Droit and double droit

[steepholm]

This afternoon I washed dishes to the sound of another interesting Radio 4 programme. This time it was a group of lawyers and philosophers arguing about rights, and how far they extend. We can agree that humans have rights, sure - but animals? And, if we're talking animals, should we distinguish between the rights of individual animals and those of entire species, such as the right not to be made extinct? Does the degree of sentience have a bearing? (But then, a species qua species isn't sentient.) What about the rights of plants, or of robots?

Much of this was familiar, but it reminded me that I find the whole concept of rights curiously unsatisfactory. I can't honestly see what they're for. Or rather, since I don't want to come across as shockingly illiberal, I don't see what the concept of rights brings to moral discourse that isn't already adequately covered by the concept of duty. What does the sentence "This woman has a right to life" add to the sentence "One should not kill this woman"? The former has a more positive "spin" as it were, but isn't the net effect equivalent?

Using the discourse of duty still leaves all the important problems unsolved, of course. Instead of asking how far rights extend, or what we should do when rights conflict, the same questions are repackaged in terms of what duties we have, and what to do when we have conflicting duties. All the same, I've always felt more at home with the idea that the morality of my actions is determined by my doing what I ought to do, rather than successfully negotiating a set of rights that are "out there" waiting to be potentially infringed. I feel more as if I own my actions when I think of it that way.

I'm no philosopher, as anyone can see, but I'd be interested to know if I'm alone in feeling like that. And also - does anyone have a simple account of how and why the discourse of duty came to be at least partially supplanted by the discourse of rights? (I'm guessing it's an Enlightenment kinda thing.) In what ways was duty found wanting? And how did we end up with this strange belt-and-braces morality?

Comments

[hafren.livejournal.com]

I see it more as a negative thing - a species has no inherent "right" to be, but I have no right to eliminate it either, be it even the smallpox virus (and on a practical level you never can tell when you'll be sorry for having done so).

I dimly recall, in school, learning a poem about a worm: it ended

Let them enjoy their little day.
Their harmless bliss receive.
Oh! do not lightly take away
The life thou canst not give.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

I think you've pretty much hit the crux of the difference between modern and pre-modern attitudes. Taking it a step further, this may be one of the fundamental differences between the Islamic world-view and the post-Enlightenment world-view of the West. I know I tend to think more in terms of obligation and duty to others more than rights,or perhaps that for each right or privilege we have, there is a corresponding obligation. It's a very Roman way of looking at things, at least in the ideal.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

does anyone have a simple account of how and why the discourse of duty came to be at least partially supplanted by the discourse of rights

Making this up as I go along, but I'm guessing that first you get a justification for rebellion against princes (from the English civil war onwards), which disrupts the mutual obligations of a feudal relationship and opens the way for the idea of rights attached to an individual (as vindicated by Paine and Wollstonecraft and formalized in the American constitution), and which in C. 19th British political theory becomes the "freedom to" and "freedom from" of liberalism.

I suppose, to do the discourse of rights justice, there's an implication of mutual interdependence and obligations in the idea of the "social contract", but IIRC the contract is generally seen as a constraint?

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

I suppose, to do the discourse of rights justice, there's an implication of mutual interdependence and obligations in the idea of the "social contract", but IIRC the contract is generally seen as a constraint?

I think that's become very much the case in the last 150 years -- and especially in the last 35 (i.e., since the Reagan-Thatcher years)

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I was half-remembering something about Rousseau being ambivalent towards the social contract too.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

The mention of the social contract brings in a distinction that the participants in the programme kept bumping up against - the distinction between rights that are somehow innate and inalienable, and presumably always existed even if they were only 'discovered' and declared at a certain historical moment; and those that come into a existence as the result of a kind of mutual agreement to abide by a set of rules or laws - like the right of a person playing chess to move the bishop along the diagonal lines.

I guess social contract rights are more the latter type: they presume (and I'm vaguely thinking back to Hobbes here) that society is a contract freely entered into between rulers and ruled for the ultimate benefit of all, and that both rights and obligations stem from this agreement. I guess what I'm more interested in, though, is the other kind of un-negotiable morality appealed to in the Declaration of Independence (from a rights point of view) or the Ten Commandments (from an obligation one). Although, come to think of it, the commandments were a contract too...

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I would have said that it is a product of the Enlightenment (the rights of man, the rights of women, written constitutions, followed by anti-slavery and anti-vivisection campaigns, often by the same sort of women) were it not for a sense of the Victorian duty displayed by (mostly Quaker?) philanthropists.

[gair.livejournal.com]

Argh. I read a thing about the switch to 'rights' discourse, and now I can't remember it... if it comes back to me, I'll let you know!

(File under: gair's unhelpful comment of the day...)