12/30/06
Natural rights as idiomatic speech -
Categories: The standard language of natural rights is largely idiomatic. What is said is not literally true. But one is supposed to understand the intent. For example: I have a right to liberty.
A right is a claim to obligatory treatment. But this basic right has been whittled away in our society, and its full operation was never in place, really. Governments routinely abridge this right. They don't recognize it. You do not really have this right.
Now, I could say, I have a right to vote in my county,
and I would be completely correct. The government is obliged to take my vote when an election is held. And count it. Were it discovered that the government regularly takes my vote and stuffs it in the trash can, not only would i object, so would most citizens in the county, and the trashing of my vote would stop.
There. I effectively possess the right to vote.
But I do not effectively possess a right to liberty. There are all sorts of things that I could be at liberty to do, and do without abridging anyone else's liberty, but which I am prevented from doing. By the government. I may protest these alleged rights violations, but there is no hue and cry about them in my county, and I effectively possess no such right.
When we say I have a right to liberty,
we are really saying I should have a right to liberty.
The having is something we should have, not something we actually do have. This is a moral claim, outside of normal law and politics.
It is idiomatic speech. When one says keep your eyes peeled
we mean to keep your eyelids up and our attention focused, not literally to take out a peeler and do something drastic to your eyes; when one says over the hill,
we think of a metaphorical hill, the peak of which we pass in life at some point; if we are getting down to brass tacks
we rarely want to have anything to do with pointy little stick-ems, and certainly don't want to be down there on the floor with them; or if one of us kicks the bucket
no one expects to hear any clanking.
Idioms come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. (See what I mean?) In normative talk, one of the ways to make the suggested norm, ideal, or rule more compelling is to suggest that the should
really is an is.
Not just a should.
So we speak of rights as existing apart from their defense and respect in society. They exist in some metaphysical realm. And we have
them even when, unlike property we actually own, we can in no sense bring them into causal connection and make them a lived reality. (To use a Mengerian construction.)
In this way, ethics seems like it descends into error. J.L. Mackie propounded the Error Theory of ethics, arguing that human beings naturally misuse philosophical concepts in ethical suasion, asserting, say, objective value when no such value has been demonstrated.
I prefer thinking of this as the Bluster Theory of ethics. We overstep our argument and assert an existent where all we have is a preferred course of a counterfactual or imaginative nature.
I tend to clean up my language and not descend into full-blown natural rights talk. Those philosophers who still assert deep philosophical import into what I see as idiomatic speech I look upon, I'm afraid, with a little condescension. They simply haven't separated speech, and speech acts, and imagined acts, and norms as distinct concepts. They are muddled.
Their muddle is to act as if bluster were an epistemic method. It is not.
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