Individual Rights, Primary or Secondary?

In his essay entitled Atomism, Charles Taylor outlines the failings of the political doctrine known as the primacy of rights. Proponents of this doctrine, among whom are numbered John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, hold that “political structures and action” should be based on the rights of individuals (Taylor 187). Furthermore, primacy of rights theorists argue that individuals do not have an obligation to live in or sustain a society. Any such obligation is seen as “derivative… through our consent, or through its being to our advantage” (Taylor 188).

Taylor begins his argument by demonstrating how closely tied the primacy of rights is with yet another political doctrine, atomism. He describes it as a “contentious premise” that “lie(s) far outside the common sense of our society” and which “affirms the self-sufficiency of… the individual” independent of society (Taylor 189). Atomism, according to Taylor, refutes the Aristotelian position that “Man is a social animal… because he is not self-sufficient” outside society (Taylor 189). The argument runs simply that many men could not live without society, and those that did would simply be surviving. They would not be living up to their human potential, but merely refusing to succumb to the environment.

This becomes the crux of Taylor’s next line of argumentation. “…outside society,” he states, “our distinctively human capacities could not develop” (Taylor 191). Naturally, a primacy of rights theorist would counter this argument by saying that rights are still attributed to infants and madmen, namely, human beings without such capacities (Taylor 191). Taylor responds by saying “human specific potential is an essential part of the background of our ascriptions of rights” because we do not ascribe the same rights to non-human entities (Taylor 191). For instance, “The sand on certain beaches tends to form in dunes, but no one would claim that in leveling it out for the tourists we are violating any rights” (Taylor 192).

This, according to Taylor, is contingent on that fact that our intuition tells us that a capacity demands respect. Any particular capacity must have “a special moral status” to be ascribed any rights (Taylor 193). Following this logic, the fact that we do not ascribe human rights to non-human entities suggests that human rights are based on distinctively human capacities, which thus become relevant to the primacy of rights. Additionally, Taylor argues that, because rights are based on human potentialities that cannot be properly developed outside of society, this line of argumentation provides at least some grounds for a theory of social obligation within the primacy of rights.

Taylor is not finished, however. He goes on to point out that respecting a capacity, within human beings or other entities, is not simply an “assertion of right” which prohibits interference (Taylor 194). Taylor argues that respecting a capacity involves an “affirmation of worth,” in which an individual has a commitment to promote the capacity in every way possible (Taylor 194). As he states, “asserting a right is more than issuing an injunction”(Taylor 195).

Taylor’s adequately sums up these arguments later in the essay: “If we cannot ascribe natural rights without affirming the worth of certain human capacities, and if this affirmation has other normative consequences (i.e., that we should foster and nurture these capacities in ourselves and others), then any proof that these capacities can only develop in society… is a proof that we ought to belong to or sustain society” (Taylor 197).

Thus, Taylor reaches the logical conclusion that the validity of the primacy of rights falls back on the validity of atomism. Is man truly self-sufficient without society? Taylor demonstrates that many primacy of rights theorists “escape the whole argument of self-sufficiency… by making (their) schedule of rights sparse enough” (Taylor 201). By defining rights in terms of sentience, for example, they proclaim that self-sufficiency is irrelevant, because sentience is either present or not; it has no need of being developed (Taylor 201). However, this route most often fails due to its lack of inclusiveness. As Taylor points out, defining rights in terms of sentience “restrict(s)… rights to those of life, desire-fulfillment, and free and pain” (Taylor 201). Such a theory could not regard it as a violation if one were to change its beneficiaries, “unknown to themselves, into child-like lotus-eaters, say, by injecting them with some drug” (Taylor 201). Thus, restricting the schedule of rights inevitably creates an untenable system of the same.

Another method of avoiding this issue is accomplished by restricting social interactions to the family. Primacy of rights theorists might agree that human capacities must be developed if they are given rights, but that this can be done within a familial unit. This is still not a violation of the primacy of rights because “Family obligations and obligations of friendship can be kept separate from any obligations to belong” (Taylor 204). Unfortunately, Taylor falls short of refuting this hypothesis.

Taylor offers one final argument worthy of mention. He states, “The kind of freedom valued by the protagonists of the primacy of rights… is a freedom by which men are capable of conceiving alternatives and arriving at a definition of what they really want… to exercise autonomy in the basic issues of life” (Taylor 204). Thus, the primacy of rights values three things above all: reason, choice, and autonomy. However, as Taylor points out, these things can “only (develop) within an entire civilization. Think of the developments” in society “which have contributed to the historic birth of this aspiration to freedom, to making this ideal of autonomy a comprehensible goal men can aim at” (Taylor 204). Simply put, these concepts would not exist without society. Taylor continues, “But this civilization was not only necessary for the genesis of freedom. How could successive generations discover what it is to be an autonomous agent…? This is an identity… which men are not born with” (Taylor 205). Society, then, not only originates these ideas, but also is necessary to propagate them.

Thus, Taylor’s arguments generally rest on the Aristotelian hypothesis that man is indeed a social animal. Rights require respected capacities, and respect requires us to foster those same capacities, which cannot reasonably be developed outside of society. If we define these rights in terms of inborn capacities that cannot be developed, we end up with a flawed system of rights that presents itself as easily falsified. Finally, the very values on which the primacy of rights is based would not exist without society to create and propagate them. In the end, the real validity of the primacy of rights falls on atomism, which is still a matter of debate. Is man self-sufficient outside society? The question is heavily tainted with opinion, and demands further probing to reach a conclusion.

Resources

Taylor, Charles. Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Philosophical Papers Volume 2. 1985.