(p. 69) Alasdair MacIntyre writes that:there are no [human] rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns.
The best reason for asserting so bluntly that there are no such rights is indeed of precisely the same type as the best reason which we possess for asserting that there are no witches and the best reason which we possess for asserting that there are no unicorns: every attempt to give good reasons for believing that there are such rights has failed.He concludes (p. 70) that "natural or human rights [...] are fictions."
I disagree. I suppose that human rights were fictions at some point in time, but only in the sense that creativity was involved in bringing the idea into the world. If 'murder' means wrongful killing then murder is equally a fiction, since the idea that some killing is wrongful had to be created or invented. Such things are not discovered in the way that planets are. Perhaps they are discovered in some sense, but I'm not sure why anyone would claim that wrongs can be discovered while rights cannot be. I might appear to be getting two senses of 'right' mixed up here: the sense of a good deed (as in "two wrongs don't make a right") and the sense of a moral entitlement. But isn't murder wrong precisely because the victim's rights (in the sense of entitlements) are violated by it? Murder is wrong because it wrongs the victim, and this means it is unjust. Which means that it violates his/her rights. At least that is so according to the standard kind of thinking about rights and justice.
Rights are not like unicorns, because unicorns are physical objects that may or may not be out there, like planets. They might yet turn out to exist, however unlikely this is. Witches are a different case. My grandmother once told me that some relative of ours had been a witch, but by this she meant something like a practitioner of folk medicine who was called a witch. I also attended a talk once by two people who claimed to be witches. From them I gathered that witches are spiritually-inclined, gothic hippies. If someone objects to Harry Potter books and movies on the grounds that they "promote witchcraft," can we just say that no such thing exists? I would want to know what they meant. They might mean that Harry Potter stories embody values incompatible with those of Christianity, rightly understood. And who am I to disagree? Well, I'm me, that's who, but I have no special right to pronounce what is and what is not the right understanding of Christianity. Witchcraft, like blasphemy (but unlike unicorns), is hard to identify without bringing in value judgments. Rights are, if anything, even more like this.
So to call human rights a fiction is to make a kind of value judgment, it seems to me. It is to take a stand against talking about human rights. Which seems a bit like speaking against the tide's coming in. This kind of talk is not going to go away. If it should do so then this ought to be for moral or pragmatic reasons, not metaphysical or epistemological ones.
So to call human rights a fiction is to make a kind of value judgment, it seems to me. It is to take a stand against talking about human rights.
ReplyDeleteThat's as maybe. But it might as well be a confession of one's psychological inability to see anything to the notion of human rights, without expressing any value judgement at all as to the badness or goodness of this inability.
Isn't Wittgenstein's lecture on ethics a confession of not seeing anything in a closely related idea (we might say: the idea that there could ever be a lecture in ethics as opposed to a lecture on ethics) - and yet he concludes it by saying that this idea is "a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it"?
I might appear to be getting two senses of 'right' mixed up here: the sense of a good deed (as in "two wrongs don't make a right") and the sense of a moral entitlement. But isn't murder wrong precisely because the victim's rights (in the sense of entitlements) are violated by it? Murder is wrong because it wrongs the victim, and this means it is unjust. Which means that it violates his/her rights. At least that is so according to the standard kind of thinking about rights and justice.
This put me in mind of another passage in Raymond Geuss - your take on whose philosophy (your take more than anyone else's) I'd really like to see some day:
"It is a natural confusion brought on by linguistic accident and the prevalence of the subjective conception of rights in our time and society to think that [the] omnipresence of phrases like 'it is right that ...' or 'it is right to ...' implies that the concept of a subjective right is [...] deeply rooted in the human condition. The idea that individuals can 'have' rights is a specific historical invention of the late middle ages in the West, and the experience of Western antiquity (and virtually the whole non-Western world until very recently) shows that it is in principle perfectly possible to conduct social life at a high level of civilisation without the idea of a subjective right. China has done without this idea very nicely for the past several thousand years." (History and Illusion in Politics, p. 135)
Maybe you will see no problem in denying that "the concept of a subjective right is deeply rooted in the human condition". (After all, you seem to be defending it by pointing out that it is a mere invention and should not be considered anything else.) But "according to the standard kind of thinking about rights and justice" that you brought up yourself, it is so rooted.
But isn't murder wrong precisely because the victim's rights (in the sense of entitlements) are violated by it?
