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Rights, Responsibilities, and Communitarianism
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments
are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the
Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these
Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it...
Thomas Jefferson, "The Declaration of Independence," 1776
Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in
such keeping as our souls are now [i.e. under a State religion 1]. Thus in France the
emetic was once forbidden as medicine, the potato as an article of food.
Thomas Jefferson, "Notes on Virginia," 1784
A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government
was founded....Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to
control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not
crimes.
Abraham Lincoln
Everybody has asked the question. . ."What shall we do with the Negro?" I have had
but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has
already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain
on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early
ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the
tree
in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall.
And if
the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a
chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!
Frederick Douglass, "What the Black Man Wants"
The State...stands between me and my body, and tells me what kind of doctor I must
employ. When my soul is sick, unlimited spiritual liberty is given me by the State [2].
Now then, it doesn't seem logical that the State shall depart from this great
policy...and take the other position in the matter of smaller consequences -- the
health of the body....Whose property is my body? Probably mine....If I experiment
with it, who must be answerable? I, not the State. If I choose injudiciously, does the
State die? Oh, no.
Mark Twain, in "Osteopathy," 1901
While the Opium Registration Act of December 17, 1914, may have a moral end, as
well as revenue, the court, in view of grave doubt as to its constitutionality except
as
a revenue measure, construes it as such.
United States Supreme Court, United States v. Jin Fuey Moy, 1915
The greater the readiness to subordinate purely personal interests, the higher rises
the ability to establish comprehensive communities.... This state of mind, which
subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really
the first premise of every truly human culture.
Adolf Hilter, Mein Kampf, Chapter 11, Ralph Manheim translation
What matters is to emphasize the fundamental idea in my party's economic program
clearly -- the idea of authority. I want the authority; I want everyone to keep the
property he has acquired for himself according to the priniciple: benefit to the
community precedes benefit to the individual. But the state should retain supervision
and each property owner should consider himself appointed by the state. It is his duty
not to use his property against the interests of others among his own people. This is
the crucial matter. The Third Reich will always retain its right to control the owners
of
property.
Adolf Hilter, 1931
If we are to go forward we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice
for the good of a common discipline, because, without such discipline, no progress is
made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit
our lives and property to such discipline because it makes possible a leadership
which aims at a larger good.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, 1933
When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a
radical Bill of Rights, giving [sic] a radical amount of individual freedom to
Americans,
it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly...
that they would work for the common good, as well as for the individual welfare...
However, now there's a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's too
much freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it.
Bill Clinton, April 19, 1995,
after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, two
years after the massacre of the Branch Davidians at Waco
A decent society is not based on rights; it is based on duty....Our duty to one
another...To all should be given opportunity; from all, responsibility demanded.
Labor Party Prime Minister Tony Blair, elected 1997
[Washington Post, November 9, 1997]
The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone
else to pay when things go wrong.
In the past few decades, a peculiar and distinctive psychology has emerged in
England. Gone are the civility, sturdy independence, and admirable stoicism that
carried the English through the war years. It has been replaced by a constant whine
of excuses, complaints, and special pleading. The collapse of the British character
has been as swift and complete as the collapse of British power.
Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom, The Worldview That Makes the Underclass
[Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2001], p.5
Sometimes so many people seem to be screaming about their rights, while
neglecting to answer to their responsibilities, that many of us may become
completely disgusted with the whole discourse of "rights." A whole movement exists,
billing itself as "Communitarianism," that promotes an effort to restore the notion of
responsibility and to establish a balance both between rights and responsibilities and
between individuality and community. There has actually been talk of building a
"Statue of Responsibility" on the West Coast as the counterpart of the Statue of
Liberty in New York harbor. The movement is spearheaded by sociology professors
Robert Bellah, in Habits of the Heart, and Amitai Etzioni, in The Spirit of Community.
Their viewpoint is shared by many others, including historian Garry Wills; and it is
reflected in the title of Hillary Clinton's book on the responsibilities of government
in
child rearing, It Takes a Village.
