File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2003/bhaskar.0311, message 84


Subject: BHA: rights and breastfeeding
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2003 14:52:12 -0500
From: "Moodey, Richard W" <MOODEY001-AT-gannon.edu>


Hi Howard,

On Monday, November 03, 2003 1:33 PM, you wrote, in conjunction with some general comments about "rights":

"By contrast, if you suppose, by the pattern of their material interactions, a whole community actually engaged  in the common task of raising the universality of each individual's needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive forces, etc., to the highest possible level ('wealth' stripped of its narrow bourgeois form) because they know in their bones this is for their common advantage, I'm not sure the 'right' to this or that in the sense in which we understand it has a lot of purchase.  It's not that I wouldn't have a 'right' to essential human needs, to full expression, etc.; it's just that we're beyond that point.  Imagine a mother picking up a child to breastfeed because the child has a right.  Without doubt we live some such realities, but the 'rights of the child,' for which we fight and must fight are one way of measuring the impoverishment of our social life.  Why should children need rights?!  Children need nurturing.  We all do."

I am not convinced that we really are "beyond that point."  I think that our basic understanding of rights and duties derives from some very simple but basic characteristics of social interactions.  The first breastfeeding of a newborn by a mother has a very material foundation -- the lactating mother and the hungry infant both have a need for the nursing.  But the mother also has a learned expectation, and a sense of obligation or duty.  The child gradually learns to expect the breast or the bottle.  The reciprocal expectations of mother and child are not, at first, reciprocal right-duty expectations.  They are asymmetrical, with the mother thinking in terms of her duty and the infant's right long before the infant or child is capable of thinking in these terms.  But I believe that we learn about rights and duties as we learn to interpret expectations in terms of "oughts" and "shoulds."

Best regards,

Dick


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