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.”]
[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).
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