Communitarians, however, promote a certain view of rights and responsibilities that
is quite different from that of John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, etc. It
is more in the tradition of G.W.F. Hegel, where the community, or the state, is more
real than the individual and the individual who does not fit in with the social norms
or
the law is objectively irrational. Hegel has been regarded, justly, as the father of
modern totalitarianism. How different these attitudes are comes out in the
Communitarian treatment of things like seat- belt and motorcycle helmet laws.
Etzioni would deny to the automobile or motorcycle rider the right to decide for
themselves whether to wear seat-belts or motorcycle helmets because, if they are
injured, the public is liable to end up paying for their injuries. Thus the riders
have a
duty to protect themselves in such a way as to not impose a burden on the public
through their injuries.
This is interesting reasoning, for the denial of the right of choice about seat-belts
and
motorcycle helmets is really predicated on the concession of another right: that the
injured riders have the right to be treated at public expense. The claim of that right
is
then used to deny the other [3]. The question is not even asked: do those who don't
want to use seat- belts or motorcycle helmets really want their liberty curtailed for
the
privilege of their injuries being treated at public expense? Evidently they are not
even
asked. The consequence, then, is not that Communitarians want to balance rights
and responsibilities; it is that they want to deny certain rights in favor of certain
other
ones, without asking whether that is the particular choice other people really want to
make.
The rights that Communitarians seem to prefer curtailing are what traditionally are
called "liberties," and the rights they seem willing to sacrifice those to are what
traditionally are called "powers" or "privileges." A "right" can mean a number of
things. The following diagrams (versions of the logical Square of Opposition) show
the relationships between different kinds of rights:
Rights, liberties, powers, and immunities are all kinds of "rights." Most importantly,
each kind of right implies a certain kind of liability in others, and each kind of
right
also has its opposite form of liability. Thus a "right," plain and simple, always
implies
some duty in others: they must observe your right through some kind of appropriate
behavior or recognition. Thus, if you have a "right" to have a job, it is going to mean
that someone is going to have the duty of giving you a job. A "responsibility" is a
duty
[4]. What we can call the responsibility to take care of one's own interests really
means a duty not to be a burden to others, which means a duty not to use them by
trying to fraudulently impose a non-contractual duty of commission on them.
The opposite of a "duty" is a liberty, which means that there are no rights of others
that need be observed in a particular case. A liberty is a right to act without
restraint,
which means that a liberty implies no right in any other -- bringing us back to the
opposite of a right. Similarly, in the other diagram, a "power" [5] is the ability to
change the legal status of something or force a legal compliance in another. A power
thus implies a liability in another, that they must recognize or comply with the power
exercised upon them. The opposite of a "liability" is an immunity, which is an
exemption from being subject to someone else's powers. An "immunity" implies a
disability in another, that they are without a power to affect the immune person in
that
case. Since liberties, powers, and immunities are all rights, any right may be said,
after a fashion, to imply certain duties, liabilities, or disabilities in others.
In the case of the seat-belt and motorcycle helmet laws, the conflict is between a
"liberty" to use one's own judgment and be responsible for one's own injuries, and a
right or a power to be treated at public expense, which imposes a duty or liability on
the public to do that. Communitarianism wishes to deny the liberty and give to the
public (the "community") the power to regulate the behavior of individuals (impose
disabilities) in order to limit public liabilities. That is the point: the
Communitarian
emphasis on the "community" makes everyone a ward of the community and
responsible to the community, rather than their own keeper and responsible to
themselves for their own actions. This is not a "balance" between individualism and
community; it is a historic reversal of the manner in which mediaeval society, in
which everyone was a ward of the King and/or the Church, was replaced by modern
conceptions of autonomy and freedom.
This also comes out in the Communitarian attitude towards the War on Drugs.
Etzioni says that drugs cannot be legalized because the laws "communicate and
symbolize those values that the community holds dear." Repealing the drug laws
would send the message that "the community approves of people being in a drug-
induced stupor." This is a common response from both Conservatives and Liberals;
but it is not right. The proper role of the laws is to forbid and punish judicial
wrongs
(of negligence, violence, and fraud) and protect judicial rights (of person, property,
and contract). The law should not be used to send any "messages," especially
messages that reflect moralistic views of prudential virtues as imposed by the
tyranny of the majority. The absence of drug laws does not mean that drug usage is
endorsed or promoted. Frederic Bastiat addressed this issue in relation to socialism
in his 1850 classic The Law:
Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction
between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing
being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at
all.
