Date: Sun, 09 Nov 2003 09:10:43 -0600
From: Carrol Cox <cbcox-AT-ilstu.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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