On Rights and Duties

Picture of Londoners social distancing, uploaded by Philafrenzy to wikimedia commons, used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

All across the United States, municipalities and state governments are opening back up for the sake of the economy. There have been protests demanding that people be allowed to go and get haircuts and spend time in public. Many of these protests are astroturfed by the Koch Brothers and the DeVos family, though there are a number which are organic. The podcast Worst Year Ever has a pretty solid breakdown of how complicated the situation is, though it’s still a struggle for them.

Meanwhile, every time someone heads the wrong direction in the grocery store, I feel the same as if I see someone pull into oncoming traffic. Call it anxiety.

The protesters are claiming that their rights are being infringed upon by the lock down. Some leftists and left-ish types on the internet are arguing that it is a way to cut people off from unemployment benefits or punish businesses for remaining closed. Apparently, we can’t let the cure be worse than the problem, whatever that means.

Saint Augustine, painted by Lippo Memmi. He looks like someone who has never smiled in his life.

So what this calls to mind is the question of what a right actually is. I get the feeling that a right (henceforth capitalized to avoid confusion) is defined sort of like how Saint Augustine defined time, namely, we function as if we know what it is until we try to define it (or, to reference Donald Rumsfeld, it’s the missing corner of his graph: the Unknown Known.)

What discourse on Rights exists tends to define it one of two ways: Positive Rights are things which other people are compelled to help you do. Negative Rights are things which other people cannot morally prevent you from doing. Often, the assumption is that Leftists define Rights positively, while the right wing defines Rights negatively.

As with many binary divisions, though, this schema looks like it would work and doesn’t. A huge part of the Incel Community is politically on the right, but behave as if they have a Right to access sexual relations with women through some kind of legally enforced monogamy. Many leftists take a laissez-faire approach to certain narcotics, but I have yet to hear someone seriously call for a Universal Basic Toke (if any leftbook types care enough, this may be taken up as a joke. Do whatever.)

Another division comes from the origin of Rights. Many people talk about Natural or God-Given Rights – this tends to be the right-wing analysis – but materialistic analysis suggests, instead, that it’s the result of the application of force. The people with the weapons say this is what we’re due. This suggests Rights are a sort of antonym for “crimes.”

This can be seen in the fact that people call the police when theft occurs: the Right to property is backed up by the government-sanctioned threat of violence. Some people’s, at least.

No one, I think, would separate the issue of governance from the issue of Rights. Whether we’re discussing them being infringed, trampled, or protected, the interaction between the two is well-documented. Personally, I would say that the maintenance of Rights is not solely the province of government: I’ve spoken in the past on the issue, but membership in a group is essentially accepting governance of a portion of your life; this is part of why bad jobs are so bad – its essentially having a time-share in a dictatorship. Having a good job or having membership in a pleasant group is essentially having Rights protected within that context.

So I think, instead of talking about the origin of Rights – which, personally, I feel to be socially constructed and largely backed up by force – I think it is more productive to talk about certain Rights being Transactional and Certain Rights being Non-Transactional.

Non-Transactional Rights are Rights which you do not have to take part in a social contract to have exist. You have a Non-Transactional Right to be alive. You don’t have to do anything to have the continuation of your life be a factor in decision making.

A street like 63rd street, used as a cover image previously.

Transactional Rights require something from the person. You have a Transactional Right to use streets and public spaces. To take part in this you have to abide by the traffic laws of the locality you’re in. Largely, this is out of a sort of hierarchic respect: if you don’t obey the traffic laws, you may infringe on someone’s Non-Transactional Right to be alive and, having violated this, you may lose the Transactional Right to move freely about the streets in a half-ton explosion-powered metal cage (or however much your car weighs.)

Different groups may construct different Transactional and Non-Transactional Rights for their members, and this constructional often says something about the values held by the group in question. For example, the creators of Open Source software tend to hold that anyone has a Right to access their work, use it, and modify it at will – if you can get to it, you’re the owner, you have a Non-Transactional right to it. John Deere, the tractor manufacturer, on the other hand, doesn’t allow anyone to own their products: you have a purely Transactional Right to operate the machine, and a purely Transactional Right to have it repaired. You have no Right to modify it or fix it. It is completely enclosed.

One may argue that there is a Non-Transactional Right to buy it (that is, a Non-Transactional Right to engage in a transaction.) This is somewhat ridiculous, but let’s just go with it for a moment. Does everyone have a Non-Transactional Right to engage in transactions? The invocation of the Right to Refuse Service suggests otherwise – when properly used, this suggests that it is acceptable to require a Transaction for access to something.

Of course, to even participate, you probably need to buy stupid custom dice, because so many systems rely on those and it’s terrible.

I’ve written in the past about Role-Playing Games, and some of these involve an asymmetry in the Rights of the participants. Depending on the game being played, the person running it may have the Right to declare anything within the game as true by fiat, a Non-Transactional Right to say anything they wish about the fiction being constructed. The other participants have a Transactional Right to do the same – though the nature of the transaction is once again defined by the game being played. Perhaps they have to roll a certain amount on a die or spend an in-game currency like FATE points.

Everything is kept in balance by a Non-Transactional Right possessed by every player to leave the game. To keep the game moving, to make sure that everything functions smoothly, it is necessary for the person running the game to calibrate their actions to the desires of the other participants to keep everything moving: if they do not, the game dissolves.

Presented as my mental image of the haircut protests. Sometimes, you wish that you had the right to leave this particular game.

Most injustice, I feel – or at least unfairness – comes from mistakes of categorization being made regarding which Rights are Transactional and which are Non-Transactional. Your Right to a haircut, to use the beach, to use the park, to gather in groups don’t trump someone else’s Right to not be infected with a deadly disease.

I suggested above that the antonym of “Right” is “Crime.” But the mirror image of Rights are Duties. Our Right to health is matched by a Duty to health, because we have to make an effort not to strain the health resources that we have available to us. All of these people demanding that the states reopen are falling asleep at the wheel, and ignoring the duty that they have to their fellow citizens: your right to a haircut doesn’t trump your duty to not put people at risk.

So perhaps that’s where my head is at on the issue of Rights and Duties, we have a Duty to protect the Rights of the people around us – whether to enable them Positively or leave them unmolested in a Negative fashion.

Duties are a bit thorny, though. We don’t tend to think of people as having many duties, and I think this is an aspect of the social atomization that we’ve talked about a lot on this website. We don’t like to think that we’re beholden to interests other than our own personal ones, we don’t like to think that we owe other people anything, but many of the more interesting pieces of art and narrative that we construct are preoccupied with the issue of duty – the issue of what we owe to each other.

I think that, despite what many people on the right talk about, the abolition of a sense of duty is a mark of neoliberalism. Duty goes beyond capital; we owe things beyond our money and time. We owe our efforts to the common task of creating society, and I think that only by recognizing our duties to our fellows will we make it through the current crisis.

So that’s where I end up: we shouldn’t ask just what we are owed by society – what our Rights are – but also, on all levels, what duties we owe to those around us.

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