We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to
any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no
religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are
against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of
not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.
Similarly, just because we disapprove of the government attempting to forbid
imprudent or self-destructive behavior, this does not mean that we approve of that
behavior.
The emphasis of the authors of American Independence and of the Constitution was
clearly on the liberties of individuals, who were responsible for themselves, and not
on the powers and liabilities of the community to be responsible for individuals. Their
emphasis on Liberty contrasts with the typical emphasis of older societies, which was
on Duty -- still the keynote even in a generally liberal thinker like Immanuel Kant.
The
Preamble of the Constitution thus says that it is intended to "secure the Blessings of
Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." The Communitarian emphasis on positive
responsibilities to others, rather than on the mere negative responsibility not to be a
burden to others, thus sounds like a return to the traditional emphasis on Duty.
The Communitarian pitch to balance rights and responsibilities thus masks an
attempt to shift the basic nature of rights and responsibilities from individuals to
the
community, i.e. to the state. They can always refer to the clause in the Preamble that
says to "promote the general Welfare" -- regardless of whether particular individuals
want their welfare promoted by the state, as it sees fit, or not. Unfortunately, the
people who often do seem to be screaming about their rights all the time, seem
mostly to want to have it both ways: to have the liberties of individualism and to
impose liabilities on the community for the errors in judgment and action that they
make [6]. What needs to be made clear to people is that they cannot have it both
ways. The Communitarians, in turn, don't seem to understand that there is a choice:
they would just as soon strip individuals of their liberties every time there is a
conflict
with communal power and liability.
Behind the Communitarian shift of power to the state is a certain distorted preference
about what a "community" is: Communitarians distrust and dislike voluntary
communities. Robert Bellah especially believes that the only true community is one
created and controlled by democratic political power, which also happens to mean
that of the largest political unit possible. To him, small units, whether voluntary
associations or smaller units of government, do not represent enough of "the People"
to properly represent the General Will (as Rousseau would have said) of the
Community. This is an amazingly credulous, dangerous, and naive view of the
benevolence of democracy and of large government. What it reveals is that
Communitarians are not basically advocates of real community, but they are statists
and collectivists who confuse their own benevolent intentions, if they were in power,
with what such a government would be like operating under the incentives for
corruption that are created in the sort of unrestrained and absolutist, indeed
totalitarian, government that they desire.
No "community" worth the name is founded on anything other than voluntary
association. An interesting example is the mediaeval Jewish community. Most Jews
in the middle ages lived in countries with Christian or Moslem majorities and
governments. No Jew could be forced to remain a Jew, because all that a gentile
government needed was the slightest hit that a Jew wanted to convert to Christianity
or Islam and it would use, literally, all means necessary to "rescue" that potential
convert. Such governments also provided various incentives for conversion, including
greater freedom and security and more moderate taxation. Nevertheless, not only did
the Jewish community survive (though there were many conversions), but the
community also assessed contributions from its members to take care of its own.
Such contributions, then, could only be enforced by persuasion. But that was a very
effective means of enforcement, since the Jewish community mostly succeeded in
taking care of its less fortunate members. Certainly nobody else was going to.
It is particularly sad, then, when many people in the 20th century (including Jews)
look at something like the mediaeval Jewish community and think that it is precisely
the same thing to use the power of government to care for society in the same way. It
is not the same thing, because the power of government means the police. As
George Washington himself said: government is not reason; it is not persuasion; it is
force -- like fire, a dangerous servant and a terrible master. Community, in short, is
not the State. The Communitarians don't seem to realize, or perhaps they do, that
trying to create a "community" by the threat of the police kicking down people's
doors, to enforce the laws and taxes dictated by the "habits of the heart" of people
like Robert Bellah, does not create a "community" but instead a police state and a
prison for anyone who isn't 100% in tune with the crowd of demagogues returned by
the latest election. Thus the columnist Alexander Cockburn, although himself a
strange kind of civil liberties Leninist (not realizing that is a self-
contradiction), aptly
parodied the title of Hillary Clinton's book, It Takes a Village, as It Takes a Police
State.