ReplyDeleteA quote from a very different philosophical tradition:
"[...] if one puts in the mouth of the remorseful person many of the philosophical accounts of what makes an obligation a moral obligation or a principle a moral principle, of the nature of morality and of its authority, we get parody. 'My God what I have done? I have violated the social compact, agreed behind a veil of ignorance.' 'My God what have I done? I have ruined my best chances of flourishing.' 'My God what have I done? I have violated rational nature in another.' 'My God what have I done? I have diminished the stock of happiness.' 'My God what have I done? I have violated my freely chosen principles.' An answer must surely be given to why, at one of the most critical moments of moral sobriety, so many of the official accounts of what it is for something to be of moral concern, the accounts of the connection between obligation and what it means to wrong someone, appear like parodies." (Gaita, Good and Evil, 2nd edn., p. xxi)
I'm afraid the same goes for "My God what have I done? I have violated the rights of another". (Gaita himself later makes the same point a second time in relation to Rawlsian liberalism, pp. 33-34.)
(I have some replies to your earlier replies as well, but it looks like they will have to wait until tomorrow. I'm in the middle of translating a tremendously electrifying court case on two vanishingly minor points of EU tax law.)
i think it would be interesting to ask of macintyre, what would be a good post-wittgenstein / austin / searle reason for asserting that there are no rights? because 'it's true that there aren't' or 'no account to show they exist has succeeded' are not, i think, good reasons, even if they might be (part of) why such an assertion would be justified. i don't know about unicorns, but it seems that belief in witches might have had a cultural / historical moment at which it was specially vulnerable to broad denials of this sort, on grounds that have to do with the irrationality of believing in witches, the injustice done to people tried and burned at the stake, the widespread harm caused during witch-panics, and so on. those sound to me like moments at which people (a society? a culture?) re-orients itself or sloughs off a less-than-vital cultural practice because it's holding it back in some way -- a blemish upon its self-conception, an atavistic holdover to be embarrassed or ashamed about, a drain upon its capacity for development and growth.
ReplyDeleteperhaps i can imagine similar grounds for asserting that there are no rights, but i have a hard time seeing how there is presently space for doing so.
also: does macintyre answer the question that naturally arises, about the status of comparable belief in the existence of god?
Thanks, Tommi and j.
ReplyDeleteFirst j.: I agree. As far as I know MacIntyre says nothing about God in this connection, but it does seem to be an obvious question to ask him (I mean one obviously worth asking, once it has occurred to you). To be fair to him, I have only recently re-read a tiny part of After Virtue, so I might be missing something important. I'll try to return to this.
Tommi: "it might as well be a confession of one's psychological inability to see anything to the notion of human rights"--maybe, yes, although then I might expect him to sound less dogmatic.
"Isn't Wittgenstein's lecture on ethics a confession of not seeing anything in a closely related idea...?" That's not really how I read the Lecture on Ethics. The word 'confession' sounds personal to me, and I think the personal part of the lecture comes at the end, not in the part where he applies a certain idea of meaning to ethics and shows that, according to that way of thinking about meaning, ethics is meaningless. (I'm not saying his point is about theories of meaning rather than ethics, although I think I have made it sound that way. I'm trying to say nothing about what his point might be here.)
On Geuss: I will read more of his work and no doubt say something about it here. On the particular point you bring up here, I think what I want to do is defend talk about rights but not necessarily standard ways of thinking about them. That doesn't sound very promising, but I'll try to explain in another post soon.
On Gaita: I think it's the 'because' that gets me in trouble here. Rights don't explain why anything is wrong, and I think Gaita shows this nicely (this is the kind of thinking I don't want to defend, even though I put my point so badly that it came off as just such a defence above). But I think that rights talk is something like shorthand for talking about injustice. I will have to think about this. Mostly here I think I want to say touché, but I'm not giving up yet.
"So to call human rights a fiction is to make a kind of value judgment, it seems to me. It is to take a stand against talking about human rights. Which seems a bit like speaking against the tide's coming in. This kind of talk is not going to go away. If it should do so then this ought to be for moral or pragmatic reasons, not metaphysical or epistemological ones."
ReplyDeleteThat's probably true, but the temptation to speak like MacIntyre - e.g. in a stern epistemological voice - stems exactly from seeing the assertion of human rights being presented as the conclusion of a metaphysical deduction.
I think MacIntyre can be read as saying: "Look, talk of human rights arose for pragmatic reasons, and if this talk ever declines it will also be for pragmatic reasons - so stop pretending that such talk has any metaphysical foundation."
And that would not be too far away from your position, would it?
It wouldn't, that's right. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteOn p. 70 MacIntyre writes that the concepts of utility and rights "purport to provide us with an objective and impersonal criterion, but they do not." I think I agree with him on this.
So, yes, my position is close to his. But I don't like his use of the word 'fiction,' especially when combined with talk about unicorns and witches. That kind of talk is not even useful fiction.