "for me and for you", on one hand, and those that are "for us" on the other.
LINKS
The Age
It's time to reject "mutual obligation"
City Journal
Animal Rights
City Journal
Community, yes - but whose?
United Nations
Declaration of Human Rights
Institute for Communitarianism Studies
A guide to the communitarianism vision
University of Missouri
Notes on Communitarianism
Firstthings.com
The achievements of Alasdair MacIntyre
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Search by name or concept...
Bartleby
Immanuel Kant's Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission
Documents, FAQs and links
He demonstrates this with an imaginary conversation: "Fine weather we're having," I say to my neighbour. Before this he was well aware of the weather, obviously I was as well. It was a matter for him and also for me. What the conversation opener does is to make it a matter for us: we are now attending to it together.
This attending-together is not reducible to an aggregation of attendings-separately, Taylor says. The atomistic tendency is so strong we may want to put it in individual mind states: now I know he is attending and he knows I am attending, and he knows I know, and so on. But just adding these individual states doesn't get us to the shared condition where we in fact are.
Similarly with goods: some things have value to me and to you and some have value to us. Their being "for us" constitutes their value. At the simplest level, a joke is much funnier in company. At a higher level there is friendship, where what is central is just that there are common actions and meanings. And patriotism is like this, and many aspects of community, where a shared identity and working together are what count.
Liberalism can give only a reductionist account for this because the state is merely an aggregation of individuals who must preserve their autonomy against threatened encroachments.
At their doctrinal edges, communitarianism and liberalism are incompatible. But in the past 40 years, a defence of rights that goes a long way to reconciling what both hold central has developed from a surprising source: the Catholic Church.
From a staunch and scathing critic of rights as subversive of community and authority, the church has become a leading champion - and without the theological revision this reversal might suggest.
The key was the Vatican II council in the early 1960s, which brought a fundamental shift in the church's understanding of its place in a pluralistic world and which explicitly recognised freedom of religion.
Jesuit scholar David Hollenbach says the church's reconstruction of rights pivots on the traditional natural-law conviction that humans are essentially social beings. The church thus offers a communitarian alternative to liberal human rights theory.
In the Catholic view, rights do not belong to the sort of isolated pre-social individuals 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes conceived of, but to people in communities. Someone living utterly alone has no need of rights; it is in society that rights become important. Thus Vatican II still rejected the liberal emphasis on autonomy and individualism; its concept flowed from a Christian understanding of the human person, which demands that human dignity be respected.
Another consequence of a social foundation is that rights are not only political but social and economic. They specify minimum conditions for life in community, so that people are not excluded from material wellbeing or the participation in economic life needed to achieve it.
As Hollenbach says, this view of social obligation - love of neighbour - summarises the biblical vision of the moral life. "The Bible does not regard freedom as autonomous independence," he writes. "Rather liberation is into community."
The Bible, of course, does not speak of rights but the concept is there as the obverse of what it does speak about: responsibilities and obligations. The biblical insistence on the obligation to be just, tacitly implies the right to be treated justly.
English theologian J. Andrew Kirk underlines this with an instructive paraphrase of the Old Testament prophet Amos: "Hear, O countries of the Western world, this word of the Lord: you sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes (marked 'made in Brazil'). You trample the heads of the poor into the dust of the earth and turn aside the way of the afflicted. You take exactions from the poor (copper from Chile and Zambia, tin from Bolivia, coffee from Uganda, tea from Sri Lanka, fish from Peru). You have built houses of hewn stone (and filled them with trivial luxuries).
Amos and the other prophets got their message across with no mention of rights. And some philosophers simply reject the concept entirely.
Jeremy Bentham, the 18th century founder of utilitarianism, argued that values were based on pleasure and pains, which left no room for rights. "The idea of rights is nonsense, and the idea of natural rights is nonsense on stilts," he wrote.
Alasdair MacIntyre, who has done much to restore the idea of virtue as central to ethics, objects on Aristotelian grounds. He thinks rights discourse is not really a moral language at all, but an ideological club wielded to defend self-interest and secure concession.
In After Virtue, he writes: "There are no (natural) rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and unicorns" - and for the same reason, every attempt to give good reasons for believing there are such rights has failed.
