Zero sum?
Is there any truth in what Billy Bragg said here?
Is it true that women’s rights were won at the expense of men? Is it true that a loss of rights for one set of people is what must happen for an excluded group to win their human rights?
I don’t think so.
There may be some truth in it in the case of women, because of the role of childbearing, which brings with it some physical needs (or lacks, if you want to put it that way) and some responsibilities that can’t be shared. There may be some truth in the claim that men have to give up or dial back some of their advantages and freedoms if women are to have equal rights. If men just walk away from the children they half-created then the women who bear the children lose a lot of freedoms, aka rights.
But other than that, I don’t think it is true. Exploiting the labor of groups of people deemed subordinate is not a right in the first place. Abusing them, shunning them, forcing them to accept bad housing in neglected neighborhoods – none of that is a right.
But maybe I’m overlooking something…
It’s not zero sum, there was a void to be filled. All we have to do is look at 1st wave feminism. When women got the right to vote, did men lose theirs? No. It can be argued that men’s votes were rendered less significant, but that’s as it should be. Men alone shouldn’t be able to decide for men and women both.
No True Rights.
I do think that some things that are perceived as rights are lost when rights of others are upheld. The rights of Christians to hold public prayers at football games or in public school assemblies, that’s one class of examples. The rights of men to have male-only clubs and societies that have influence in governments and schools (I’m thinking of the many groups that were forced to admit women over the years). The right to receive the entirety of an estate or income from a job or investment without any taxes taken out.
I’m not saying that these things constitute reasonable rights; just that the people who had these privileges might see them as rights and might feel rights are being taken away.
In other words, Billy is talking out of his ass again because that’s what stupid internet trolls do.
What you’re overlooking, Ophelia, is that your conception of rights is narrow and outmoded. The new, true rights are what every sovereign individual can exercise according to his or her desires and ability.
Speaking of which, I just got a new Glock. Now I’m going to exercise my right to set up a bunch of beer cans in my backyard for target practice. If the family behind me doesn’t like the bullet holes in their brick or a stray round through a window, that’s the price of freedom.
Sackbut, that’s why I asked the questions and why I worded everything tentatively. Wondering what we mean by rights, which ones are reasonable, etc. Sort of tapping on them to see which ones are hollow.
This explains a lot more about Billy Bragg than I expect he imagined.
Which male rights were taken away by women’s rights?
Oh yeah, the right to keep women from owning property, from getting jobs, from managing their affairs, and of course the man’s right to beat women.
I think I understand Bragg better now.
Women’s rights ‘came at the expense of men’ in the specific sense that men’s domination has been reduced; husbands can no longer rape their wives, men have to compete against women for jobs, sons no longer inherit ahead of their older sisters, wives no longer lose all property to their husbands when marrying (etc. etc.). It’s no different as the argument that freeing slaves comes at the expense of the former owner.
Hills: semi off topic, but your last point is the logic of Haiti being stuck for the equivalent of billions owed to France for their freedom. one of the reasons the country is a disaster.
There’s an ambiguity here, because we can mean different things when speaking of rights.
By right, one might mean a central ethical precept or principle, something we believe is a core component of the ability to lead a fulfilling life. Under this interpretation, it is semantically incoherent for something unethical to be a right. Thus exploiting people’s labor against their will can never be a right. In philosophy-speak, this kind of right maps to desert. If we point to ethical principles to justify our conclusion, we make an argument about that which someone deserves.
On the other hand, a right can also be a political or legal construct. Such rights are a matter of social construction. There isn’t anything intrinsic to speech, conscience, assembly, bearing arms, voting, etc., that makes them rights. Being designated as rights by some body deemed to have the proper authority (e.g., a constitution, Magna Carta, etc.) is what makes them rights. While the scope and scale are obviously incomparable, the mechanism is identical to the way a game’s rules become binding. There’s nothing intrinsic to a shot that makes it worth one or three points rather than two. What makes a free throw worth one point is merely agreement. In philosophy-speak, this kind of right maps to entitlement. If we point to rules to justify our conclusion, we make an argument about that to which someone is entitled.
For thousands of years, property rights included the possession of people; e.g., slaves, etc. Slave-owners weren’t mistaken about their right to own slaves, as they would have been under the rights-as-ethics view. They really did have that right; i.e., it was something to which they were entitled.
Similarly, the advancement of women’s rights necessarily entailed the reduction and elimination of various rights previously enjoyed by men. Not ethical rights, of course, but political rights. So yes, women’s rights did come at the expense of men, as men had to lose some incompatible rights. This isn’t an argument for beating our chests and wailing, “Oh, the poor men!” Rather, it’s an acknowledgement of the fact that political rights and ethical rights are hardly ever aligned. Whether it’s possible or even desirable to align them perfectly is an open question.
The trans cult is not asking for rights, oh they say they are, but what they really want are privileges.
Maybe what can be legitimately considered a ‘right’ could be tested by the very question of whether it’s a zero sum game or not. Ergo, if it encroaches upon or usurps another group’s rights, can it really be considered a right at all? Similar to Kant’s universizability via the moral imperative.
Good post NiV, I like the idea of entitlement too, and the way TRA’s behave at women’s right events, they sure look entitled to me.
twiliter: Thanks. They certainly do act entitled. Actually, there’s something in the pejorative use of “entitled” that kind of fits the discussion. We don’t call pejoratively call people entitled when they’re actually entitled to whatever it is they want or expect. When you expect to receive a good or service for which you’ve paid, you’re not acting entitled. When you expect to receive one for which you haven’t, you are. I think it’s the same kind of thing in general. Someone who’s (pejoratively) acting entitled is someone incorrect about that to which he or she is actually entitled.