No, the "heart" works by love and persuasion, not by force, by a free and voluntary
community, not by government; and the Communitarian view that small and
voluntary associations won't do the right thing by the community really means that
they don't trust what anyone will do until they themselves have the absolute power, in
the name of the "People," to control society the way they see fit. Since what they also
want to do is control private property and "redistribute" income, it should be clear
that
they are not new, non- partisan lovers of Community but really very old, very
remorseless leftists who love power and hate capitalism in the very same ways that
they have all this century [7].
What the shift from individual to communal rights also also amounts to is a shift from
duties of omission to duties of commission. Thus, Communitarianism results in a
new version of moralistic altruism and a new version of the feudal values that were
replaced by capitalism. The "right" to medical treatment at public expense,
regardless of one's own imprudence (smoking, drug usage, drag racing, sky diving,
coffee spilling, etc.), imposes a positive duty of commission on others to provide, or
at least to pay for, that treatment. On the other hand, the liberty to behave
imprudently only imposes the negative duty to be left alone. The shift from one kind
of right, the liberty, to the other, the power of compelling treatment, increases the
power of individuals to compel positive action in others. Thus, while the authors of
American Independence typically emphasized Liberty, recent political discourse is
dominated by talk about "empowerment" [8]. Since an unlimited version of individual
power is insupportable, the Communitarian answer, in turn, is not to strike out the
new powers as cases of moralistic altruism, but to add new powers to the state to
limit original individual liberties, like the liberty to be imprudent, in order to
limit the
state's new liabilities. The exchange in the end is the age old Satanic bargain of
trading freedom for security -- real freedom for the security promised by the state.
That security, of course, relies on the power of the state to compel others to do its
bidding, i.e. its power to enslave the persons and loot the wealth of others. Since the
others do not enjoy being enslaved and looted, their productivity declines and the
value supplied by the state's promise of security declines as well. All that such a
system can do, as Fidel Castro does to the Cubans, is to browbeat the people for
their lack of selfless ardor and exhort them to greater sacrifices for the common
good, i.e. goods for others that they will mostly never see, except what they see
turning up in the flourishing of those privileged with political connections.
While movements like Communitarianism are trying to replace responsibility to self
with responsibility to the state, on the grounds that this is responsibility to
others, the
very idea of personal responsibility has been damaged by the idea that the causes of
people's actions are exculpatory (i.e. absolve us of responsibility) before the law. It
has become rather common lately both to excuse the perpetrators of crime because
they couldn't help themselves (because of "anger," etc.) [9] and to blame some
remote conditions (poverty, capitalism, child abuse, television, drug abuse,
pornography, video games, etc.) for the perpetrator's actions. There are two deeply
malicious consequences to these views:
They are profoundly dehumanizing. Holding someone responsible for their actions is
to credit them with the dignity of free will, whether the effect of this is either
praise or
blame. The opposite is to reduce them to a mechanism -- a machine that must be
fixed or a computer program that must be rewritten. They become a link in a chain,
where all the links are open to our tinkering so that the chain comes out the way we
would like it. (Just who the "we" is supposed to be liking it is a good question.)
This is
deeply depersonalizing. Criminals become rats in cages watched over by behavior
modification specialists. Even the death penalty is more humane than that: at least
the death penalty is the ultimate "the buck stops here" attribution of responsibility.
Most arguments against the death penalty presuppose that the only real argument
for the death penalty is "deterrence"; but that stacks the deck. "Deterrence" is about
tinkering with causes and motivations. Death is about retribution. Whether there
should be a death penalty or not, that is the point on which the arguments speak past
each other: all judicial penalty must be about retribution first of all, because that
is the
essence of holding someone freely responsible for the crime. All other issues --
restitution, rehabilitation, remorse -- are secondary and dependent.
