#institutional structures

[This posting is subject to further editing.]

Ironies abound in life.  According to the philosopher, Charles Taylor, probably no more important irony exists than that which has to do with basic rights.[1]  Specifically, he finds that the basic belief in a natural rights view – the claim that every individual has the right to do what that person wishes to do as long as that person does not deprive that right to others – to be false. 

How?  By living one’s life through such a credo and utilizing it, if one so chooses to undermine the bonds that hold a society together, to the degree it is successful, that person is undermining the necessary prerequisites for such a society to survive and therefore protect such rights.  The position of this blog is that this nation is on the road to proving Taylor correct.

Why would a person wish to do that?  Perhaps the wish is not directly to fulfil that aim, but instead for things – behaviors or conditions – that prove to be destructive of those bonds irrespective of one’s motives or understandings.  In this case, it is the results that count.  And those behaviors or conditions can have the antisocial consequences about which Taylor warns his audience. 

Examples might include when one might choose to engage in legal but harmful practices such as being disrespectful of others’ religious practices or practicing business activities that disregard the living standards of employees.  The number of examples one might sight is countless.

This blog with this posting revisits this Taylor argument that was initially posted in 2019[2] (interested readers can check on that previous posting by using the archive feature).  As described, Taylor presents a reasonable argument that traces how the quality of justice would be subjected to abuse in a society where atomism becomes prevalent.  Atomism is the belief that a form of individualism should hold rights as primary especially as expressed or acted upon when a person strives to satisfy self-defined ends. 

That earlier posting ends with the following:

In terms of when it is legitimate to exercise natural rights in pursuing self-centered interests, that would be in securing justice.  Why?  A total answer would probably constitute a whole other argument and another posting.  Suffice it to write, justice is advanced by an adversarial system where the parties are free to pursue their interests.  Advocacy for those interests should be allowed to be pursued unfettered as long as the procedural rules of the proceedings are respected.[3]

But here lies the basis of the irony one can associate with this concern.  Justice is not just a value associated with natural rights but with federalism, as a mental construct relating to ideal governance and politics, as well.  Perhaps both trains of thought, natural rights and federalism, approach the quality from different points of view and hence the duality of meaning. 

Federalism sees it as a precondition that motivates one to join a union – an associated arrangement – and become part of a grand partnership.  On the other hand, the natural rights view sees it as guaranteeing or protecting one’s rights especially as they come into conflict with the rights of others.

          And in this a basic distinction can and should be made.  The “partnership” view tends to demand a more wholistic sense of what rights are.  Yes, one can innumerate basic rights – speech, movement, religion, association, etc. – but they can be more readily seen, within a federalist perspective, as expressions of a free life or of the right to life. 

On the other hand, the natural rights view seems to beg for a more granular approach and relating to these individual rights it becomes more important to innumerate and treat them as separate claims.  As such, they are seen more legalistically than culturally, more from a contractual view than a compact-al view.  And by so doing, rights lose the advantage of being considered as a quality-of-life attribute.

          Federalism holds all of these more specific rights as being more readily assumed or included in what one is referring to, they are a full package or an element of life one associates with a life of quality.  As such, they can take on a more basic sense of what it means to be federated, that is, it defines a quality necessary for a viable life. 

This federalist sense is also needed to maintain the health of a society and of its polity in that to be so concerned among a citizenry means one has a populous, to meaningful degree, sharing a sense that they are in it together.  Taylor describes this distinction:

How would it do for a scientist [for example] to say, “Well, I have respected his right to life, it is other rights (free movement, exercise of his profession, etc.) which I have violated?  For the separation in this context is absurd.  True, we do sometimes enumerate these and other rights.  But the right to life could never have been understood as excluding all these activities, as a right just to biological non-death in a coma.  It is incomprehensible how anyone could assert a right to life meaning just this, “Who calls that living?”[4] 

Robert Novick, as Taylor describes his argument, represents the natural rights’ side of this disagreement.  He holds that such a view as expressed by Taylor is misguided.  He, Novick, uses an example to illustrate his point.  That is, individuals have the right to dispose of their possessions as they individually wish without any sense or establishment of bonds to society or to other citizens, and, in addition, this ability is commonsensical. 

Taylor retorts that this claim is insufficient.  It doesn’t establish the level of self-sufficiency that individuals would need to secure – establish and maintain – if the institutional structures that needed to exist in allowing for such a disposal were disregarded.  And that level of reliance on such structures can be extended to just about all sorts of behaviors individuals might wish to enact.

            Of course, this back and forth is conducted on a philosophical plane.  At a more cultural level and in how this issue affects current day politics, a good deal of rhetoric, at least to this blogger’s ear, reflects Novick’s argument or view.  If one logically breaks down what is commonly bantered about, Novick’s treatment of rights seem to handily prevail among American discourse – Americans tend to speak of rights as a list of sacred prerogatives.   

That messaging seems to assume one has little to no reliance on the importance of those institutional structures, much less any appreciation of what supports them and allows them to function.  Any reference to those structures is usually couched in delegitimizing language.  When was the last time that the reader heard someone refer to regulatory agencies, for example, in a positive way?

Currently, for example, the Supreme Court is considering to rule in such a way that will debase the ability of government to regulate the actions of corporations by shifting that function from regulatory agencies to unelected jurists.[5]  These are the type of issues one should strive to insert a federated/partnership perspective – particularly in how that perspective addresses the health and even survival of the polity as it is constituted.

[1] Charles Taylor, “Atomism,” in Communitarianism and Individualism, eds. Shlomo Avineri and Avner de-Shalit (New York, NY:  Oxford University Press, 1992), 29-50.

[2] Robert Gutierrez, “A Derivation for the Sake of Justice,” a posting, Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics – blog, 2019, accessed January 20, 2024, URL:  https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2019_09_29_archive.html.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Taylor, “Atomism,” in Communitarianism and Individualism, 38.