Though not a relativist, MacIntyre sees morality as a "practice" learnt in a community with a tradition. The idea of universal rights ignores these historical and communal dimensions and relies again on the Hobbsian pre-social isolated individual. It leads to an individualistic understanding of morality.
Another philosophical school identifies a different problem with the dominance of rights talk: often it is simply inadequate to capture what is at stake.
French thinker Simone Weil, who described rights as a mediocre concept, said such talk made it difficult to see the real problem. "If you say to someone who has ears to hear: 'What you are doing to me is not just', you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love." But words such as "I have a right to" awaken the spirit of contention. Putting rights at the centre of social conflict inhibits any possible impulse of charity on both sides.
Melbourne University moral philosopher Christopher Cordner says the concept of rights can fail to convey a certain dimension, such as gentleness or tenderness, which is nevertheless fundamental.
Victims of child abuse, for example, often feel insulted by failure to recognise their hurt. They say practical compensation fails to engage the worst hurt and that acknowledging what happened can be the most important aspect. It's not their rights that have been violated but they themselves, and any talk of rights is secondary.
Cordner takes up this theme in his new book, Ethical Encounter: The Depth of Moral Meaning, which seeks to draw on the Platonic project and put goodness at the centre of ethics. "Goodness and the forms of love that manifest it have an altogether different register from talk of morality or even of virtue," he writes.
Moral philosophy's traditional emphasis on correct action or even virtue cannot capture something really important, something that is encapsulated by forms of love such as kindness, tenderness, compassion and gentleness that disclose in a deeper way what it is to be human.
Cordner is not hostile to rights in themselves - he acknowledges they have an important political and moral place. His concern is that the abstract legal conception of the person as bearer of rights (and duties and responsibilities) is made to do the moral work. It gives rise to a legalistic conception of the moral. Rights talk by itself misses the personal dimension of human interaction that underlies the importance of rights.
All this shows how rights - as a legal category in moral guise - can miss the mark in various ways. Rights talk today is used as a placeholder to mark what is important to people. Those who say children have rights, for example, are merely indicating it's very important we look after them. And it's hard to disagree.
Rights have become the universal discourse of claim. People make claims in rights talk because rights talk is how we make claims. This tendency reinforces the dominance of rights talk while both making it increasingly vacuous and inhibiting real discussion.
The lesson is clear: if we want to restore that perhaps mythical sense of community that people apparently pine for, then we have to wind back the sense of individual autonomy that makes a mother think it is her right to speed down the highway while breast-feeding a baby, writing notes and talking on her mobile phone.
THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
Mutual obligation:
Do the unemployed have a right to jobs? If there aren't enough jobs, do they have a right to income support? For how long, and under what conditions? Is the community entitled to expect those on support to work for it? Is the community entitled to require the unemployed to accept other obligations, such as training? Do these "rights" depend on the capacity of society to provide them? What sort of "rights" are these, and who guarantees them?
IVF for lesbians:
Clearly people can desire children, but does that confer a right? Is there any significant difference between a lesbian couple and a heterosexual couple? Is discrimination the key issue or is it nature? Do IVF children have particular rights, and what sort? What are the community's interests and rights? Should the community pick up the bill?
Sex slavery:
When women are brought into a foreign culture, raped, deliberately turned into drug addicts and forced into prostitution, is rights talk adequate to capture how they have been brutalised? Is it because they have rights that we are appalled at their treatment? Are their rights different from citizens' rights?
PHILOSOPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Ethical Encounter: The Depth of Moral Meaning, By Christopher Cordner
Cordner shows that love, in its various manifestations, and shown in human interaction, underpins our moral concepts in ways that analytic moral philosophy cannot reveal.
Claims in Conflict: Retrieving and Renewing the Catholic Human Rights Tradition, By David Hollenbach
Hollenbach looks at the Catholic tradition and the profound influence of Vatican II in turning the church into a leading rights advocate.
After Virtue, By Alasdair MacIntyre.
An influential and broad-based criticism of 20th-century moral philosophy that seeks to incorporate and move beyond Aristotle's concept of virtue.
Philosophical Arguments, By Charles Taylor
A collection of Taylor's essays dealing with communitarian and existential issues, including language and identity.
This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/10/17/1066364477657.html
|
Author
Logged
