[This posting is subject to further editing.]
Ironies abound in life. According to the philosopher, Charles Taylor,
probably no more important irony exists than that which has to do with basic
rights.[1] Specifically, he finds that the basic belief in
a natural rights view – the claim that every individual has the right to do
what that person wishes to do as long as that person does not deprive that
right to others – to be false.
How? By
living one’s life through such a credo and utilizing it, if one so chooses to
undermine the bonds that hold a society together, to the degree it is
successful, that person is undermining the necessary prerequisites for such a
society to survive and therefore protect such rights. The position of this blog is that this nation
is on the road to proving Taylor correct.
Why would a person wish to do that? Perhaps the wish is not directly to fulfil that
aim, but instead for things – behaviors or conditions – that prove to be
destructive of those bonds irrespective of one’s motives or understandings. In this case, it is the results that count. And those behaviors or conditions can have the
antisocial consequences about which Taylor warns his audience.
Examples might include when one might choose to
engage in legal but harmful practices such as being disrespectful of others’
religious practices or practicing business activities that disregard the living
standards of employees. The number of
examples one might sight is countless.
This blog with this posting revisits this
Taylor argument that was initially posted in 2019[2]
(interested readers can check on that previous posting by using the archive
feature). As described, Taylor presents
a reasonable argument that traces how the quality of justice would be subjected
to abuse in a society where atomism becomes prevalent. Atomism is the belief that a form of
individualism should hold rights as primary especially as expressed or acted
upon when a person strives to satisfy self-defined ends.
That earlier posting ends with the following:
In terms of when it is legitimate to
exercise natural rights in pursuing self-centered interests, that would be in
securing justice. Why? A total answer would probably constitute a
whole other argument and another posting.
Suffice it to write, justice is advanced by an adversarial system where
the parties are free to pursue their interests.
Advocacy for those interests should be allowed to be pursued unfettered
as long as the procedural rules of the proceedings are respected.[3]
But here lies the basis of the irony one can
associate with this concern. Justice is
not just a value associated with natural rights but with federalism, as a mental
construct relating to ideal governance and politics, as well. Perhaps both trains of thought, natural
rights and federalism, approach the quality from different points of view and
hence the duality of meaning.
Federalism sees it as a precondition that
motivates one to join a union – an associated arrangement – and become part of
a grand partnership. On the other hand, the
natural rights view sees it as guaranteeing or protecting one’s rights especially
as they come into conflict with the rights of others.
And
in this a basic distinction can and should be made. The “partnership” view tends to demand a more
wholistic sense of what rights are. Yes,
one can innumerate basic rights – speech, movement, religion, association, etc.
– but they can be more readily seen, within a federalist perspective, as
expressions of a free life or of the right to life.
On the other hand, the natural rights view
seems to beg for a more granular approach and relating to these individual
rights it becomes more important to innumerate and treat them as separate
claims. As such, they are seen more
legalistically than culturally, more from a contractual view than a compact-al
view. And by so doing, rights lose the
advantage of being considered as a quality-of-life attribute.
Federalism
holds all of these more specific rights as being more readily assumed or
included in what one is referring to, they are a full package or an element of
life one associates with a life of quality.
As such, they can take on a more basic sense of what it means to be
federated, that is, it defines a quality necessary for a viable life.
This federalist sense is also needed to
maintain the health of a society and of its polity in that to be so concerned among
a citizenry means one has a populous, to meaningful degree, sharing a sense that
they are in it together. Taylor
describes this distinction:
How would it do for a scientist [for example]
to say, “Well, I have respected his right to life, it is other rights (free
movement, exercise of his profession, etc.) which I have violated? For the separation in this context is absurd. True, we do sometimes enumerate these and
other rights. But the right to life
could never have been understood as excluding all these activities, as a right
just to biological non-death in a coma.
It is incomprehensible how anyone could assert a right to life meaning
just this, “Who calls that living?”[4]
Robert Novick, as Taylor describes his argument,
represents the natural rights’ side of this disagreement. He holds that such a view as expressed by
Taylor is misguided. He, Novick, uses an
example to illustrate his point. That is,
individuals have the right to dispose of their possessions as they individually
wish without any sense or establishment of bonds to society or to other
citizens, and, in addition, this ability is commonsensical.
Taylor retorts that this claim is insufficient. It doesn’t establish the level of
self-sufficiency that individuals would need to secure – establish and maintain
– if the institutional structures that needed to exist in allowing for such a
disposal were disregarded. And that
level of reliance on such structures can be extended to just about all sorts of
behaviors individuals might wish to enact.
Of course, this back and forth is conducted on a
philosophical plane. At a more cultural
level and in how this issue affects current day politics, a good deal of
rhetoric, at least to this blogger’s ear, reflects Novick’s argument or view. If one logically breaks down what is commonly
bantered about, Novick’s treatment of rights seem to handily prevail among
American discourse – Americans tend to speak of rights as a list of sacred
prerogatives.
That messaging seems to assume one has little
to no reliance on the importance of those institutional structures, much less any
appreciation of what supports them and allows them to function. Any reference to those structures is usually
couched in delegitimizing language. When
was the last time that the reader heard someone refer to regulatory agencies,
for example, in a positive way?
Currently, for example, the Supreme Court is
considering to rule in such a way that will debase the ability of government to
regulate the actions of corporations by shifting that function from regulatory
agencies to unelected jurists.[5] These are the type of issues one should
strive to insert a federated/partnership perspective – particularly in how that
perspective addresses the health and even survival of the polity as it is
constituted.
[1] Charles Taylor, “Atomism,” in Communitarianism and
Individualism, eds. Shlomo Avineri and Avner de-Shalit (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1992), 29-50.
[2] Robert Gutierrez, “A Derivation for the Sake of
Justice,” a posting, Gravitas: A Voice
for Civics – blog, 2019, accessed January 20, 2024, URL: https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2019_09_29_archive.html.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Taylor, “Atomism,” in Communitarianism and
Individualism, 38.
[5] See Allison Frankel, “U. S. Supreme Court Just Gave Federal Agencies a Big Reason to Worry,” Reuters (June 30, 2022), accessed January 20, 2024, URL: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-just-gave-federal-agencies-big-reason-worry-2022-06-30/ AND Melissa Quinn, “Supreme Court Signals Openness to Curtailing Federal Regulatory Power in Potentially Major Shift,” CBS News, (January 17,2024), accessed January 20, 2024, URL: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-chevron-deference-oral-arguments-federal-regulations/. Yes, Americans don’t elect regulators, but they do elect those who hire them.
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