The above imagine is making the rounds on facebook, apparently in light of the Prop 8 ruling. I don't dislike Rachel Maddow, but I find this quote so intellectually despicable that I feel it demands a response.
As luck would have it, I penned in the wee hours of last Wednesday a midterm essay on this very topic. The essay specifically confronts human rights, but I would apply its arguments to the concept of rights more generally (including that of gay rights).
Here it is, and I promise to be more active on this space in the coming weeks.
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I gargle generosity further than the monster explosion. That is a perfectly grammatical sentence comprised of commonly used words. It is also completely nonsensical. Just because something can be said does not mean that it expresses a concrete or even coherent concept. Words are artificial, epiphenomenal constructs the primary utility of which resides in expressing and communicating ideas. Just because I can say a word and call it a noun does not mean that it “exists” by any standard definition of the term. Let’s call a “kwyjibo” an invisible, empirically undetectable rhinoceros with Gene Simmons face paint currently standing directly atop your head. There we have a word and even a fairly cogent concept to back it up. Yet in no sense would you say that the kwyjibo actually exists. Indeed, if unobservable things exist then anything could be said to exist. I could legitimately believe in the kwyjibo, and if you ascribed existence to intangible entities then you would have no way to refute my claim. To take it to a level philosophically uncomfortable for most, numbers do not exist. There is no magical “3” floating out there in space (but who knows, I suppose). Numbers are socially constructed tools that lend utility to innumerable applications. If there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, there is no guarantee whatsoever that they use anything resembling the concept of numbers. With that in mind, I find it bizarre and untenable that anyone could ascribe existence to what we call human rights. Further, I do not think that the term is backed by anything resembling a coherent or consistent concept.
Robert Churchill likens “rights” to terms like “justice” and “equality” in the sense that it is “too complex or controversial to be defined in simple and nonambiguous terms.” Controversial, certainly, but to explain our absence of an agreeable and communicable definition in terms of complexity gives the liberal philosophical tradition far too much credit. Quantum physics and wave-particle duality are extremely complex, extremely recondite concepts. Yet they are sufficiently coherent and inspire sufficient consensus to amass an entire worldwide discipline dedicated to their study, with textbook upon mutually compatible textbook espousing the same ideas. It is a well-established, internally-consistent, bona fide epistemological paradigm, prodigious complexity notwithstanding. And yet philosophers cannot even agree on a consistent framework for analyzing “rights” or “justice”. Sure, the politicians provide a consistent rhetorical approach, but intellectual honesty is not a prerequisite for their positions. Philosophers and scholars have nothing near a workable paradigm for analyzing many of the flagship terms of the western liberal tradition. Plato, that scourge of intellectual history, spends an entire treatise attempting to elucidate “justice.” He fails so spectacularly that scholars today still argue over what even he meant.
Consider the right to free speech. Most Americans might claim to have it. But what about when a court issues a gag order, or any of the other myriad exceptions to our proudly boasted oratory freedom? What about when you’re pulled over and you decide to speak rudely to the cop, who then uses his executive discretion to give you a ticket that a more affable orator mightn’t have gotten? If you have the “right to free speech” except in cases X1, X2,…Xn then what do you really have? Nothing worth compressing into a simple term, certainly. So why do it at all?
The problem compounds when you consider what the absence of a right to free speech (as popularly denoted) looks like. Can citizens in Iraq or Myanmar or North Korea say anything they want without much harm coming to them? In 99.9 percent of cases the answer is yes. The government can only observe and execute actions upon a very, very minute subset of all the things that its citizens will say. And if you can say whatever you want except in cases X1, X2,…Xn, it becomes hard to distinguish in practice from a purported “freedom of speech.” Particularly when you take into account the limits of violence monopolization and the internationally heterogeneous cultural attitudes that government policies reflect, it becomes hard to view the right to free speech as a coherent legal concept, let alone a philosophical one
I do concede, however, that some people may find some utility in using a term like “human rights”. Because so many people recognize the term and mentally associate it with benevolence and happiness, it can be an immensely effective rhetorical device. I agree with Amartya Sen that “It is not hard to understand [human rights activists’] unwillingness to spend time trying to provide conceptual justiļ¬cation, given the great urgency to respond to terrible deprivations around the world.” But let us recognize that conceptual justification is indeed an afterthought, and that the primary goal is indeed to respond to terrible deprivations around the world. The moral sentiment in my view has nothing to do with a mere word like “rights.” Rather it is a response to actual human suffering. I personally applaud the goal of preventing human suffering, but I feel no need to build an elaborate mythology around it.