They launch the law onto a sea of hypothetical uncertainties. The causes of things
are usually concealed from casual inspection. Finding them out is what science is
for, and it is not surprising that it took 4500 years of human history for science to
find
its feet and really begin to discover the inner workings of nature. It is still a
process,
as Karl Popper puts it, of "conjectures" and "refutations." That is what a scientific
theory is: a conjecture. Some theories, at this point, seem to be things that we can
trust in with some confidence; but it is much clearer now than it was fifty years ago
that science is not just a simple march from ignorance to certainty. Indeed, the
insights of Popper and Thomas Kuhn are that every scientific "conjecture" inevitably
contains preconceptions and prejudices that are not easily weeded from the theory.
That is unavoidable. But where Bacon had wanted to say that all prejudices are bad
as such and must be avoided, we can say now that, not only cannot they be avoided,
but that even the lamest prejudice sometimes actually turns out to be true. In light of
this, however confident or distrustful we may be of science, it is in any case a weak
reed upon which to begin manipulating, punishing, exhorting, and coercing people
because of theories about the causes of criminal behavior. The way that science
gets used in such projects is almost always shallow and credulous in the extreme: if
scientific theories or results support some political agenda, then they are simply
True; but if they begin to contradict it, then suddenly science contains all these
vicious prejudices and preconceptions (!) and perhaps is even wholly unreliable and
discreditable because of some underlying agenda. The most amazing move is when
scientific truth is seen as inherently a matter of power politics, for that leaves
knowledge of causes in general as a pawn of power and political ideology -- which
means we can just believe whatever we want to, given our own particular grievances
with things, and then call it our "science." The tough bullet to bite is that all such
triumphant or recriminating uses of science are irrelevant if the causes of behavior,
apart from out and out insanity, are simply irrelevant to the law.
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Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2001 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights
Reserved
Rights and Responsibilities, Note 1
Virginia at the time had a tax supported Established Church which people were
required to attend under threat of legal punishment. Jefferson's own "Act for
establishing Religious Freedom" was proposed in 1779 but not passed until 1786,
when Jefferson was already American ambassador to France.
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Rights and Responsibilities, Note 2
Note Twain's incautious language. According to the theory of the Declaration of
Independence and the Bill of Rights, liberties are not "given me by the State." Instead
the State recognizes natural rights, which pre�xist it, and indeed the State only
exists
in order to guarantee those rights. Were a government to become "destructive of
these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it," as Jefferson
wrote in
the Declaration.
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Rights and Responsibilities, Note 3
As the public expense of medical treatment is now being used to attack tobacco.
Various States are suing tobacco companies to recover the medical costs States are
paying for the treatment of tobacco related diseases. On this theory, citizens are not
response for the expense incurred when they engage in dangerous activities, viz.
tobacco smoking; and since it is the tobacco that causes the disease, the supplier of
the tobacco should pay for the treatment. This kind of theory clearly would impose
limitless and insupportable liabilities on the tobacco industry, or require them raise
the price of tobacco products beyond what the market might support. In either case,
it could drive tobacco out of business -- at least out of legal business. At the same
time, if nicotine is declared a drug by the FDA, as the head of the FDA has proposed
himself, the FDA cannot approve drugs that are not "safe and effective," which
means it would have to ban tobacco. Again, tobacco would be out of business, which
one assumes is the ultimate purpose of all the political action against it.
Political activity against a popular drug began, of course, with alcohol. Interesting,
the
"Women's Christian Temperance Union," which, spearheaded by Carry Nation
(1846-1911), successfully led the drive for alcohol Prohibition in the United States,
actually still exists. On Monday, July 8, 1996, the Los Angeles Times printed a letter
from Paul B. Scott, a "Public Relations Consultant" for the Union, applying the "cost
to the public" theory used against tobacco to alcohol itself. Scott says: "The alcohol
industry can never make restitution for all of the social consequences of its products
but it should be made to pay for the medical costs it creates." Once tobacco is
destroyed, one supposes, the next target, on the same principles, will be alcohol
again. The theory has already been floated that perfume causes allergic reactions in
some nearby people, so it could be the next target.
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Rights and Responsibilities, Note 4
Since "response" means a reply, "responsible" originally meant "liable to to called on
to answer," i.e. accountable. From this came both the old expression "responsible
government," which meant government that had to account for its doings, and the
original meaning of the word "irresponsible," which was just "unaccountable." One is
answerable or accountable for what one has the duty to perform.
