No socialist believes the state should cover even our discretionary expenses, like dinners out; and no libertarian believes the state shouldn’t provide us with police, the courts, and national defence. But everything other than police and courts and national defence is discretionary, in the sense that one could choose not to send her child to school, or to seek medical attention. So the issue is never all or none, but rather what to cover and what not to.

Your right to stay alive is a negative one. Its correlate is my duty not to kill you. But presumably no one thinks I have a positive duty to keep you alive. But this distinction hangs on the commission/omission distinction, which hangs in turn on … And so on and on it goes.

Is there a principled way either side can pretend to draw the requisite distinctions to distinguish between the two? There is not. It’s whatever’s in political equilibrium. If too few of us have kids in college, then education is not a right. But if enough of us worry we might require cancer treatment we couldn’t afford on our own … And so it goes. People who talk about the right, dammit, to education or health care or whatever, are simply trying to pretend these entitlements are a res judicata. The way to parry this talk is to say, “Well, isn’t that precisely what we’re in the process of negotiating?”

Do I think women have a right to control their own reproductivity? Well, that depends on what they’re offering me in return. Because I have very little skin in the reproductive game, I won’t ask for much. How ’bout something like a less defeasible interpretation of academic freedom?

Would that it were that simple. The problem is our negotiations aren’t bilateral like this. Each of us is a member of multiple constituencies. We can form coalitions. Feminism and trans rights both lie on the left. But as we’ve seen, coalitions are notoriously unstable. So on the issue of trans athletes, it’s the Christian right with whom feminists have found common cause. On most issues, including universal dental care, I’m about as left as they come. But were I south of the 49th, I’d be supporting the right to bear arms. Go figure!

Except you can’t. None of us can. We’re not Every Man negotiating behind Rawls’ veil of ignorance as to our embodiment and situatedness. We’re individual discrete bags of skin, with bank accounts and credit card debts, with a penis either erect or spent, or with menstrual cramps ranging between mild and debilitating. What I want from the state – and through it from others – is subsidised Viagra or Midol. And because one is significantly debilitated without these subsidies, they ought to be a right, right?! Well yes, provided I get two free flights a year across the Pond.

I trust this explains why, notwithstanding I’m a political philosopher, I don’t engage in rights-talk. Rights-talk does rhetorical work, which is the rice bowl of the rhetorician. But rhetoric is precisely what is not the rice bowl of the philosopher.

Categories: Social and Political Philosophy, Why My Colleagues Are Idiots

Tags: libertarianism, Midol, negative rights, philosophy, positive rights, Rawls' veil of ignorance, rhetoric, socialism, Viagra