I hate sounding like a dried-up professor by insisting on going back to underlying concepts and definitions but in this case I will. One of the responses I received on my international ‘morality play’ was from Derk Lupinek and although he believes that we should attack Iraq and set up a democratic government, he didn’t think that we have any “responsibility” toward the Iraqi people.
It was his understanding of rights that intrigued me sufficiently to comment on it:
Rights are nothing but wishful thinking without the power to enforce them. The power of enforcement requires an emotional commitment on the part of many individuals. Each individual agrees to help enforce the rights of others and, in return, each individual gains the right to protection under the group’s power. The individual has this right because he contributes to the power that enforces the right. Individuals must contribute to the power that enforces rights or else they have no right to protection under that power. So, I think we can “call for freedom and progress for ourselves” and not feel obligated to kill ourselves helping other countries, especially when those people do not contribute to the preservation of our rights.
I detect a category fallacy in the above paragraph. The definition of a right as wishful thinking without the power to enforce it. So does it mean that where individual’s rights are abused and often cannot be enforced, they do not exist? A right is not a right unless it is enforceable and/or enforced? Just because some people do not wash, should we deny the existence of soap on the grounds of its ineffectiveness with the unwashed?
Which leads me nicely to the various concepts of rights. There are actually three versions at play here. One is the natural rights theory, which assigns inalienable rights to an individual by his/her virtue of being a human being. I will not go into assumptions behind this one here as it is a well-worn and therefore lengthy topic, suffice to say it is the one I subscribe to. That is why I cannot agree with Derk Lupinek’s subscription-based rights, whereby individual’s rights are defined arbitrarily by and within groups of individuals, and protected by a sort of social contract enforced by mutual consent.
In my post on Western intervention in totalitarian regimes, however, I haven’t used either concept of rights, natural or positivist. I was merely thinking of the individuals trapped in totalitarian regimes who never had a choice to enter in any such agreement about either definition or protection of their rights. It is that freedom of choice I feel we have some sort of moral obligation to help them obtain. Not because they contribute to the power that enforces the right or because we are somehow legally or otherwise bound to do so.
Let me put it another way. Try to explain to a child being beaten up by a bunch of thugs, that he has no right to protection since he has not contributed to the power that enforces that right. If you can manage it, you may be consistent but not very humane.
