| | MJ Adler's perspective on rights (contrasted with the Bidinotto Manifesto on rights) ...
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Note: This post serves to stimulate discussion by drawing from, and expanding on, the insights of Mortimer J. Adler.
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One of my gurus is Mortimer J. Adler. I know, I know, he was ultimately a Christian philosopher with some intrinsic views, but please, check out this man's insight --I suspect that it is valuable here.
I feel that MJ Adler was the preeminent PROFESSIONAL philosopher of objective rights/values in the middle of the 20th Century (Ayn Rand and, to a lesser extent, Eric Hoffer, being preeminent pseudo-professional advocates--in the middle of the 20th Century) ...
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First a telling quote from this deceased man ...
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Source:
http://www.radicalacademy.com/adlerdirectory.htm
"The only standard we have for judging all of our social, economic, and political institutions and
arrangements as just or unjust, as good or bad, as better or worse, derives from our conception of the good life for man on earth, and from our conviction that, given certain external conditions, it is possible for men to make good lives for themselves by their own efforts." Mortimer J. Adler
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My own interpretation of this quote:
Right and wrong can only be known against background conditions of the "what-is-possible." It has to do with man's nature as man qua man, man's powers and potentialities, man's goodness. It doesn't have to do with how "bad" man can be when he turns his back on his own powers and potentialities. Normative concepts use the exemplary (the superior of all possible instantiations) to judge the inferiority (distance away from the highest good) or superiority (closeness to that which maximizes happiness for the acting / interacting agents).
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Now, excerpts from some of his work ...
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Natural Rights and Civil Rights
Source:
http://radicalacademy.com/adlernatcivrights.htm
If human rights are natural rights, as opposed to those that are civil, constitutional, or legal, then their being rights by natural endowment makes them inalienable in the sense just indicated.
Their existence as natural endowments gives them moral authority even when they lack legal force or legal sanctions. Their moral authority imposes moral obligations, which may or may not be respected or fulfilled.
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When a human right is not acknowledged by the state, or when it is not enforced or when it is violated by a government, it still exists. It retains its moral authority even though it is not enforced or has been transgressed. If these rights did not continue in existence in spite of such adverse circumstances, then we would have no basis for condemning as unjust a government that failed to enforce them or that trampled on them.
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On the Mistake of Giving Primacy of
the Right Over the Good
Source:
http://radicalacademy.com/adlerrightgood.htm
Two serious errors that affect our understanding of justice have already been touched on and corrected in earlier chapters of this book, explicitly or by implication.
One, the mistake of giving primacy or precedence to the right over the good, had its origin in the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant and was given currency in this century in a book, "The Right and the Good", published by an Oxford philosopher, Professor W. D. Ross, in the early thirties. It stems from ignorance of the distinction between real and apparent goods--goods needed and goods wanted--an ignorance that could have been repaired by a more perceptive reading of Aristotle's "Ethics."
Once that distinction is acknowledged and its full significance understood, it will be seen at once that it is impossible to know what is right and wrong in the conduct of one individual toward another until and unless one knows what is really good for each of them ...[my insight: goodness is a relation, not a property--a proper relation to your identity/nature]
Real goods, based on natural needs, are convertible into natural rights, based on those same needs. To wrong another person is to violate his natural right to some real good, thereby depriving him of its possession and consequently impeding or interfering with his pursuit of happiness.
In short, one cannot do good and avoid injuring or doing evil to others without knowing what is really good for them. The only goods anyone has a natural right to are real, not apparent, goods. We do not have a natural right to the things we want; only to those we need.
"To each according to his wants," far from being a maxim of justice, makes no practical sense at all; for, if put into practice, it would result in what Thomas Hobbes called "the war of each against all," a state of affairs [anarchy] he also described as "nasty, brutish, and short."
If, as Professor Ross maintained, the right had primacy over the good, we should be able to determine what is right or just in our conduct toward others without any consideration of what is really good for them. But that is impossible.
The second mistake, equally serious for the subject at hand, made its appearance more recently in a widely discussed and overpraised book, "A Theory of Justice", written by Harvard professor John Rawls. The error consists in identifying justice with fairness in the dealings of individuals with one another as well as in actions taken by society in dealing with its members.
Fairness, as we have seen, consists in treating equals equally and unequals unequally in proportion to their inequality. That is only one of several principles of justice, by no means the only principle and certainly not the primary one. [I think it is!]
If, as Professor Rawls maintained, justice consists solely in fairness, murdering someone, committing mayhem, breaching a promise, falsely imprisoning another, enslaving him, libeling him, maliciously deceiving him, and rendering him destitute, would not be unjust, for there is no unfairness in any of these acts. They are all violations of rights, not violations of the precept that equals should be treated equally.
