Ridiculous Rights

The thing about Rights is that there is something not quite right about them.  That is about all the wordplay you're going to get from me today.  I'm in a bad mood, and my humour is suffering.  Anyway, on to the point.

When talking about an abstract noun, say "Redness" or "Organization"  it's very easy to begin speaking about things which don't really exist; a mistake common enough to result in several criticizing metaphysics very harshly for being nothing more than speculation.

The way to avoid such a grievous mistake is to understand that any abstract noun is the abstraction of certain properties.  For example, "Redness" is that property which allows us to identify red things as red.  "Organization" is the property shared by all things which are organized. Apart from physical things, properties might also manifest in other properties, such as the "oddness" of numbers, or the brightness of a hue.  Still however, the abstraction of "oddness" and "brightness" is only justifiable if they can be manifested in real properties, i.e. properties which may be manifested in physical things. Speaking about an abstract noun which does not have one or more corresponding properties which may manifest in physical things or other  real properties is to speak about fiction.

Now when we talk about a "Right" (as in the Right to Privacy, Free Speech etc.)  we are in fact speaking about an abstract concept and hence there must be some property which exists in the subject which allows such an abstraction.

Let us call this property simply "R" and assume that it exists.

Now property "R" is different from other properties because it makes an appeal to "should" or "ought" statements, while other properties appeal only to "is" statements.

For example, if a subject has the property of "Organization"  we can understand that it is organized. That's a simple "is" statement.  However if a subject has property "R" we understand it has a right, and that right dictates how the subject should be treated.  For example, if a subject has the property "A Right to life"  then it is understood that that subject should not be killed.  If we remove the "should" aspect from Rights, then they become unintelligible.

David Hume;  Not the inventor of humus.

It is here, that a problem arises.  As one David Hume famously put forward, it is impossible to derive a "should" statement from an "is" statement.  A "should" statement depends on both an "is" statement and a "want" statement.  For example, "I should wear a thicker jacket,"  is a true statement only if "I want to be warm," and "It is cold outside," are also true statements.

Therefore, saying that a subject has property "R" implies that there exists a "should" statement, which further implies a "want" statement.

But this is ridiculous.  How can a subject have a property such that it instills a desire in all other subjects?  If an agent is unique from the subject, then it cannot be that a property of the subject has to instill a desire in the agent.  It might just so happen that it does do so for one agent, but not for another.  But that does not mean that property "R" instills the same effect on all agents. There is no such property "R" which may manifest in anything physical such that it must instill the exact same desire in all agents.

If anyone has any lingering doubts about whether such an "R" can exist, the works of Soren Kierkegaard will quickly put the objections to rest.  Kierkegaard described a "leap of faith" (although he didn't coin the term himself) which everyone must make when s/he comes to accepting something as true; as such it's a "gap" between the external outside world and the world in our heads. Since this "gap" exists, any information we receive must be "subjectified" in our minds, and whether it falls under "desirable" or "undesirable" is a process which takes place privately and cannot be said to be the same for all people. (Granted this point is not completely proven, but it is a claim strongly supported by ample evidence and there exists, as of yet, no counter-example.)

                         

                            

                             There are ways around this problem.

Someone made a Kierkegaard finger puppet.
I suppose the internet is so big that everything
is bound to happen somewhere.

One way is to drop the "universal" aspect of Rights and consider them as relative to specific groups.  A Worker's Union, for example, might agree that all people have a Right to Employment, for as they are all workers, "employability" is a property which appeals to all of them.

A second solution is to form a social construct which "forces" (for want of a better word) the appropriate desire to be related to the property "R" by means of social sanctions.  So all people can have a "Right to life"  if the relevant sanctions against murder are put into place.  But of course this makes a Right a social construct, not a universal truth.

These approaches lead to a very different perspective on animal rights and abortion rights from the more mainstream views, but those are topics for another time.