From Ayn Rand to Amartya Sen: Using the Concept of “Rights”

“Again, there seems to be no ideological bias against the concept of rights; views on the subject come from various distinct standpoints.”

Our times appear to be defined—at least in the political realm—by increasing polarization, and this is true throughout the world. Yet, there is one area that seems to be decidedly non-partisan: namely, the importance of rights. On the Left, the language of rights is used to argue for the universal distribution of goods, such as education and health. When it comes to social issues, the right of a woman to exercise control over her own body is emphasized to argue in favor of abortion, and the right of consenting adults to their private lives is one of the central arguments in favor of LGBT rights. Conservatives—religious ones, in particular—stress our “God-given” rights. In the United States, in particular, those on the Right also place significant value on the right to keep and bear arms, as established by the Second Amendment to the Constitution. In the social sphere, conservatives tend to oppose abortion. For them, however, the argument is in favor of the right to life of the future child. At the same time, this agreement should not be mistaken for unanimity, and there are long traditions from both the Left and the Right that see the idea of rights as nonsense. Marx, to this effect, famously dismissed the notion of the rights of man as something of an anti-social feature of bourgeois ideology. On the other side of the ideological spectrum, reactionaries such as Joseph de Maistre, who are experiencing something of a resurgence today, similarly dismissed the notion as abstract rationalizations without any solid basis. Again, there seems to be no ideological bias against the concept of rights; views on the subject come from various distinct standpoints. However, if we want to rescue the idea of rights, I believe it is important to acknowledge that the way we think about them might have something to do with their dismissal. This, I think, is highly relevant for the Left because—for better or worse—the language of rights is the default way to discuss moral issues, at least in Europe in the Americas. Given that I believe the case for the Left is ultimately a moral one, abandoning the idea of rights can only be detrimental to its cause.

It should be easy to see from the abortion example that the apparent agreement about the importance of rights is little more than a shared linguistic framework—and that there are significant, substantive disagreements between different ideological factions. To use just one more example, let us look at the issue of healthcare in the United States. The United States is an interesting case in this respect because—unlike the rest of the industrialized world—there is no state-funded universal health insurance program. Moreover, the Libertarian right tradition is much stronger in the United States than in virtually any other country. The Left, as I previously mentioned, supports the idea of healthcare as a right. The Right, on the other hand, not only does not support it but often actively opposes it on the grounds that it would be a violation of individual rights. Senator Rand Paul famously equated the right to healthcare with slavery. The logic behind this comment was that if everyone has the right to healthcare, then it follows that the government can force medical practitioners to work against their will. Now, this particular argument is demonstrably false: public health insurance programs do not conscript medical professionals; they simply provide people with the funding to have the access to such services. But this kind of logic is present in much of the Right’s appraisal of rights, and it may not always be so obviously false. It is best summarized in Ayn Rand’s idea that an individual’s rights should impose no positive obligations on others. For example, a person’s right to life—in its most minimal interpretation—imposes only the negative obligation on others not to murder that person. This logic is what lies behind common libertarian ideas, such as the motto, “taxation is theft.” The thought is that when taxation is used to fund public services, the state essentially steals part of a person’s property to provide services to others.

This latter claim is certainly more nuanced than the claim that public healthcare turns doctors into slaves; yet, it still relies on some unexamined assumptions that—when analyzed—make this seemingly reasonable claim less straightforward and less logical than it appears at first glance. These assumptions will be examined later in more detail, but it is important to first understand what lies at the source of these disagreements. The best way to characterize the basic problem, in my view, is a fundamental disagreement about the ontology of rights. Ontology is the field of philosophy that studies being. As explained by W.V.O. Quine in his paper “On what there is,” ontology tries to answer the question, “What is there?” The problem arises because there is one obviously correct answer: namely, everything. Yet this answer is useless because we still do not know what constitutes “everything.” To know this, it is important to decide what is enough for something to have the property of being. Quine is particularly interested in two kinds of things. In the first part, in what we could call “imaginary” things like the winged horse Pegasus—and further along: in mathematical objects, such as numbers.