Rethinking Rights
Which will prevail?
It's obvious to me that all humans have certain rights. These rights are codified in various documents like the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the constitutions of various countries.
I'm pretty comfortable with the ideas in documents like that.
I affirm ideas like "All people have a right to life, liberty and happiness". Who could disagree with that?
But that can morph easily into people with no money not having a right to anything.
The meme of 'rights' is evolving. Once women in the USA had a right to terminate a pregnancy but that turned out to be an illusion.
Lately the meme of 'parental rights' has been spreading like wildfire. Just as people have certain rights because they are human, parents are claiming to have rights because they are parents. Of course, when it comes to some parents claiming the right to ban books from libraries that they don't want their kids exposed to, they are conflicting with the rights of other parents who want the books to be there.
The idea of rights implies a kind of objectivity as if the rights were like facts of nature that can't be denied.
But in fact, establishing a right involves a very elaborate political process among conflicting interests - its not objective at all.
Perhaps we can do better.
Amartya Se
n and Martha Nussbaum look beyond the idea of rights to the idea of the capabilities a person needs to live a full life on their own terms.
They call their method The Capabilities Approach. Rather than aggregate measures of social well being like GDP or stock market gyrations, we need to look in detail at what capabilities people actually have compared to the capabilities they need.
For instance, unless a person is literate, their opportunities in life are greatly restricted.
These days encampments of homeless people are common and it's plain that the opportunities available to people are restricted if you are unhoused.
Wikipedia has a good article that lists Nussbaums 10 core capabilities at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach
These capabilities have a certain tension. For instance, the capability to love and enjoy sex is not something that can be given as a right to any individual because it depends on the details of their relations to other individuals.
None of them can be taken as primary.
The capabilities approach was developed as a way of comparing societies.
It also fits with the idea of an open society. That is, a society that solves it's problems as they arise, as opposed to a closed society that seeks an unchangeable perfection.
We can look at our own society and when we see that people don't have various capabilities we can work directly to solve the problem.
For instance, one of the reasons there is so much homelessness around me is that the cheapest places to rent are also unpleasant places to live. Many people find a tent on the sidewalk preferable. I wonder why we don't do a study and design low rent housing that doesn't have those problems. Problems could be addressed one at a time. But really, this would require purpose built public housing.
Trying to encourage private landlords to do it is a mugs game.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.