Freedom against Liberty, Liberty against Freedom: a Discourse on Rights

A right is a particularized (and reified) liberty or freedom. By “particularized,” I mean that your freedom of speech doesn’t give you freedom of movement or freedom of worship. Each one is a specific thing. By “reified”, I mean that it is an immaterial thing that’s treated as a discrete object that one is able to possess: presumably, we’re endowed with these rights at a certain time (by our creator, or at age of majority.) It’s specifically, in my opinion, the reification that’s the problem with “rights” as a concept – it’s something conceived of as separate from the person, rather than as an attribute of the person.

Tapped: The Psychic Cost of Contemporary Work

You see, the libertarian model – which is based largely on the work of Adam Smith – is that employees sell their labor to employers. Lacking capital, this is the only means by which many of them can avoid homelessness and starvation. It is, in short, a buyer/seller relationship, the way that we might conceive of the sale of a commodity or the purchase of necessary supplies. The logic goes that employing a waiter is the same kind of deal as buying a bottle of floor cleaner for that same waiter to use after close to mop up after the day’s business.

Commentary, Written by: CameronCameron SummersDecember 1, 2021Burnout, generations, Adam Smith, Rights, Political EconomyComment

What is Modernity?

My worry is that, as alienating and bad as things are now, that the cessation of modernity might be followed by merely swapping one savagery for another. We like to believe that the world is growing less brutal and less violent, but the moral arc of the universe doesn’t bend towards justice: there is no arc. There is no absolute, inevitable progress. Everything that we get, we need to push for, fight for, argue for. It’s possible that the world might be a better and more just place if the modern era had never happened, but it has happened. If it is undone, it will most likely be undone through a great deal of suffering.

On Dis-Identity Politics: How Our Social World is Continuously Created

Consider: In the absence of other human beings, what identities do we possess? If you found yourself on a desert island, far distant from other human beings, would you still think of yourself as being an American or a Briton or a Catholic or an Atheist or anything of the sort? Or would, after a period, these identities simply slip from you like dead skin, leaving you just as a person trying to survive in the wilderness?

On Rights and Duties

So what this calls to mind is the question of what a right actually is. I get the feeling that a right 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.)

Commentary, Political, Written by: CameronCameron SummersApril 29, 2020Covid-19, Protesting, Rights, Duties, PoliticsComment