Now "accountable" and "responsible" have become slightly different since the
meaning of "responsible" has become different: "responsible" now usually just
means "conscientious," that you take care to execute your "responsibilities," i.e.
duties, faithfully. Some people water this down enough that "taking responsiblility"
has come to mean no more than acknowledging that one did something, or that one
feels good about it, not that one is really answerable or accountable for it, or even
conscientious. "Irresponsible" now usually means a failure to act conscientiously, but
the weakest sense of "taking responsibility" now has come full circle to the original
meaning of "irresonsibile," free of accountability.
Duty and accountability imply possibly adverse judgments against one's behavior,
and the theory of "taking responsibily" is often hostile to the existence of standards
of
duty and judgment. Ronald Reagan "took responsibility" for the Beirut Marine terrorist
bombing, as Janet Reno and Bill Clinton both "took responsibility" for the Waco
massacre of the Branch Davidians, but the intention and effect of all their actions
was to abolish consequences and accountability for themselves.
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Rights and Responsibilities, Note 5
Or "privilege," as the 14th Amendment forbids the States from passing laws "which
shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States." The
unamended Constitution itself says (Article IV, Section 2): "The Citizens of each
State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of citizens in the several
States." "Privilege" could to be interchangeable with "liberty" or "power." The great
English jurist, William Blackstone (1723- 1780), whose Commentaries on the Laws
of England formed the basis of American understanding of English Common Law,
defines the terms thus (boldface added):
The rights themselves, thus defined by these several statutes, consist in a number of
private immunities; which will appear to be indeed no other, than either that residuum
of natural liberty, which is not required by the laws of society to be sacrificed to
public
convenience; or else those civil privileges, which society hath engaged to provide, in
lieu of the natural liberties so given up by individuals.
Thus, "immunities" tends to cover natural rights that are retained pretty much in their
original form. The right to self defense would belong in that category. On the other
hand, "privileges" are rights (as powers) that substitute in a civil form for certain
other
natural rights which are not retained in their original form. An example of that would
be a natural right to retribution through revenge, which is surrendered for a civil
power, or privilege, to seek redress for wrongs and retribution through judical
proceedings. Punishments for wrongdoing are then applied by a presumably
dispassionate authority, whose judgment will not be distorted by personal grievance.
A fairly clear boundary can then be drawn between just retribution and revenge,
where in the state of nature that would be very difficult.
Today "privilege" is usually contrasted with any kind of "right," in the sense that
rights
are natural and inalienable while privileges are granted, contingent, and revocable,
as most States say that a driver's license is a "privilege, not a right"; but we see
James Fenimore Cooper, in his The American Democrat, using the expression
"inalienable privilege," which shows that our contrast between "rights" and
"privileges" is quite recent. A power as a privilege thus would be very different from
a
power as a right, and care must be taken with this ambiguity.
The ambiguity, however, goes back to "right" itself in Latin, jus, which originally
just
meant a legal claim, whether a right, duty, or privilege, without all the "human
rights"
furniture that has been added since Locke and Jefferson. A similar ambiguity turns
up in French, where droit can mean either a "right" (as in les droits d'homme, "the
Rights of Man," or the droit du seigneur, which meant the right of a lord to sleep with
any new bride among his vassals) or a "duty" (as in Dieu et mon droit, "God and my
duty," the motto on the arms of the Kings and Queens of England). That could be
confusing! Both "right" and droit originally just meant "straight" and so implied any
kind of moral or legal correctness.
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Rights and Responsibilities, Note 6
An infamous recent case was a woman who had bought a cup of coffee from
MacDonald's and then spilled it in her lap while driving her car. As the coffee soaked
into her clothes, she was badly scalded. Her lawyers argued that MacDonald's was
negligent because they sold coffee at 180 degrees F, which they knew would be
scalding if spilled. They won a large settlement, millions of dollars, for the woman.
