JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, II

 

An advocate of natural rights continues his/her presentation[1] …

The last posting began a general defense of the natural rights view.  It presented the basic definition and rationale for the view that centers on the belief that humans, within a natural state, have the rights to do what each deems preferable as long as those behaviors do not interfere with others having the same rights.  So central is this belief that it is given a moral standing among its advocates. 

          That moral claim further points to another defense, that being the judgment that for a person to have a moral duty which is universally held, it must be recognized not only by the individual, but also by the general population of rational human beings.  Along with this recognition, there must also be a generally accepted reason to act upon any entailed duties.

          Jeffrey Reiman[2] claims that only the ideal of individual sovereignty satisfies this requirement:

 

Since people’s ability to act according to their own judgment is vulnerable to the ability of others to block them in so acting, everyone has an interest in principles that maximize each one’s ability to act according to his or her own judgments as far as this is compatible with a like ability for everyone else.  Thus, everyone has an interest in the ideal of individual sovereignty.[3]

         

Individual sovereignty is seen as the only sense of duty to satisfy the requirements of a universal duty.

          And Reiman last listed defense of the natural rights perspective is that since death is final and life a one-time experience, human beings are ends in themselves.  They, therefore, feel the imperative duty to themselves.  That takes the form of them seeking the potential of living the life they define as meaningful.  In that, each recognizes and endorses the truth of that imperative for him or herself and supports the equal opportunity for all others to do likewise. 

This last notion adds an equality element to the natural rights view, but as a derivative set of concerns.  As such, if situations pit a conflict between liberty and equality, liberty should prevail.  As to what level equality should be given prevalence or priority in determining behavior, along with all other concerns, are left to individuals to decide.  It would be just another expression of people’s liberty or freedom.

          American political culture has developed to prize, above all other moral claims, the belief that all should be allowed, on an individual basis, the right to pursue what is meaningful to their lives.  Government’s primary responsibility is to protect the individual’s ability and right to maximize that potential.  The nation’s political debates are over whether the social and economic environment of the nation is conducive to individuals having that opportunity.

          Modern day politics, the politics between what is currently called liberals and conservatives, is over defining the conditions that relate to that opportunity.  A current journalistic service recently listed twenty-five issues that are capturing the interests of the public, including academics.  In the top ten, one can consider seven of them to be “individual rights” issues. 

They are gun control, abortion, religious freedom, vaccine mandates, privacy rights, free-market capitalism, marijuana legalization.  Of an extended connection, one can add global climate change (to the degree it refers to one’s energy consumption behaviors).[4]  For some time now, analysis of the political issues of the day – including foreign relation issues – in America are defined in terms of individuals’ economic opportunities.

While there is some debate over when and if this view has attained dominance in American political thinking, most commentators treat this dominance as an assumed condition in today’s political culture.[5]  This posting is being written in the aftermath of an election in Kansas, a generally viewed conservative state with strong religious ties, ties that would lead one to expect a strong vote against abortion rights.

Yet, Kansans overwhelmingly voted against a proposed amendment to the state’s constitution that would have overturned a constitutional protection of abortion rights.  If it had passed, one could have interpreted such a vote as reflecting a limitation to a natural rights bias.  But that was not to be by a significant number of votes.[6]

This secular moral argument – of the natural rights view – serves as that view’s basic assumption regarding the relationship between the individual and the state.  Government and civics instruction in the nation’s secondary classrooms should incorporate – or better stated, continue to incorporate – this view when establishing the role of that relationship.  What follows in this blog is an analytic description of the natural rights perspective as it affects civics and as it assumes this central role for the individual.

This blog’s next posting will continue with the subject matter commonplace in curriculum development by addressing the discipline of political science.  For an extended accounting of the ways political science has an influence on civics education, readers are directed to this blogger’s recent published book, From Immaturity to Polarized Politics [7] – available through Amazon.

[Reminder:  Readers are reminded that they can have access to the first 100 postings of this blog, under the title, Gravitas:  The Blog Book, Volume I.  To gain access, they can click the following URL:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zh3nrZVGAhQDu1hB_q5Uvp8J_7rdN57-FQ6ki2zALpE/edit  

OR click onto the “gateway” posting that allows the reader access to a set of supplemental postings to other published works by this blogger by clicking the URL: http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/ and then looking up the posting for October 23, 2021, entitled “A Digression.”]

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[1] This presentation continues with this posting.  The reader is informed that the claims made in this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or knowledge of this blogger.  Instead, the posting is a representation of what an advocate of the natural rights view might present.  This is done to present a dialectic position of that construct.  This series of posting begins with “Judging Natural Rights View, I,” August 2, 2022.

[2] Jeffrey Reiman, “Liberalism and Its Critics,” in The Liberalism-Communitarian Debate, edited by Cornelius F. Delaney (Lanham, MD:  Rowman and Littlefield Publisher, Inc., 1994).

[3] Ibid., 27.

[4] Evan Thompson, “25 Controversial Topics:  Position Paper Guide,” The Best Schools (March 3, 2022), accessed August 3, 2022, https://thebestschools.org/magazine/controversial-topics-research-starter/.  Also see E. J. Dionne, Jr., They Only Look Dead:  Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era (New York, NY:  Simon and Schuster, 1996).

[5] For example, there is a revised extended concern over views challenging individual rights and increasing concern over collective rights.  See Aaron Rhodes, “How ‘Collective Human Rights’ Undermine Individual Human Rights,” The Heritage Foundation (June 25, 2020), accessed August 3, 2022, https://www.heritage.org/global-politics/report/how-collective-human-rights-undermine-individual-human-rights.  For background, see Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism:  A Double-Edged Sword (New York, NY:  W. W. Norton and Company, 1996) AND Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent:  America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996).

