February 1, 2008
In the Introduction to his Justice: Rights and Wrongs Nicholas Wolterstorff spells out what I have noticed here in Australia---a deep hostility to rights:
Justice and rights are the most contested part of our moral vocabulary, contested not only, or even mainly, by philosophers, but within society generally. To publish a discourse on justice as rights is to plunge into a hornet’s nest of controversy....Opposition to rights-talk is common. Some of those opposed are also opposed to talking about justice; they connect the two, rights and justice. Others want to pull them apart. Justice is fine; it is talk about rights that is bad.
Why so? I'm wary of rights talk because of the individualism and self-interest in which each person pursues his or her own good in his own way, constrained only by a minimal formal common good--- a working legal apparatus that enforces contracts and protects individuals from undue interference by others. So we have the shift to care or virtue ethics with their st concern for the good of others and for community. Yet I recognize that all the great social protest movements of the twentieth century in the West have employed the language of rights and that the rights of the other place limits on how I treat her.
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Gary,
Justice and rights both use the deserving/underserving filter in social attitudes. Justice can be meted out as deserved. Rights can be granted whether they're earned or not.
I'm thinking here about the fair go. Even though we consider it a right, it's only a right for those who have earned it in some way - failing despite trying really hard or suffering in silence. The right of the fair go is only just if it's earned and therefore deserved.