On the other hand, since most people boil water to make coffee and tea, and boiling
water is 212 degrees F, one would think it common knowledge that scalding is
possible from hot coffee or tea and that MacDonald's could assume that people
would be as careful with coffee purchased from MacDonald's as with home made. If
that assumption is negligent, then one is left to wonder what the next step in
Communitarian reasoning would be: If people cannot be given the liberty to decide
about motorcycle helmets, because the public would be liable for their injuries, then
certainly people cannot be allowed to boil water at home, since the public would be
liable for injuries people might incur by spilling the water (or coffee or tea) on
themselves.
Return to text
Rights and Responsibilities, Note 7
Closely associated with Communitarianism and with these features of it is Michael
Lerner, the editor of Tikkun magazine and the rabbi of a San Francisco Jewish
congregation. Lerner's ideas he calls the "Politics of Meaning," and for a while after
the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, he had the ear of Hillary Clinton and was
publicly
being caller her "guru." However, that did not last, probably because Lerner was
unable to tone down his rhetoric and it quickly became clear how radical and leftist
he was.
The "meaning" Lerner was talking about was clearly any meaning that was contrary
to the principles of private property or the free market. A characteristic piece was a
column Lerner wrote about the riots in Los Angeles in 1992, published as a "Column
Left" in the LA Times. His problem was not with Rodney King or police brutality.
Instead he drew a comparison of the looting carried out by the rioters with capitalism
itself: "Looting is the dominant way of life in America"...."the unfair appropriation
of
[sic -- and?] random destruction of the collective goods of others for the sake of
personal and private benefit." How it is the "collective goods" are being "unfairly"
appropriated is unclear, unless Lerner simply doesn't believe in private property. And
if the appropriation of any goods for "the sake of personal and private benefit" is
unfair, then he clearly believes that society should be run by political means, by
people like him, for the presumed benefit of all. Lerner regards the "frantic pursuit
of
self- interest" as a moral evil.
There is nothing new about these ideas: They are the principles upon which the
Soviet Union was supposedly run. But people like Lerner don't seem to have noticed
that the class structure and poverty of the Soviet Union were vicious beyond
comparison with the United States, while the "random destruction of the collective
goods of others" that Lerner refers to, doubtlessly meaning to invoke the
Environmentalist clich� that capitalism is bad for the environment, was pretty much
what happened every day in the Soviet Union: with its worthless central heating
system, the city of Moscow uses as much natural gas in a year as the entire Republic
of France does.
Lerner's attacks upon individualism and capitalism are the same old leftist grab for
power away from individuals and for political commissars that people like Lerner
aspire to be. He can cloth this in moralistic language precisely because he can use
language from mediaeval societies that were conceived in just the totalitarian way
that he prefers.
Return to text
Rights and Responsibilities, Note 8
Liberties and immunities more clearly imply duties of omission in others, since they
do not involve any power to compel positive actions. Rights (in particular) and
powers, in turn, more easily imply duties of commission in others, since duties and
liabilities as such tend to imply positive actions or responses, as the existence of
"no
right" and disabilities merely imply the forbidding of certain actions. "Empowerment"
is ambiguous, since "power" in general can simply mean the ability to do something.
"Empowering" someone thus can simply mean giving them the ability to do positive
things in their lives, and that always sounds like a good thing. But a legal power has
the strong connotation of compelling action in others, and the context of talk about
"empowerment" today is usually in such a legal one. Much talk about "power" and
"empowerment" thus seems to involve politically moralistic limitations on liberty.
Return to text
Rights and Responsibilities, Note 9
This is applied very selectively. When those sympathetic to leftist causes commit
crimes, the crimes are often excused and "understood" as occurring because of
righteous anger (or "rage"). But when those sympathetic to rightist causes commit
crimes, attributing the actions to their anger (or "hate") often means requiring that
punishment be magnified. This can be true even when precisely the same kinds of
actions and motives are at issue, i.e. racially motivated beatings of whites by blacks
in the former case and racially motivated beatings of blacks by whites in the latter.
Such a double standard is often found when political bias influences the
administration of justice, as when Adolf Hitler was given a light prison sentence by a
sympathetic court for committing treason by trying to overthrow the government in
1923 (the "Beer Hall Putsch"), or in much of American history when crimes against
blacks would be punished much less severely, if at all, than crimes against whites --
which if done by blacks could be punished severely indeed, including by extra-judicial
lynching.
Return to text
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