The Constitutional case is defensible; the historic arguments are pretty good at establishing a custom and tradition grounding; the 'making up for the sins and mistakes of our history' is not persuasive to me as all such arguments generally are not. For example, here's a post from fifteen years ago called "Against Human Rights." The idea that you have rights without the corresponding polity or community that defends the space in which those rights can be actualized is ahistorical and pragmatically indefensible. If you want to join the polity or community, well, you have to start with respecting their norms, culture, mores, rules, and maybe -- maybe -- their laws.
Likewise, not to accuse him of liberalism except in the broadest, Classical Liberal sense of the word, but this is an area where liberalism is insufficient. There is a genuine human universal that liberalism cannot see or explain, and has no answers for in play here. There's a reason Amelia is so instantly popular, and it isn't racism or meanness: it's that universal that liberalism (nor capitalism) has any way to defend.
Still, I am in the mode of advancing interesting and sincere arguments whether or not I agree with them. This one is strong in places; I'll leave the Scriptural arguments to the readers, some of whom are much more deeply engaged in that than I am.
In honor of the gentleman, Mr. Bundy, a Johnny Paycheck song. This is from the album that partly got him sent to prison; the title, "Armed & Crazy," at least didn't help his defense on the charges of having shot a man in the head while high on cocaine. Which, you know, was true -- that didn't help either.
The idea that you have rights without the corresponding polity or community that defends the space in which those rights can be actualized is ahistorical and pragmatically indefensible.
ReplyDeleteI see where you are going here but I'm not sure that I'd add the last three words, or at least the penultimate one, because the concept that rights are inherent seems to me to be very useful. I think you run directly into the 'two wolves and a sheep planning dinner' problem if you don't clearly separate the existence of rights from the security to exercise them. Lacking an appeal to common inherent rights turns the argument into the tit-for-tat response we see around us, and emboldens the majority to make sure they don't turn into a minority.
I'm not saying that it's philosophically indefensible. I understand why people often like different formulations of this idea. Some of them may in a philosophical sense even be true, at least for some of the proposed rights. The natural rights formulation for what are sometimes called 'negative rights' -- i.e. rights that don't obligate anyone else to do anything for you, only forbid others from interfering with you -- strike me as an especially good candidate.
DeletePragmatically, however, your natural right to keep and bear arms (say) is void outside of a polity or community that respects and defends it. You can believe in that natural right all you want to in China or Russia or even England or Scotland, but you will find that pragmatically it doesn't exist.
For it to exist, you have to win a space in the world that you can control enough to make it real and enforce it. That requires a community strong enough to do that, and one that has the right values or culture to want to do it. And, thus, QED.
For that matter, try exercising your right to free speech or thought in any of those places.
DeleteThe idea that you have rights without the corresponding polity or community that defends the space in which those rights can be actualized is ahistorical and pragmatically indefensible. If you want to join the polity or community, well, you have to start with respecting their norms, culture, mores, rules, and maybe -- maybe -- their laws.
ReplyDeleteLife, liberty, pursuit....
Anyhow, the 'community' of which you speak were originally the Catholic communities of France, Germany, Italy, England, Greece, (etc.) following the conversion of their kings to RC. But as those communities migrated to "less-Catholic"/more Protestant, those rights were eroded, bit by bit, as you can see in modern Europe (and Israel/Palestine).
The rights exist PRIOR to 'polities' as they are from God, not from the polity. Are they codified? Respected? That's another question altogether.
Yes, that is the very distinction between philosophically defensible and pragmatically defensible that I was raising in the comments above.
DeleteAs Christopher B and Dad29 have pointed out, though, the rights exist, full stop. It's the failure of pragmatism that the rights are not protected or enforced, not a failure of their nonexistence from lack of protection/enforcement.
ReplyDeleteIf nothing existed before they were enforceable/protectable, there'd be nothing to begin enforcing or protecting the first time.
Eric Hines
The problem is that it's simply not true that you have a right to freedom of speech in England; and England is better than Iran, and Iran is better than China. The right doesn't exist in any real or practical way. It's purely theoretical, and without any empirical evidence for it.
DeleteNow a full-on Pragmatist would say that if an idea can't be made to work, that is sufficient to prove that the idea is false. Thus, judged from a pragmatic perspective, the rights really don't exist there: and they won't exist until they are made to exist by a people who will defend them.
An Idealist will take your position. However, that doesn't change anything about whether people have an actual right that they can exercise.
As an illustration of a Pragmatist argument: the failure of every Communist state's attempt to make Communism works means that, in spite of its high Ideals, Communism has been proven false.
DeleteThe Communist, or Idealist, will say instead: Oh, no, it's true full stop (as you put it). We just haven't made it work yet.
Now we come down to first principles.
ReplyDeleteWe say our rights come from God; the Communist idealist says they come from...something...but not God.
Since our rights come from God--if our first principle is the correct one--then they pre-exist any success or failure to protect them in any pragmatic way.
The failures in the UK are failures of enforcement, not failures of nonexistence. The practical side of the matter is important, but absent the rights in the first place, Brits have lost nothing--they never had it. If the rights pre-exist, then what the Brits have lost is the morality to support them. And that's a far more serious failure than the practical.
Eric Hines