Only when the facts of human equality and inequality in personal respects and in the functions or services that persons perform provide the basis for determining what is just and unjust can justice and injustice be identified with fairness and unfairness.
When, on the contrary, the determination of what is just and unjust rests on the needs and rights inherent in human nature, then justice and injustice are based on what is really good and evil for human beings, not upon their personal equality or inequality or upon the equality and inequality of their performances.
The fact that all human beings, by nature equal, are also equally endowed with natural rights does not make their equality or their equal possession of rights the basis of a just treatment of them. If only two human beings existed, one could be unjust to the other by maliciously deceiving or falsely imprisoning him. That wrongful act can be seen as unjust with out any reference to equality or inequality. It is unjust because it violates a right.
Murder, mayhem, rape, abduction, libel, breach of promise, false imprisonment, enslavement, subjection to despotic power, perjury, theft--these and many other violations of the moral or civil law are all unjust without being in any way unfair. They are all violations of natural or legal rights. That is what their injustice consists in, not unfairness.
Murder wrongfully deprives an individual of his right to life. Mayhem, torture, assault and battery wrongfully impair the health of an individual, which is a real good to which he has a natural right. False imprisonment, enslavement, subjection to despotic power transgress the individual's right to liberty. Libel, perjury, theft take away from individuals what is right fully theirs--their good name, the truth they have a right to, property that is theirs by natural or legal right. Rendering others destitute, leaving them without enough wealth to lead decent human lives, deprives them of the economic goods to which they have a natural right.
In all these instances of injustice, which consist in the violation of rights, the ultimate injury done the unjustly treated individual lies in the effect it has upon his or her pursuit of happiness. The circumstances under which individuals live and the treatment they receive from other individuals or from the state are just to the extent that they facilitate his pursuit of happiness, unjust to the extent that they impair, impede, or frustrate that pursuit.
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Natural Needs = Natural Rights
Source:
http://radicalacademy.com/adlernaturalneeds.htm
Resting on the distinction between the real and the apparent good, a basic tenet of the commonsense view is that what is really good for any single individual is good in exactly the same sense for every other human being, precisely because that which is really good is that which satisfies desires or needs inherent in human nature -- the makeup that is common to all men because they are members of the same biological species. The totum bonum -- happiness or the good life -- is the same for all men, and each man is under the same basic moral obligation as every other -- to make a good life for himself.
Two things follow from this controlling insight.
Every real good is a common good, not an individual good, not one that corresponds to the idiosyncratic desires or inclinations of this or that individual. The same, of course, holds true of the totum bonum as the sum total of all real goods.
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In addition, when I know the things that are really good for me and what my happiness consists in, and when I understand that each real good and the totum bonum as the sum of all of them are common goods, the same for all men, I can then discern the natural rights each individual has -- rights that others have which impose moral obligations upon me, and rights that I have which impose moral obligations upon others. [my note: the moral obligation NOT to infringe on others' rights--negative rights]
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But what is a moral right as contradistinguished from a legal right? It is obvious at once that it must be a right that exists without being created by positive law or social custom. What is not the product of legal or social conventions must be a creation of nature, or to state the matter more precisely, it must have its being in the nature of men. Moral rights are natural rights, rights inherent in man's common or specific nature, just as his natural desires or needs are. Such rights, being antecedent to society and government, may be recognized and enforced by society or they may be transgressed and violated, but they are inalienable in the sense that, not being the gift of legal enactment, they cannot be taken away or annulled by acts of government.
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That which I do not need for my own good life or that which is not an essential ingredient in my pursuit of happiness does not impose a duty on me, as far as my own private conduct is concerned, nor does it impose a duty on others with regard to their conduct toward me because such matters give me no natural or moral rights that others must respect.
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Natural needs make certain things really good for me; the things that are really good for me impose moral obligations on me in the conduct of my private life; these, in turn, give me certain moral or natural rights, and my having such rights imposes moral obligations on others with respect to me.
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And just as natural needs and the real goods correlative to them are the same for all men because they have the same specific nature, so too, and for the same reason, the remaining items on the list are the same for all men. We all have the same moral obligations in the conduct of our private lives; we all have the same natural rights; and we all have the same duties toward others.
