A Crucial Element of Democracy

This is a blog by Robert Gutierrez ...
While often taken for granted, civics education plays a crucial role in a democracy like ours. This Blog is dedicated to enticing its readers into taking an active role in the formulation of the civics curriculum found in their local schools. In order to do this, the Blog is offering a newer way to look at civics education, a newer construct - liberated federalism or federation theory. Daniel Elazar defines federalism as "the mode of political organization that unites separate polities within an overarching political system by distributing power among general and constituent governments in a manner designed to protect the existence and authority of both." It depends on its citizens acting in certain ways which Elazar calls federalism's processes. Federation theory, as applied to civics curriculum, has a set of aims. They are:
*Teach a view of government as a supra federated institution of society in which collective interests of the commonwealth are protected and advanced.
*Teach the philosophical basis of government's role as guardian of the grand partnership of citizens at both levels of individuals and associations of political and social intercourse.
*Convey the need of government to engender levels of support promoting a general sense of obligation and duty toward agreed upon goals and processes aimed at advancing the common betterment.
*Establish and justify a political morality which includes a process to assess whether that morality meets the needs of changing times while holding true to federalist values.
*Emphasize the integrity of the individual both in terms of liberty and equity in which each citizen is a member of a compacted arrangement and whose role is legally, politically, and socially congruent with the spirit of the Bill of Rights.
*Find a balance between a respect for national expertise and an encouragement of local, unsophisticated participation in policy decision-making and implementation.
Your input, as to the content of this Blog, is encouraged through this Blog directly or the Blog's email address: gravitascivics@gmail.com .
NOTE: This blog has led to the publication of a book. The title of that book is TOWARD A FEDERATED NATION: IMPLEMENTING NATIONAL CIVICS STANDARDS and it is available through Amazon in both ebook and paperback versions.

Friday, April 12, 2013

QUESTIONS BY WHICH TO STUDY RIGHTS

A while ago, I tried to make a distinction between liberty and autonomy. Both are related to the idea and ideal of rights. Both have to do with being able to do what one wants to do whether because of desires, obligations, associations, physiological needs and/or physiological proclivities. Liberty refers to the absence of power over one's life. The power can be legitimate or illegitimate. Autonomy refers to one's ability to choose what one's course of action will be. The main difference is that liberty, along with referring to human freedom, can describe the level of freedom of any organism, where- as in the case of autonomy, only humans can make life-directing decisions. A pet dog that escapes his/her home can be said to have won liberty, if not safety. But only humans can meaningfully choose and, therefore, only they can enjoy autonomy. Of course, autonomy can be restricted, delayed, or deprived. But if we, at all, can see ourselves seeking, through our choices, those conditions that determine the quality of our lives and how innate that desire is, then we can understand how sad, or even depressing, the deprivation of that ability can be. We can then visualize or feel that we are born with a right to be autonomous – to decide in which ways we can attain our desires. The sense we derive from this state of affairs is that we have a natural right to be autonomous. The natural reactive state of being deprived of what we want is frustration; the natural reactive state of being deprived of the ability to decide what we should do in order to get what we want is hopelessness. In either case, the lack of autonomy leads to a level of discontent.

As a matter of fact, an issue over autonomy arises only when our autonomy, through no action or choice of our own, is limited. So how does this happen? Richard Dagger1 offers understandable language by which to analyze this area of concern. He first distinguishes between two sorts of rights: special and general rights. General rights are rights we all have because they either enhance or protect our autonomy. For example, we all have the right to participate in economic activity – to be able to work, to exchange for goods and services, to save for future eventualities, and so on – because without this right we would suffer from want for the things that make life possible and meaningful. Hence, in its most basic sense, our autonomy will neither be enhanced nor protected without this general right. On the other hand, special rights are those rights we acquire through agreements with others as when we enter a contractual relation. Here, though, we usually are called upon to relinquish some autonomy or liberty in exchange for the autonomy or liberty we are seeking in the agreement. The agreement is an exchange. General rights are held against all others while special rights are against a specific other party(ies) – that is, the other party(ies) identified in the agreement. Some rights are easily categorized as being either general or special. Some are not. The example I give above illustrates the type that is not so easily categorized: the right to work might be general, but in a particular case, work is attained by an arrangement with another party.

Dagger goes on to provide a four question test by which to determine what type of right a particular putative right2 is. By so doing, he gives us a set of concerns deserving of our consideration and he provides questions a civics teacher might introduce in his or her lessons.

Before sharing the test he devised, let me address why determining what type of right a particular putative right is is important. I feel the essence of the concern has to do with the definitional distinction I laid out above. General rights are not rights we accept by choice; they are simply part of the legal-constitutional arrangement in which we find ourselves or is proposed by some political faction. Special rights, on the other hand, are rights we choose to acquire or relinquish through an exchange with others. Even though part of the arrangement usually calls on us to surrender some autonomy, the fact that we choose to be a party to such an agreement is an expression of our autonomy. And all this reflects the questions on Dagger's list: Does the right protect an individual's autonomy? Does the right promote an individual's autonomy? Does the right infringe or violate the rights of others? And can the right be realized? By analyzing the state of a given proposed right, as reflected by the answers to these questions, we discover the content of that “right” and better define what it is.

For example, by answering the question does the right promote an individual's autonomy, we can analyze the issue of whether citizens have a right to health care regardless of whether they can afford either the care or the related insurance coverage. On the one hand, we can readily see that illness can seriously interfere with a person's autonomy. On the other hand, the taxes that are needed to fund universal health care will also restrain people's autonomy. Of course, this leads to calculations and meaningful classroom discussions. It also makes related information more functional to students who might be concerned with their own autonomy. That's just another way of saying that the use of Dagger's questions assists teachers in making their resulting lessons more relevant.

1Dagger, R. (1997). Civic virtue: Rights, citizenship, and republican liberalism. New York, NY: Oxford.

2Putative right is a right someone claims to exist.

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