Rights are wrong

One of the dominant features of modern political discourse is passing appetites as rights.

Thus, for example, instead of saying “I’d like to have paternity leave”, a modern man is likely to say “I have a right to a paternity leave”.

We are reaping the poisoned Enlightenment harvest. Billed as the Age of Reason, that period and its aftermath debauched reason like no other. The concept of ‘rights’, natural, inalienable or otherwise, reflects the crepuscular thinking of those self-proclaimed enlighteners.

A real, otherwise known as natural or inalienable, right presupposes no concomitant obligation on anyone else’s part. The rights mentioned in the American Declaration of Independence, those to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, score two out of three on that test.

The pursuit of happiness was understood in the Lockean sense of the pursuit of estate, which is to say wealth and property. This right, if exercised legally, doesn’t impose an obligation on anyone else and thus qualifies as legitimate.

So does the right to life. Your life isn’t contingent on anyone else’s consent to grant it (let’s leave God out of it). Hence your right to it is indeed inalienable.

By contrast, the right to liberty is problematic. First, unlike life and the pursuit of estate, liberty is hard to define. One man’s liberty is another man’s licence and a third man’s anarchy.

However defined, liberty is a matter of an intricate multi-lateral consensus. Claiming it usually involves limiting the liberty of others, something to which they may or may not agree. Had the framers of the Declaration used the word ‘freedom’ instead of ‘liberty’, they would have been on a safer intellectual ground.

For, unlike liberty, freedom exists within, not without. Our right to it is natural and inalienable because freedom comes from our relation to God (I know I promised to leave Him out of it, but you know better than to believe me), not other men.

Even when a right is indisputable, it leaves room for casuistic abuse. Is the death penalty a violation of the natural right to life? Is abortion? How is it that the proponents of the latter are almost always opponents of the former and vice versa, with this right invoked in each case?

In general, the term ‘rights’ is at best useless in any serious inquiry, and at worst harmful. It certainly flings the door wide open for wicked ideologies to barge in.

Today we are served up any number of rights: to marriage, education, health, development of personality, leisure time, orgasms, warm and loving family or – barring that – warm and loving social services, employment, sex change, abortion on demand and so forth.

These ‘rights’ are all bogus since they fail the test of not presupposing a concomitant obligation on somebody else’s part.

Thus one’s right to employment would mean something real only if there were someone out there who consents or is obligated by law to give one a job. One’s right to a developed personality presupposes an obligation on somebody else’s part to assist such development. My right to free education entails your obligation to pay for it.

Far from being natural, all these rights become tangible only if they are granted by others; and anything given can be taken away, so there go all those pseudo-rights alienated right out of the window.  

The subversive potential of rights is best illustrated by the US, where this concept was codified in the founding documents. Now the country is tearing its social fabric to shreds, with various groups slashing it with the jagged knife of rights.

One instantly apparent problem is that most of these ‘rights’ clash with one another. It doesn’t even matter whether the rights are real or bogus.

For example, a group claiming its right to be equally represented in the workplace denies the owner’s rights to the pursuit of estate (aka happiness) and, arguably, to liberty as well. How do we solve this conflict? Who wins?

Why, whoever screams more loudly, practises name-calling with more febrile passion, threatens violence most credibly. The language of rights, if used with abandon, replaces thought with hysterics, debate with swearing, civility with savagery.

Everything becomes a matter of political rough-and-tumble, including matters that logically should be outside politics. Law is one such, and that too has been thoroughly politicised, meaning, inter alia, dumbed-down.

Take the on-going, raging debate about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn its 1973 ruling on Roe vs Wade. This issue touches on various disciplines: constitutional law, philosophy, biology, theology, morality – and it can be argued on any or all of these grounds.

Yet the debate has been solely reduced to the matter of rights, with the predictable result. It has descended into name-calling, spasmodic fits, verbal and often physical violence. The matrix is simple: If you are [for, against], then you are [choose an appropriate term of abuse, shout it at the top of your lungs].

In reality, the decision to overturn Roe vs Wade corrected a flagrant constitutional wrong. Supreme Court judges ruled in 1973 that the US Constitution conferred the federal right to have an abortion, thus striking down any number of local laws.

Anyone scrutinising that document, along with volumes upon volumes of commentary, will be hard-pressed to find a single mention of abortion or the right thereto. Nor is it immediately clear how anything indeed mentioned there can be interpreted as a licence to abortion on demand.

But the shrill yelps of rights rendered Their Honours deaf to the demands of their day job: judging the constitutionality of legislation. Roe vs Wade was an exercise in political activism, not constitutional law.

The judges established their impeccable modern credentials by arguing the toss on medical grounds. Nowadays everything that can’t be politicised must be medicalised. If the two can be brought together, so much the better.

A woman, argued Their Honours, is more likely to die as a result of childbirth than an abortion. Statistically, they were right, although in 1973 the incidence of either procedure causing death was low to the point of being negligible.

One way or the other, the Constitution doesn’t say that Supreme Court judges should assume personal responsibility for maternal health. If Their Honours felt morally obligated to fight for that cause, they should have done so in their spare time, while staying within their remit during office hours.

That constitutional folly was corrected on June 24, 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade. Rather than getting bogged down in dubious medical data and succumbing to political pressures, today’s judges did their proper job.

They ruled that the right to abortion wasn’t “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history or tradition” and was unknown in US law until Roe vs Wade. It thus should leave the domain of the federal constitution to become a matter for individual states to decide.

Hence their ruling was purely judicial, having nothing to do with either asserting or denying the right to abortion, nor, for that matter, the right to life. Yet that’s not how it has been taken.

The issue hasn’t been put to rational, civilised debate. It’s being argued in the streets. The debating parties aren’t academics with leather patches on the elbows of their tweed jackets, but shrieking, violent fanatics ready to do murder for their ‘rights’.

Ideas Have Consequences, wrote Richard Weaver in 1948. They certainly do, and the feebler the ideas, the deadlier the consequences.

Therefore, in the spirit of the cancel culture so dear to my heart, I suggest the word ‘right’ in the sense of entitlement be expurgated from all dictionaries. Anyone using it in any context other than indicating direction, should be fined for speaking under the influence of ideology.