Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2003 11:27:57 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, etc.



Hi Carrol,

Earlier in this thread I referred to SRHE 209 where Bhaskar asserts  the
'*existence* of rights (and goods) for all human beings *qua* human
beings, in virtue of their possession of a common (although always
historically mediated) human nature, ultimately grounded in their
biological unity as a species ... ' and suggests that 'To collapse a
right to the historical conditions of its recognition, realization or
exercise is to commit some ethical form ... of the epistemic fallacy,
grounded in the actualist collapse of anthropology.'

It's certainly possible to take issue with this, and since Althusser
it's been pretty fashionable to attack the 'ridiculous concept of man'
[sic], but I agree with it. Just because a right is not recognized or
actualized doesn't mean it's not real; it has to be discovered and its
recognition struggled for. That said, while the Spartacists may not have
consciously struggled against the instution of slavery, there never have
been a class of slaves who did not feel in their hearts that their
unfreedom wasn't worthy of their human nature and resent and resist it
in one way or another. If everything is reducible to the struggle, as
you say, how do you *explain* your modern struggle for freedom? Why
freedom? Why don't people struggle to be more heteronomous or dominated
and exploited?

It is a necessary presupposition of emancipatory discourse, including
your own, that people are essentially and therefore ought actually to be
free.

Mervyn




 Carrol Cox <cbcox-AT-ilstu.edu> writes
>
>
>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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