Guest post: Very few people understand what a “right” is
Guest post by George Felis, from a discussion on the “right to insult people” issue elsewhere.
In addition to the obvious smug stupidity here, there’s a subtler level of plain old ignorance: Very few people understand what a “right” is. The word “right” does not necessarily always mean a civil right, legal right, or constitutional right. For one person to have a “right” simply means that some other person or persons has an obligation to do or refrain from doing something that affects that person. For example, children have a right to the love and care of their parents because their parents have a moral obligation to love and care for any children they create. Rights can be personal (an obligation owed by a particular person or persons) or universal (an obligation owed by everyone).
Since everyone has a moral obligation to refrain from heaping insults and abuse on people who have done nothing to deserve it — and, more generally, an obligation to refrain from inflicting any kind of undeserved harm on anyone — people do in fact have a moral right not to be insulted. I suppose someone might disagree with this very modest moral principle, but the principle is so transparently obvious and so widely shared that the burden of proof ought to fall on someone who rejects the principle rather than those who accept it.
Furthermore, whenever someone violates this obvious moral principle without offering any justification whatsoever for doing so, they have clearly done something objectionable and wrong. And if you do something obviously wrong (without being able to offer any justification, or indeed without even trying), your behavior deserves some sort of censure or punishment. Therefore, someone who called you an asshole for heaping abuse and insults on undeserving people would not be violating the principle that you one shouldn’t heap abuse and insults on undeserving people — because you would be deserving rather than undeserving.
Therefore, Milo Yiannopoulos and all his sycophantic man-boy cronies who attacked Leslie Jones for the horrible “offense” of being a successful black woman in a popular film are all worthless assholes. (Incidentally, the whole purpose of a sphincter is to keep defecation inside rather than letting it spill out into the world anywhere and everywhere, so calling these feces-spewing goons “worthless assholes” is descriptively accurate as well as richly deserved.)
Q.E.D. ;-)
Bravo. Many people claim for themselves a whole slew of rights that aren’t rights at all – i.e., a relative of mine who claimed he had not only a right to smoke, but a right to smoke in my house – but will deny much more basic rights to other people.
Well said.
The rights in formal documents were never intended to be *all* the rights considered to be ours by virtue of being human. That’s why the founding documents for the US always state that the rights ennumerated are not the only ones (and they are focusing on legal rights, which are meant to be more limited in scope than moral rights).
“Since everyone has a moral obligation to refrain from heaping insults and abuse on people who have done nothing to deserve it — and, more generally, an obligation to refrain from inflicting any kind of undeserved harm on anyone — people do in fact have a moral right not to be insulted.”
That doesn’t follow. What follows is that people who have done nothing to deserve it have a moral right not to be insulted. For this principle to work we need some criteria for how someone could deserve to be insulted.
Thanks #3. We’ve been seeing Erdogan exercising his ‘right’ not to be insulted lately. Reaching across international borders to silence criticism. Obviously this is hugely different from Milo’s poison-pen crusades. But how do we couch the legal language to keep that distinction?
The dividing line seems intuitively obvious to me. But what about all the ‘offended’ Jihadis and Trump fans? Are their ‘intuitions’ to be given the same respect?
The difference isn’t all that tricky. Let’s not exaggerate the difficulty and subtlety of the distinction between disrespecting ideas and political parties or candidates on the one hand, and calling people cunts and niggers and ugly and smelly on the other.
John the Drunkard @4,
We don’t. Because, again, it’s not the legal right that is in dispute here.
But a familiarity with the law is useful for issues like this in the sense that it teaches one that the inability to draw absolute, clear-cut lines doesn’t mean we throw up our hands and give up on making any distinctions. Tort law in common law countries is based on the “reasonable person” standard, and plenty of criminal statutes employ subjective terms like “unreasonably” or “without justification” or “excessive.”
Basically: we tolerate a fair bit of fuzziness in defining legal rights, even when people’s property or freedom are at stake. So color me unimpressed at hand-wringing over an inability to draw an absolute clear line on moral discussions, where the only thing at stake is one person’s opinion of another’s behavior.
Sweet Jesus on toast. What does a blogger have to say to make it even more clear that we’re not talking about the law, the law isn’t what we’re talking about, we don’t have to satisfy every dude’s concerns about irrelevant, off-topic legal distinctions? What? Anyone? Any of you? What words would be plain enough that you can understand this?