What Is a Right?

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Clarissa

February 22, 2020

I’m new to conservative thought, so I keep discovering stuff that everybody has probably known for a lifetime.

For instance, I found out today that the issue of the how elastic the concept of “a human right” has become wasn’t first brought up by Caldwell (the author of The Age of Entitlement). Scruton – and I’m guessing others – have been talking about this for years.

How far should we stretch our understanding of what’s a right? Who will guarantee and enforce this right and by what means? Do you have the right not to be called “a horsefaced piece of utter ridiculousness”? Do you have the right to respect? The right to be addressed the way you choose to? The right not to be displeased? The right to live anywhere you want? The right not to be exposed to anything that upsets you?

Who gets to compile these lists of rights? Who gets to create new rights? Scruton gives some really shocking statistics on how clogged up the British judiciary is with cases that arise from this dramatically expanding list of rights.

It’s a really important question. And I’m guessing that Scruton’s writing – which preceded Caldwell’s – signals a big flaw in Caldwell’s argument. If Caldwell were correct about the very American origins of this phenomenon, it wouldn’t be as – or even more – present in Canada and the UK. Caldwell’s book is still great but his fault is his American exceptionalism that blinds him to the rest of the world.

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9 responses to “What Is a Right?”

readerjohn

February 22, 2020

Antecedent to the thorny questions you’re grappling with is a question arising from how equivocal the term “right” is. There exists a little-known “Hohfelidian vocabulary” for distinguishing right from right, but nobody seems to use it. It’s more fun just to raise your voice when assering a right.

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David Gendron

February 22, 2020

« Do you have the right not to be called “a horsefaced piece of utter ridiculousness”? Do you have the right to respect? The right to be addressed the way you choose to? The right not to be displeased? The right to live anywhere you want? The right not to be exposed to anything that upsets you? »

No, no, no, no, no and no. But both have the right to tango.

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1. Clarissa
  
  February 22, 2020
  
  I agree but the current consensus is going in the opposite direction.
  
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David Gendron

February 22, 2020

And if someone is for free speech but promotes a more repressive state, I have the right to call him a hypocrite.

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cliff arroyo

February 22, 2020

Simplifying a bit (because I can’t get more complex……
One basic division is between:
negative rights (no one can stop you if you can do/get it on your own)
vs.
positive rights (if you can’t do/get it on your own then….. society has to provide it for you).
The US has mostly been into negative rights while things like the universal charter of human rights are far more into positive rights.

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Izgad

February 22, 2020

I am planning on downloading Caldwell and reading him as soon as possible.
For a conservative/classical liberal theory of rights see Thomas Sowell’s Conflict of Visions (he should be read within the context of Burke and Hayek). Jonathan Haidt’s Righteous Mind might also be good for you. A way to approach this issue is to read J. S. Mill’s On Liberty and ask yourself where most people on the left would disagree with him.

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DWeird

February 22, 2020

Conservative thought is turf I know pretty well, it has been the basis of my political education.

Never really bought the negative/positive right distinction as anything other than sentiment. Never really saw the need for rights as a core concept, either.

All rights are obligations, just for other people, and you can cover whatever behaviours you want by extending either “negative” or “positive” rights as you wish, which is why the establishment of any new rights is nearly always the same act as the self-assertion of a new political or legal body.

Why this doesn’t seem to be the case with the more recent types of rights, I have no clue. Maybe we’re just early.

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Aaron

February 24, 2020

That critique of natural as opposed to positive rights seems to go at least as far back in conservative thought as Edmund Burke. He warned that “vague speculative right[s]” would be used by “every wild, litigious spirit.”

In the famous law of the 3rd of Charles I., called the Petition of Right, the parliament says to the king, “Your subjects have inherited this freedom,” claiming their franchises not on abstract principles “as the rights of men,” but as the rights of Englishmen, and as a patrimony derived from their forefathers. Selden, and the other profoundly learned men, who drew this Petition of Right, were as well acquainted, at least, with all the general theories concerning the “rights of men,” as any of the discoursers in our pulpits, or on your tribune; full as well as Dr. Price, or as the Abbé Sieyès. But, for reasons worthy of that practical wisdom which superseded their theoretic science, they preferred this positive, recorded, hereditary title to all which can be dear to the man and the citizen, to that vague speculative right, which exposed their sure inheritance to be scrambled for and torn to pieces by every wild, litigious spirit.

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Another Question About Rights – Clarissa's Blog

April 16, 2024

[…] about how the spread of invented “rights” eviscerated the US Constitution. Or at least, read this post from when I was talking about Caldwell incessantly. We do not need to invent the wheel when others have done it a long time […]

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