As our primary moral obligation is to make a really good life for ourselves, so our primary natural right is our right to the pursuit of happiness. To respect this right that I have, others are under the obligation not to do anything that prevents me or seriously impedes me from discharging my basic obligation to myself. If I did not know in some detail the things I ought to do in order to discharge the obligation I am under to make a good life for myself, I could not know what behavior on the part of others interfered with my pursuit of happiness and so was wrong -- a violation of my natural rights. In other words, all my subsidiary natural rights [break] stem from my right to the pursuit of happiness and from my obligation to make a good life for myself. They are rights to the things I need to achieve that end and to discharge that obligation.
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The only point I wish to reiterate here, because it is of such prime importance, is that the individual would not have a natural right to the pursuit of happiness if he did not have a moral obligation to make a good life for himself; and if he did not have that one basic natural right, he would not have any subsidiary natural rights, because all other natural rights relate to the elements of individual happiness or to the parts of a good life -- the diverse real goods that, taken together, constitute the whole that is the sum of all these parts.
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If we did not know or could not know what is really good or bad for the individual, we would not and could not know what is right and wrong in the conduct of one individual toward others; nor could we know what is right and wrong in the individual's conduct of his own life. If, without reference to others, we speak of an individual as acting rightly or wrongly, we are saying no more than that he is or is not discharging his moral obligation to make a really good life for himself. So when, with reference to others, we say that an individual acts rightly or wrongly, we are similarly saying that he is or is not discharging his moral obligations toward them, based on their natural rights -- rights that are grounded in each man's moral obligation to make a good life for himself.
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There is some point in preserving the distinction between an individual's moral obligations to himself and his moral obligations to others. He does not claim any rights against himself, as he claims rights against others. His moral obligations toward others are grounded in their rights, and determine the rightness or wrongness of his conduct toward them.
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We have seen that fortitude and temperance, which are aspects of moral virtue or strength of character, and prudence or soundness of judgment, operate instrumentally as necessary means toward the end of making a good life for one's self. A good moral character and sound judgment would also seem to be involved in making the effort that we are under a moral obligation to make in our conduct toward others -- to act rightly toward them and to avoid wronging them, which is another way of saying that we ought not to injure them by preventing them from making good lives for themselves. Thus we can see what is meant by saying that justice in general consists in having the moral character that the individual needs in the effort to make a good life, for when his moral character or virtue is directed toward the good life that others are under an obligation to make for themselves, it has the aspect we refer to as justice rather than as temperance or fortitude.
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Our basic natural right to the pursuit of happiness, and all the subsidiary rights that it encompasses, impose moral obligations on organized society and its institutions as well as upon other individuals. If another individual is unjust when he does not respect our rights, and so injures us by interfering with or impeding our pursuit of happiness, the institutions of organized society, its laws, and its government, are similarly unjust when they deprive individuals of their natural rights.
Just governments, it has been correctly declared, are instituted to secure these rights.
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On Inalienable Rights
Source:
http://radicalacademy.com/adlerinanrights.htm
One question still remains concerning the inalienability of natural human rights. The Declaration mentions our inalienable right to life and to liberty. But when criminals are justly convicted and sentenced to terms in prison, are we not taking away their liberty? And when they are convicted of capital offenses for which death is the penalty, are we not taking away their lives? If so, how then do the rights in question still exist and remain inalienable?
It is easier to answer the question about imprisonment than it is to answer the question about the death penalty. Two points are involved in the answer.
First, the criminal by his antisocial conduct and by his violation of a just law has forfeited not the right, but the temporary exercise of it. His incarceration in prison does not completely remove his freedom of action, but it severely limits the exercise of that freedom for the period of imprisonment.
The right remains in existence both during imprisonment and after release from prison. If the prison warden attempted to make the prisoner his personal slave, that would be an act of injustice on his part, because enslavement would be a violation of the human right to the status of a free man. This human right belongs to those in a prison as well as those outside its walls.
When the criminal's term of imprisonment comes to an end, what is restored is not the individual's right to liberty (as if that had been taken away when he entered the prison), but only his fuller exercise of that right. It is the exercise of that right that is given back to him when he walks out of the prison gates, not the right itself, for that was never taken away or alienated.
When we come to capital punishment, we cannot deal with the question in the same way. The death penalty takes away more than the exercise of the right to life. It takes away life itself.
If that right is inalienable, it cannot be taken away by the state, nor can it be forfeited by the individual's misconduct. It is one thing to forfeit the exercise of a right and quite another to divest one's self of a right entirely. What cannot be taken away by another cannot be divested by one's self.
It would, therefore, appear to be the case that the death penalty is unjust as a violation of a natural human right. Nevertheless, capital punishment has been pragmatically justified as serving the welfare of society by functioning as a deterrent to the gravest of felonies.
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I hope that this stimulates discussion,
Ed
(Edited by Ed Thompson
on 4/13, 11:13pm)
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