Atheism

Politics

Memes

Mind

Matters

String

Interact

Feedback

Email

Links

Debate

Home

“Right...is the child of law: from real laws come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from laws of nature, fancied and invented by poets, rhetoricians, and dealers in moral and intellectual poisons, come imaginary rights, a bastard brood of monsters.” Jeremy Bentham

The world today is filled with a whole menagerie of monstrous ideas of rights. To me the very idea is transparently wrong-headed. Rights can only exist by virtue of some authority enabled to grant them. A god could grant rights, but there is no god. But animals that have heaved themselves unaided from the primeval ooze have never had rights given to them. To my mind that clearly indicates that there are no natural rights, no imprescriptible rights no unalienable (sic) rights and no fundamental human rights. Rather inconvenient I know, but there you go, if anybody told you life was straightforward they were probably lying with some ulterior motive in mind.

Rights are, as Bentham said, granted by law. With no law there are no rights, you are on your own. If we want to have rights we need to create them. Rights are created by law, rights are man made, synthetic.

Religions have helped us a little with the formation of laws but they do not hold the monopoly or the patent.

Man has acted with a sense of public morality since before we could speak. Morality is in the main based on the simplest rules of social behaviour that most animals can adhere to, rules that work by simple reciprocation. Christians will try to make out that the golden rule was invented by Jesus, which is not true. At the very best you could say he put a slight twist on it by saying that you should not just treat people as they treat you but as you wish them to treat yourself. You would have to be very blinkered to imagine that this idea had never occurred to anybody before. But then again if you are Christian a blinkered viewpoint is to be expected.

The notion of being hospitable to strangers has existed in most cultures. Unless you have a good reason to mistrust a stranger you treat them with respect and tentative friendship, while at the same time being cautious not to leave them unattended with your daughters or goats. New contacts offer the prospect of beneficial trade; in material, culture or genes. The golden rule is the basis of morality and it is virtually axiomatic, simple experience teaches us that do as you would be done by makes perfect sense and nobody needs to get nailed to anything to prove it.

Morality existed in all human cultures. Not always to the same degree, not always concerned with the same issues, but all human cultures ever described have been found to have moral codes. A concern about theft, unprovoked violence and adultery (theft of sexual property) seem to be present in all cultures. Man is a social and indeed a political animal, we make our living in political entities. We exist in a political world. We know of boundaries, borders, states, communities and nations. This is reality for us. The rights we want to have we do not get from our humanity or our gods, we get them from our political institutions, we get them from our laws and our states.

As we get more powerful and sophisticated as people our need for more elaborate social structures increases. The world of the hunter gatherer needs little in the way of politics, state organization or bureaucracy. Farming brought new ideas of property rights, city living required more regulation and industrialization boosted our capacity to inconvenience our neighbours. Modern states have evolved to safeguard our interests, to give us real rights that we did not have before. The right to free speech, clean air, affordable treatment for illness, clean water, freedom from wading through our neighbours sewage and the freedoms from starvation, exploitation and fear. None of this is perfect, nothing in the real world ever is, but we have managed to create a much safer, cleaner and freer world by the use of collective powers than if we did not try to do anything and left all people to pursue and secure their “rights” as best they can as “free individuals”. The right to work 12 hours shifts down a mine and live in squalor and filth is not much of a right, but in many parts of the world where the state is powerless or corrupt that is the reality for millions of people.

So many people see state power as being the enemy of rights when it is the very reverse. It is the state and the legal framework that secures your chances to enjoy the important rights. Without states and courts only wealth, luck or brute force can secure your interests.

It is also important to see that the state need not have a monopoly on power and influence in order to allow men to conduct their affairs in a way that increases their overall rights and power to act in their own interests. Other forms of collective structures can also help. Voluntary collectives such as trade unions, professional associations, trade associations, consumer groups and so on can all increase the overall power of the individual without necessarily seriously impinging on the rights of others. Trade unions and cartels of companies can restrict the activities of a free market, but there is nothing magical about a free market.

The free market does not always produce the best of all possible outcomes for all concerned. It does provide a simple solution to supply and demand; if you can pay the price you get what you want, if you can't you don't. That simple scenario says nothing about whether or not there is any benefit to the whole community in letting you make that choice or whether the disbenefit of forbidding that choice would be counteracted by a benefit to the rest of the community. It is very easy to get very gung-ho about freedom and assume every freedom is important and worth fighting to the death for but that is simply not so. What is the great benefit to freedom and the rights of mankind in allowing a company to sell sweetened lard and palm oil margarine with skimmed milk powder, water, air and carcinogenic artificial flavourings as “ice cream” when other companies are trying to compete by selling ice cream that is actually made from cream?