[6] One can make the case that abortion rights also reflect the federalist concern over individual integrity; that being denied the right to abortions abuses the ability of a woman to act upon what is generally accepted as an element of a person’s integrity.  That would be to have control over one’s body.

[7] Robert Gutierrez, From Immaturity to Polarized Politics:  Obstacles in Achieving a Federated Nation (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas Civics Books, 2022).

JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, I

 

An advocate of natural rights continues his/her presentation[1] …

This first entry in supporting the natural rights view – as it would be used to guide civics curricular content – centers on William Schubert’s commonplace, subject matter.  In terms of subject matter, the natural rights/liberalism approach would transmit the following:

 

·      Teach a view of government as a subservient institution which attempts to satisfy the collective interests of individual citizens.

·      Teach the philosophical basis of government’s role as defender of individual rights.

·      Convey the legitimate needs of government to engender levels of support that maintain political stress within the political system – in the form of competitiveness – to manageable and even useful degrees.

·      Portray a realistic account of political structures, processes, and functions that allow students to internalize practical information about government to facilitate their interactions with governmental agencies and offices in pursuit of their political goals and objectives.

·      Express the technical nature of political activities with ample respect for expertise held by professional participants of the political system.

 

By accomplishing these elements, the natural rights argument claims that the subject matter advances good citizenship and natural liberty.  And liberty takes on a moral standing.

The Morality of Liberalism

          According to Jeffrey Reiman,[2] the natural rights perspective (he uses the term liberalism) is, at its core, a moral conception.  That is, the natural rights approach, in its most fundamental sense, is a standard for right and wrong behavior.  As such, Reiman explains, it is not a version or supplement to other views of governance such as promoting caring policies or community. 

Those that adopt a natural rights view advocate a moral standard that instead promotes what is required from human beings (assuming they are sane adults) to conduct themselves in such a way that maximizes the scope of everyone’s freedom.  Freedom is seen as the ability to control individuals’ lives according to their own judgment.  Any extension of their freedom that reduces the freedom of themselves or others is ruled as immoral behaviors.  This principle Reiman calls individual sovereignty.

He contends that the role of education is to prepare children and adolescents to make voluntary moral choices when they become adults.  Children and adolescents are not judged mature enough to be given the level of freedom as defined by this view.  So, a qualifier to the general argument, then, is that underaged individuals are not totally subject to this moral standard.

Another qualifier is those situations in which, because of human fallibility, people are not acting in line with their real judgments.  For example, people who are about to commit suicide in reaction to traumatic incidents or bits of information might, on reflection, choose not to kill themselves.  Reiman would allow for what he calls paternalistic coercion. 

That is, it permits as moral for people to intervene by preventing those suicides but only in obvious situations when the good judgment by the distraught person would find it extremely difficult to practice reasonable judgment.  Of course, such cases would seldom occur.

As far as government’s role under such a moral principle or standard, Reiman argues that its interference in social and economic activities is justified only in those situations when society, in the guise of government policy or otherwise, does not allow for individual freedom.  Ironically, government is to only act to advance freedom by prohibiting those actors or policies that stand in the way of such freedom.  These conditions, in turn, Reiman deems to be an empirical and measurable condition and not to be determined merely by opinion.

Further, Reiman writes,

 

Rather, the ideal of individual sovereignty is a standard against which economic systems are to be judged.  Free enterprise economics with little or no governmental involvement will only pass muster by this standard if they yield societies in which people in fact have the maximum compatible individual freedom, and this will be an empirical matter of what actually happens in such economies compared to the alternatives.[3]

 

Reiman provides a standard by which to distinguish between moral requirement and subjugation.  “To show the validity of a moral requirement, then, we must show that they are binding on people who disagree with them.  We must demonstrate their capacity to override the contrary judgments of their recipients.”[4]  Or stated another way, if moral judgments stand because they can, not because they should, they are not moral requirements, but subjugations instead.

          In such cases, the natural rights argument holds that subjugation is immoral and that subjected people are not morally bound to obey those judgments.  The only exceptions would be if people can prove beyond reasonable doubts that moral judgments are moral requirements irrespective of people’s judgments, which would be deemed impossible to do.

 

The point here is a simple one, but, I think, quite far-reaching in its implications.  Any moral requirement must be a matter of right not might.  To establish this, we must show – show, not just believe firmly – either that the requirement is true beyond a reasonable doubt, or that it is needed to restrict to a minimum the role of might in human affairs.  This shows that the liberal ideal has an advantage over all others.  Unless and until one of those others can be proven true beyond a reasonable doubt, only the liberal ideal can satisfactorily rebut the suspicion of subjugation.  It is only one that can withstand the charge of being might not right.[5]

 

          This posting will end on this note.  The next one will venture into the question as to whether people have responsibilities to others, and if they do, when would that be.  To this blogger, the basic claim of natural rights advocates is that humans have the right to do as they please if they do not interfere with others having the same right.  Short of that, there are little to no responsibilities assuming those involved, either in terms of acting upon or receiving the effects of such interactions, are adults and sane.

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[1] This presentation begins with this posting.  The reader is informed that the claims made in this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or knowledge of this blogger.  Instead, the posting is a representation of what an advocate of natural rights view might present.  This is done to present a dialectic position of that construct.

[2] Jeffrey Reiman, “Liberalism and Its Critics,” in The Liberalism-Communitarian Debate, edited by Cornelius F. Delaney (Lanham, MD:  Rowman and Littlefield Publisher, Inc., 1994).

[3] Ibid., 22.

[4] Ibid., 23, emphasis in the original.

[5] Ibid., 24-25, emphasis in the original.