Interesting idea, but I don’t think it works. (Much like how that formulation of the Categorical Imperative doesn’t work.) After all, if we think your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, then that’s because I have certain rights regarding my nose. Well, then, you might say, that’s just because the right to swing your fist just needs to be more precisely described, and then it won’t conflict. But this is the same problem of casuistry that the Universal Maxim CI always runs into. Every universal maxim meets an exception that must be accounted for, giving us a new, slightly more complex universal maxim. That maxim has its own exception, producing a new maxim. And that maxim’s exception requires a new maxim. And so on and so forth ad infinitum.
Funny, in this particular connection I used to hear this denied all the time. A phrase that was popular on Pharyngula was “rights are not like pie” [i.e., NOT zero sum, there’s always plenty to go round] and that granting trans “rights” (so-called) would take nothing from women.
Now here’s an acknowledgement that, well, yes, women DO have to give up something. I assume that history will be rewritten accordingly.
I mean, I’ll be generous and mention here that nothing Bragg said is technically incorrect… he didn’t actually explicitly say men lost rights. Do I think he’s trying to start an argumentative essay supportive of women’s rights? Of course not… Knight and the commenters here have the right of it, though: men indeed lose *privileges* when they have their *desires* curtailed by having women’s rights recognized to be the same as those of men.
“Don’t you think men said ‘what about our right to single sex spaces?’
No “think” required here: Of course they did, we know they did, and they still do. Been living under a rock? Sure, men do have as much of a right to single-sex spaces as women where people must disrobe, for example, or spaces for catering to the needs of victims of abuse perpetuated by the opposite sex. But that’s not what they’re arguing for, they’re whining about losing their own undeserved privilege, not rights that they would ever expect women to share.
Surely Kant made a brilliant attempt at bridging the is-ought gap, if only the damned gap didn’t simultaneously widen just a little to compensate. :D Maybe mine’s a bad comparison, as rights are quite a different type of thing than morality. I was just thinking that there are some foundational rights that are considered common to all, and above and beyond those it becomes questionable whether they are actually rights at all. I guess it depends on where one draws the line.
God, what a ridiculous claim. It depends what “rights” we’re talking about, duh. Anybody can claim a “right” and lots of people do, and they’re often just saying “I can have whatever I want.”
When rights were extended to women, and later LG people, the pie was enlarged. Expanding rights to include those left out increases rights for all.
The TRA/MRA/INCEL ALLIANCE are not interested in a bigger pie, they want to carve off pieces of everyone’s pie.
@14 when some women claimed to be men, as part of their ‘Man Friday’ protests (I wish they were still a thing) and therefore went to swim in the Hampstead Men’s Pond (for those of you not aware, there’s a men’s, women’s, and anyone’s, and TIMs like to brag that they swim in the women’s) the men were reasonably uncomfortable and upset and the women were politely ejected. Sauce for the goose is clearly not sauce for the gander. (See also anything which still relies on male privilege–hereditary rights, elite public schools, the traditional clergy–not many TIFs represented in these, it appears.)
Someone on Facebook pointed out that it’s not a right if other members of your class can’t access it; it’s a privilege.
So I concluded that if it becomes a right for particular men to declare themselves to be women and thereby gain access to all women’s spaces, then it becomes a right for all men to do the same. The woman-hating cult members who say that it won’t happen are therefore declaring that they know full well that they aren’t asking for rights, but demanding privileges.
Liar Thomas wouldn’t be at all amused to enter a race and find himself competing with, and changing with other men who claim to be women. He’s only doing it because, at present, he’s the only cheat and the sole voyeur.
Yes and the “can you generalize this rule to everyone?” is an important ethical test or sieve.
All that and
Well no, Billy, I don’t. That makes absolutely no sense at all. Women never campaigned to be allowed to use men’s spaces in the first place, they campaigned for their own. And by achieving this, they established the idea of single-sex spaces, guaranteeing the same for men. Men’s single-sex spaces only existed in a de-facto sense before then.
It’s a minor point, but I make it because I think we can easily be in danger of over-thinking stuff Bragg says. I think he’s just a narcissistic idiot who tweets any string of characters that sound good in his head. I just don’t think he’s thought this through at all…. and he hasn’t thought it through because he assumes he doesn’t need to, that since it comes from him, it must be right.
On the ‘rights aren’t pie’ issue: this has very much been a TRA mantra, in this and various other forms. What Bragg is saying is from The Forbidden Texts of TERF and by rights he should have been cancelled on the spot.
I have to differ with you there. Women did campaign to be allowed access to men’s spaces like clubs and bars and societies and other institutions where men got together informally but very definitely without women in order to run the world. It was decidedly a feminist program to say hell no you can’t say these clubs are private and therefore none of the law’s business when you men use them to make all kinds of deals and rules that govern us but we have no say in.
And I’m pretty sure that was a conversation about rights. If I remember correctly there was a lot of outrage, with men saying we have every right to have our private clubs and keep women out, and women responding no you don’t when you use those private clubs to govern the real world. IIRC the whole discussion was about that private or not really private, a right or not a right, aspect.
Yes, I was not being wholly serious, I should have phrased that more sarcastically. My point being that those places weren’t ‘single sex’, they were spaces that women weren’t allowed into.
I stand by my assertion that Bragg hasn’t thought this through. I’m rushing around a lot today, I’ll see if I can find time to phrase it better.
Oh, sorry. I usually recognize your not wholly serious!
Nah, definitely my fault. Lots to do today and am in heavy half-marathon training at the moment, so trying to get too much done in too short a time.