Does the majority of the population really suffer if it tells a small number of people that they are not welcome to walk through the streets with trained killer dogs on leads and carrying baseball bats? Is there a significant loss of freedom across the community at large if the “inalienable right to set off fireworks” is limited to devices that have a reasonable chance of being operated without killing anybody? Would the hand of the nanny state cripple individual initiative if 50 kilos of semtex strapped to a propane cylinder for example was not classified as harmless expression of some innate human right of free expression? And where should the line be drawn?

The idea that only actions that affect other people are the concern of the society as a whole is a feeble one. Very few actions are that clear cut. In some ways every action you take has an effect on the outside world and there is no magic scales of natural justice around to ensure that the pleasure gained balances the harm caused. Motorbikes are a classic example. Many small motorbikes are incredibly noisy and at the same time they offer only small benefits to the rider. They are dangerous to the user and the public in general, deliver one person relatively slowly and uncomfortably to their destination, producing more noxious fumes from their inefficient two stroke engines than a family car while producing intrusive noise levels similar to those that have seen Concorde banned from most airports around the world. Concorde makes more noise, but it carries 100 passengers in comfort and great speed, 50cc motorbikes are a great pain to everybody except the rider and the benefits that they do offer are so slight. It is very far from obvious that the pain of banning their use would not be outweighed by the pleasure caused to the rest of the community. I would see no problem in a community setting up maximum noise outputs for vehicles that would see these two wheeled banshees removed from the roads or radically redesigned. Such a move would be an infringement of the rights currently enjoyed by people but it would not be a cause for general alarm.

The real world is complicated. You cannot draw a clear ideological line in the sand and say that everything this side is the inalienable freedom of the individual and everything the other side is the evil hand of the nanny state. The interests of the majority cannot be eternally sacrificed because a handful of strange people claim that their human rights might be trampled on if we don't allow them to indulge their anti-social practices. Putting individual human rights on such a pedestal as that is subjecting ourselves to the tyranny of the minority. Given a choice between having my interests damaged by the interests of the democratically empowered majority and an ideologically empowered minority I have no hesitation in saying where I stand.

I see, as Bentham did, that pain is best regarded as negative pleasure, unhappiness and suffering is the opposite of happiness. There is, however, an asymmetry here. It is very easy to make a person unhappy. You reduce the power they have to control their lives, you hurt them physically, you deny them choices. Making people happy is another matter entirely. You cannot make a person happy. Happiness is something that people must grow or build for themselves. This is where the limits of the nanny state, or indeed the bread and circuses state, should come in. People find happiness best when they are allowed to achieve it for themselves. You cannot thrust happiness on people against their will by telling them to cheer up, smile, think positive or have a nice day.

If you increase the amount of tax a person has to pay you make them unhappy in an obvious way. Changing things the other way does not make them happy in as clear a way. The idea that you can literally perform utilitarian calculus is an illusion. It cannot be computed by machine, it can only be calculated by brains with the power to feel and suffer and understand happiness and suffering. The stark facts are that we can easily count and measure the numbers of people involved in a utilitarian calculus and compute those easily, however we cannot accurately convert the pleasures and pains of individuals into numbers. We cannot know how much a person suffering compares to another person. We also cannot be certain whether some people have different capacities to be happy and to suffer. It is by no means obvious that people are equal in their capacities to enjoy or suffer. If a person has become so damaged by their circumstances that they have a limited ability to enjoy happiness and a greater capacity to soak up pain without great suffering how does that affect our calculations?

To me it seems right for society to strive to increase the capacity of people to find and take pleasure in things that do little or no harm. Boys can get a lot of pleasure by fighting and being cruel to other children and animals, but we should be encouraging them to do other and better things. We can build a better society by keeping in mind the idea that happiness is easier to destroy than it is to build, but that it can be built.

A great society is not one in which the community is indifferent and has no collective goals. That is barely a human society at all. The great societies of history have always been communities with goals and aspirations not inward looking, isolationist or obsessed with lowering still further the lowest common denominator of social life. Students of history looking back on our times will regard the greatest achievements of our times to be the internet and putting men on the Moon, not selling burgers, games consoles and life insurance at unprecedented levels or allowing people the freedom to carry handguns in their cars. Collective projects, collective aims and collective action can achieve great things.

The happiness of a population is not a fixed maximum size achieved by leaving them to their own devices, it is a variable, not a constant, and it can be increased by the judicious use of collective power that is mindful of its potential to damage.

© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited