Subject: RE: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, etc.
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 14:20:09 -0500


Hi Mervyn and Carrol,

Could your disagreement here be more in terms of the assumptions you bring to the discussion rather than the specific arguments you make?  I read Mervyn as locating rights in "human nature," or as one of the implications of the generative mechanisms within humanity.  In contrast, I read Carrol as locating rights in "human culture," something socially constructed, especially through social struggles.

Regards,

Dick

-----Original Message-----
From: Carrol Cox [mailto:cbcox-AT-ilstu.edu] 
Sent: Sunday, November 09, 2003 10:11 AM
To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, etc.




Mervyn Hartwig wrote:
> 
> 
> . . .in virtue of our
> common biology and our practical, embodied encounter across history 
> and cultures with the same laws of nature, all people have in common 
> basic potentials (powers), liabilities and needs (hence rights), 
> including the need  for autonomy and free flourishing, however these 
> get culturally construed and mediated in myriad ways.

Libilities and needs do _not_, historically viewed, entail rights. Hence the "hence" in this sentence is unjustified and, I think, unjustifiable. Rights are an emergent quality [I'm not sure of the word I need here] of social struggle, and their content is defined in that struggle. For example, "free speech" as a "right" would have been meaningless to the Athenian peasantry whose struggles created the possibility of democratic rights as an object of human thought. Free speech came to exist as a practice in the Athenian democracy, but it was not until hundreds, or thousands, of years later that free speech as an independent entity came into existence. Rights as an object of thought or discussion emerge only _after_ they have been at least partly created by the struggles of those who, prior to the struggles, would not have recognized those rights because those right did not yet exist to be recognized.

Only in retrospect, for another example, does the Sparticist rebellion in ancient Rome become a struggle against slavery, for no one in that rebellion condemned slavery as an institution or human practice; had they succeeded in fighting their way out of the Roman Empire they would have been quite willing to own slaves themselves. It was the struggle of slaves in the western hemisphere over several centuries that established slavery as an essential wrong, and hence freedom from slavery as a right.

Carrol



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