CRITIQUE OF THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, IV

 

The last couple of postings looked at and critiqued the way the natural rights’ preferred approach to the study of governance and politics is done.  The postings explained how the construct constrained the way decision-making in governing and politicking is analyzed by limiting its focus to transactional factors.  By doing so, resulting studies are steered away from normative concerns. 

In turn, this gives, overall, a certain market orientation to such studies that takes on a cynicism of republican governance.  While the last posting describes this cynicism, one can look at its causes a bit more closely.  Given the construct’s emphasis on individualism, a contradictory pair of sub views emerges. 

One promotes a near zealotry of individual rights[1] and yet the other a near mechanistic view of decision making in which individuals simply go through weighing the values of anticipated rewards and costs.  Earlier in this blog, this was described as deterministic in that these episodes might be seen as robotic responses to decision making challenges. 

          Recall that the perspective “sanctifies” the right of individuals to pursue their own goals and values in the political and social arenas and then adopts this fairly deterministic view of how those choices are exercised.  The adoption of behaviorist strategies in organizations and in marketing deems human choices highly susceptible to the use of rewards and occasional punishments to solicit desired responses. 

The contradiction reminds one of an entrepreneurial defense of consumer rights of choice in the marketplace while the use of market research techniques not only discern consumer preferences, but also discern methods of manipulating consumer behavior.  The use of behavioristic and other psychological techniques can be readily cited.

For example, Neil Postman writes, “By the turn of the century [from nineteenth to the twentieth], advertisers no longer assumed rationality on the part of their potential customers.  Advertising became one part depth psychology, one part aesthetic theory.  Reason had to move to other arenas.”[2]  In similar fashion, advocates of the natural rights perspective seem to shift easily from their staunch support for individual rights to analyzing the exercise of those rights as if they were mechanistic operations.

It does this without any explanation as to the seeming inconsistency.  As close as they come is to mention that they are not crude behaviorists because they acknowledge that what are making these decisions are “organisms” and that they are affected by many factors such as cultural ones.[3]  And yet another concern along these lines is how the systems approach treats aspects of its analyses as separate components which can be manipulated, albeit with care.

Human problems in decision making are often seen as situations that either are missing certain components, that a component needs upgrading, or a component needs to be shifted.  Consequently, solutions are aimed not at fundamental causes, but as symptoms which are addressed by these types of component manipulations.  Again, this type of approach to decision making lends itself to marginal analysis. 

The problem is that true solutions, because of this incomplete approach, oftentimes elude practitioners.  In addition, marginal analysis and manipulation encourage a “cold” emotional perspective.  Problems are seen as technical concerns, not personal ones.  Consequently, when dealing with others, negotiations and compromises can include, more readily, any aspect of the problem area without fully appreciating emotional qualities of those concerns or elements.

This whole approach, therefore, runs the real danger of compromising any aspect, even those judged to be highly moral ones.  If those moral concerns include commitments in which communal bonds are anchored, then mistrust and cynicism become highly likely.  Recent labor negotiations and resulting consequential decisions – e.g., downsizing in previous decades come to mind[4] – are exemplary of these decisions.  To add to this, long term consequences seem to be either downgraded or ignored completely.

And this leads one to consider the quality of the grouping or collective one is considering with a given concern.  The natural rights view, with its emphasis on individuals, tends to steer one’s attention only to individuals.  Yet, and this is commonsensical, it is group decisions that have the most effect on any area of concern that has impact on people.  The next posting will take up this concern for groups (in whichever ways they are organized), but before ending this posting, here is a quick mention of another concern with the natural rights view.

In an expanded version of political systems, one that encompasses the concerns over requisite functions offered by Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell, there is nothing inherently definitive about the functions identified in the Almond and Powell’s model.[5]  William Flanigan and Edwin Fogelman[6] point out that there is nothing sacred with that list of functions – those that political systems need to satisfy so as to maintain a healthy state of being or to even survive – that Almond and Powell point out.  There are other theorists, both the fields of sociology and political science, who have different lists garnering respect and interest in those disciplines.[7]

          The Almond and Powell model was chosen in this account because of how smoothly one can utilize it in terms of David Easton’s political systems model.[8]  This is not a fundamental criticism – one can study governance and politics, especially in the US, with the Almond and Powell model – but this is a point of contention that should be mentioned in regard to the construct’s reliability or for its isomorphic quality. 

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[1] For a recent published concern over a singular priority of individual rights regarding more communal concerns of obligations and duties, see Richard Haass, The Bill of Obligations:  The Ten Habits of Good Citizens (New York, NY:  Penguin Press, 2023).

[2] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business  (New York, NY:  Penguin Books, 1986), 60.

[3] David Easton, “The Current Meanings of ‘Behavioralism,’” in Contemporary Political Analysis, edited by James Clyde Charlesworth (New York, NY:  The Free Press, 1967), 11-31.

[4] A SHRM online posting reports the following:  “Downsizing can take a toll on workforce morale; employees may feel betrayed. Long-term consequences of altering the work environment include increased voluntary turnover and decreased innovation.” “Managing Employee in a Downing Environment,” Society for Human Resource Management (n.d.), accessed February 15, 2023, https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/toolkits/pages/managinginadownsizedenvironment.aspx#:~:text=Downsizing%20can%20take%20a%20toll,voluntary%20turnover%20and%20decreased%20innovation.

[5] Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Jr., Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston: Little, Brown. 1966). 

[6] William Flanigan and Edwin Fogelman, “Functional Analysis,” in Contemporary Political Analysis, edited by James Clyde Charlesworth (New York, NY:  The Free Press, 1967), 72-85.

[7] The list of functions Almond and Powell include are rulemaking, rule-application, rule-adjudication (these first three align themselves perfectly with the three branches of government), interest articulation (the main work of organized interest groups), and interest aggregation (the main work of political parties).  Together, these last two functions can be considered the input functions of the political system.  During the time that Almond and Powell’s work took hold, the social sciences, led by sociology, were highlighting functions.  Historically, that emphasis was the product of a tradition begun in the late 1800s.  See the works of Emile Durkheim, Herbert Spencer, Robert Merton and especially, Talcott Parsons.  While not all theorists agree on the same list of functions, overall, such theorizing expressed the fundamental concern regarding the stability of social arrangements, including governments.

[8] David Easton, The Political System (New York, NY:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1953) AND David Easton, A System Analysis of Political Life (New York, NY:  John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1965).