July 27, 2005
Natural law philosophers (such as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant) used the term civil society as an antonym for natural society. In "natural society" each person had only the rights they could defend for themselves. The Lockean conception of natural right of the abstract individual holds that they are claims that individuals have on other individual's non-interference with my enlightened self-interest.
This emphasis on natural right does not specify the good and it assumes the myth of natural society. A better conception of civil society is the Hegelian one of non-state society between the family and the state which brings individuals into relationships of cooperation with others on the basis of their own inclinations or desires to work and live.
One way to avoid abstract right is to view rights as capabilities: we argue for rights on the basis of their ability to provide the conditions in which people can construct and pursue meaningful lives. This is a more diffuse concept of rights, that I think intentionally avoids reduction to a list of particular measures. Combined with deliberative democracy, the capabilities' approach takes on the character of a theory of democratic participation.
Thinking of individual rights as capacities to participate in democratic deliberation solves any perceived tension between negative rights and positive rights. There is no practical sense in which individuals can have freedom from non-interference without having correlative freedoms to achieve freedom self-determination So-called negative rights, rights against the state, are of course necessary guarantees of personal freedom from arbitrary power. However, any privileging of these rights over the positive rights of individuals of self-determination ignores the way that inequality and discrimination subvert the effective functioning of civil society and associational life.
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