This morning, in response to Mr Rowe’s essay, I had asked a question on government and rights. A second post on the same subject has appeared over there, this time by Timothy Sandefur, at Positive Liberty. Mr Sandefur writes:
Second, and more to the point: we do have a natural right to do wrong things, because “rights” are a special class of ethical principles which have to be separated from other ethical principles. As Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl explain in their outstanding Norms of Liberty, moral values—such as, say, honesty, or integrity, or courage—aim toward the individual’s flourishing. We cannot know a priori the exact mix of values that will enable a particular individual to flourish, or how that person should go about accomplishing his or her ends. It is not possible as a matter of knowledge to prescribe this to another person with any real degree of precision. Moreover, each individual differs in so many ways that there cannot be one rule that is applicable to each case. Flourishing—which is the purpose of ethics—is like “health.” All individuals need it, but there is no One Best Health that applies for all. For some people, health requires a vitamin every day; for others, it requires more exercise; for others, it requires insulin injections; for others, that would be dangerous—and so forth. In Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s phrase, there are many different kinds of flourishing—many different “good lives.” This does not mean that flourishing, or moral values, are subjective: they are objective, ascertainable facts, but they relate to each individual as an individual, so they are agent-specific.
Mr Sandefur then tries to make a distinction between individual ethics and governmental ethics. To this I’ve two things to say, one short and one long. The short observation is that it is a common (yet dreadful) mistake to think that these ethics are so seperate, recall Solzenetzen’s famous quote,
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being
The second is a question. It is true that men are different and flourishing is different for each. But must we have any other establishing principle of government except that the purpose is to foster the flourishing of each of its citizens? Why talk of rights at all? Do we need rights, if the government is truly purposed in order to foster each of us?
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