However, it's Ireland's problem, and they'll have to deal with it. When the consequences of it become evident, the Irish have established traditions for throwing off tyranny as necessary.
I won't, therefore, bother discussing the law at length; but the frame raises an old debate in an interesting way.
To begin: freedom of speech is not a "God-given" right; no rights really are. We may hold certain rights to be "self-evident," but that is simply a comforting fiction derived from the American Revolution. Rights must be taken, not given and, once won, any attempt to nullify them must be resisted by (in the Communist Left's favorite phrase) "any means necessary." ...Nor are the enshrinement of rights in a nation's constitution any guarantee of perpetuity. Countries come and go; regimes change. The populace undergoes a philosophical and ethnic shift -- a quiet revolution -- and no longer feels any loyalty or allegiance to even bedrock cultural notions from hundreds of years ago. Constitutions become "living," which is to say, dead.
Joel and I had a lengthy debate about whether or not that was the right conception of rights back in 2007, which was itself part of a subset of a debate that had already gone on for quite a while. I was taking roughly the same position as the fellow here: whatever God wants us to have in terms of rights, we have to do the work, in the same way that God created a world in which men could have wine, but there will only actually be wine to drink if we make it anew every year and all the time.
You can find this debate on the sidebar under the heading "Frith & Freedom," it being the first several entries ("The Endowment of Rights" and then several posts citing Beowulf and the Founders).
If you take the position that "a right" belongs to whatever level at which it practically comes to be, the only "natural rights" are the right to die and the right to think. The right to die Nature will defend herself; no matter what efforts are put into trying to force you to stay alive, your right to die really cannot be denied but only delayed. (That formulation puts an unwanted division between Divine Law and Natural Law, but Nature is said to be fallen; in at least this one way the Natural Law is out of order with God's Law).
The right to think, likewise, is beyond human power to deny you. You can be drugged, deprived of sleep, tortured, or killed, and these things can delay thought or prevent it. But as long as you are not dead, during whatever moments of clarity your torturers leave you, you have the power to keep your own counsel. You may not be able to say anything about it or do anything about it, but your ability to think through the world is something they can only try to influence from the outside.
I have, in more recent years, argued that this inalienable right to thought implies also a right to speak: if your ability to think rationally about the world is a source of your human dignity (or the source, as Kant has it), then we ought also to respect your right to express those thoughts. By the same token, I have argued that the dignity that inheres in human beings implies an inalienable right to self-defense, which in turn grants necessarily the right to the means to defend one's self.
Those things I think are rational truths that ought to follow from the limited things that Nature really does defend. They can be said to be natural rights because they are direct or necessary logical consequences of natural rights. In that way, they really ought to be part of any political system whatsoever; no government, which is always and only a human-created institution, ought to violate these pre-political truths about human nature.
Even so, if that view is to be realized in the face of all the human beings who desperately want to exert their domination and mastery over others, it must be defended. These defenses may morally be as emphatic as necessary, and furthermore they ought to be, because something more fundamental and important to humanity than that particular government's survival is at stake.
10 comments:
It is fascinating to go back and revisit that old debate. It is interesting to see how my position on "natural rights" has evolved over the years. I guess continued study and experience has a way of doing that over time.
I don't give much credence to the abstract idea of "natural rights." Rights only exist within the specific political community that recognizes them. This is often the result of tradition, experience, societal values, and numerous other variables.
The concept of free speech is a perfect example of this. I am somewhat of a free speech absolutist, but I recognize this is because I cherish the American understanding of this concept which itself is the result of a process that stretches far back into a history that long predates the birth of America. I also recognize that the vast majority of countries do not share the American understanding of free speech because they do not share our history and experience with the concept.
Consequently, it would be ridiculous, and the height of arrogance, to claim our understanding of free speech is somehow the "naturally" correct understanding and expression of that concept. Different societies have different ways of viewing this concept and if that works for them then that's great.
I too have thought much on these matters since 2007; it was just about then that I went to Iraq, and stayed through the middle of 2009 except for occasional trips home. Then I went back to the university, and engaged in much study and reflection.
There's a lot at stake in your new position, which involves yielding up a tradition that dates to Ancient Greece in favor of a kind of cultural relativism. I think that's the war talking, or perhaps the several wars, which we have lost because we were ultimately unable to convince others of the universality of our view of rights. It's fair to reflect on that.
It is also worth considering that it may be that there are in fact some natural rights, though perhaps Western talk of rights has blown wildly out of it proper limits. Humanity does have a nature, as much as that is these days in dispute by those who don't like the fact -- those who want to pretend that men can become women and vice versa, or that there's not a significant difference between them anyway. Some things might fall out of that which are then necessary for any decent view of justice, just because they are rooted in that nature.
If not, it would be surprising. But it is likewise surely not so many things as have lately been asserted by the wild prophets of the view.
As a Christian I certainly believe that God created man and imbued him with a certain nature that we all share as humans. However, lets not conflate nature with rights. While our nature may be universal, our understanding of rights isn't.
The concept of rights emerge within a political context. They have to because that is the arena in which they are expressed, practiced, defined, and debated. The specific political environment in which this occurs is created and shaped through the unique history, experiences and traditions of a society and its people. These factors differs significantly across nations and cultures. Consequently, their understanding and expression of rights will differ significantly. How could they not? Therefore, to argue for a universal, one-size-fits-all understanding of rights is to argue for the impossible.
CS Lewis noted that calling something a right means that someone is obligated to give it to you, and the weakness of the position becomes immediately evident when we look around for exactly who that is in this situation.
When did Lewis make that claim, AVI? The distinction between negative and positive rights -- with positive ones being the kind that require people to do something for you -- is usually attributed to Isaac Berlin (1958). I wonder if Berlin was earlier or later than Lewis here.
The thing about the two examples of rights under discussion here is that no one has to actually do anything to grant them: in fact, if everyone else does nothing about them then they exist. It's only if someone else does something to violate these kinds of rights that they are in peril. (Cf. a positive right, like 'the right to housing,' that at some level obligates someone to build you a house or cede ownership of one to you. If no one else does anything, you still don't have a house; but if no one else does anything, you are still free to speak as you wish.)
Joel, that's approximately Disraeli's position -- and it's very close to the one I was arguing fifteen years ago!
Well, you were right, as you were with the connection of our political tradition with the earlier Germanic culture represented by Beowulf. Montesquieu himself stated that the freedoms of the West, or at least the Anglosphere, had their origins in the forests of Germany.
My first thought is The Abolition of Man, which would be 1944. I'll see if I can find it.
This sounds like a conversation that Steve Hayward and 'Lucretia', strong proponents of Henry Jaffee's theory of Natural Right, had with the more Positivist member of the trio on the 3WHH, John Yoo. I think it was Lucretia who, paraphrasing, expressed the idea that any instantiation of a government was always going to be a compromise based on what is possible at that moment with how the US Constitution finessed the slavery question being a prime example. But the compromises don't prove Natural Right doesn't exist, they just prove that humans are imperfect creatures.
Christopher B, That's the problem with the idea of "natural rights." It is such an abstract concept that it can be whatever you want it to be and, therefore, of no real practical use. Do they exist? Who knows and so what if anyone did. The parameters of any right are always defined politically/legally by all societies according to their specific experience, history, traditions, values, and laws. Those parameters, the left and right lateral limits so to speak, are what affects people and, therefore, what matters to them, not some poorly defined abstract concept.
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