Know your rights
It’s a bit unusual for someone with hard left sympathies to complain about the ‘liberal’ advocacy of ‘positive’ rights, but the anonymous blogger at Splintered Sunrise is and does exactly that. Nonetheless, I’m not entirely sure academic liberal political philosophers of the past thirty years (thinking of, say, Joel Feinberg) have actually advocated the sorts of thing Mr Sunrise ridicules. Indeed, if one is looking for a definite intellectual forebear, ‘politics of recognition’ and/or ‘radical multiculturalist’ types in political theory would surely be better candidates, yet these have tended to style themselves as ‘left’ or at least ‘radical’ critics of ‘liberalism’.
Admittedly, as the discourse is transposed to practical left-liberal politics, the faux socialism which typically accompanies it in academia is replaced with an unflinching support for actually-existing capitalism. Thus, New Labour politicians never tire of saying their ‘project’ was (and is) all about achieving greater ‘equality’ of something or other, yet do so in a manner that is in no way anti-capitalist or even mildly unhappy about rising pay differentials under their watch – to care about such things is the ‘old’ politics of ‘envy and resentment’ they say, and thus, something that is ‘not appropriate’ to ‘modern Britain’!
Nonetheless, ‘New Labour’ and ‘politics of recognition’ discourses come together, I think, in precisely what Splintered Sunrise styles as the former’s aim of ‘legislating niceness’: the idea that the ‘rights’ of one group to be respected requires state action to counteract the ‘bigotry’ of certain individuals in society at large, even if this ‘bigotry’ has only very low-level expression that, in the grand scheme of things, makes very little (if any) practical difference to the lives of those it disrespects.
As an example, Splintered Sunrise gives that rather odd row a couple of years ago over Catholic adoptions agencies, when ‘it was written into law that the right of gay couples to adopt overrode the right of Catholic organisations to operate in accordance with Catholic social teaching’:
The funny thing is that, given the very small numbers of gay couples applying to adopt, and given the unlikely scenario of many, or even any, of them deciding to apply via the Catholic agencies, that the whole argument was unnecessary – the Catholic agencies could have perfectly well been granted the legal exemption they wanted, without infringing on the right of the gay community to take their custom elsewhere.
Another, slightly different example one might give is of the ban on smoking in public places. At least, in presenting it, the then Health Secretary John Reid exclaimed:
In a free society, men and women ultimately have the right within the law to choose their own lifestyle, even when it may damage their own health. But people do not have the right to damage the health of others, or to impose an intolerable degree of inconvenience or nuisance on others.
We thus end up with things like this, stuck to the inside of door of the small block of flats I’m currently living in:
Now, I’m a non-smoker who would much prefer to live in a smoke-free environment. Moreover, I’ve no problem with a non-smoking clause being part of the covenant signed by buyers, and by implication, tenants, even if such a clause were a common cultural norm, and thus, ‘objectively’ anti-smoker. Actually, I’d even be fine if local bylaws had been enacted banning smoking in ‘public’ places (though I admittedly find calling the hallway of a block of flats a ‘public’ place rather strained). Why on earth does it need to be a rule set by central government however, and in the name of the ‘rights’ of non-smokers ?
And yet, and yet…
An immediate point against my own example is that it is rather lame, since the smoking ban was more typically put forward for reasons of public health rather than the ‘rights’ of non-smokers. Indeed, Google for “smoking ban rights”, and what mostly comes up are libertarian-minded American sites moaning about this tyrannical attack on the rights of private property. What about the adoption agency row though? Surely that’s a clear-cut case of the idiocies of left-liberal rights talk?
On reflection, I’m not so sure, since a more charitable interpretation of the row’s genesis would see it arising not from the Blair government seeking to defend the rights of gay people over the rights of the Catholic Church, but simply from how the law effectively defines (or if you prefer, ‘constructs’) what an adoption service is: for, if the reasoning on which the current legal understanding of who is fit to adopt a child changes, then it is reasonable to think the class of people who are legally fit to adopt should change in step; and if an adoption agency is something whose role – as it currently is in the UK – is to be a sort of delegate of the state, then its internal rules are things that, prima facie, should change accordingly too. For sure, maybe it’s ‘obvious’ that an exception should have been made in the current case; but if so, where in principle should exemptions stop? Of course, believe in a free market in adoption, and this is a silly question. That, however, is a belief held by very few: for a child is not a piece of property to be bought and sold, or so common morality has it.
Because of this, I’m more inclined to think the government’s error (if there was an error) was in it not looking to create an exemption when a fuss was kicked up (assuming, as it was, that the ‘fuss’ was perfectly peaceable), not in the issue having arisen in the first place. For, it’s perhaps just inevitable that friction will occasionally arise between what the state defines as appropriate adoptees and what a sectional institution does; and in the case of adoption – unlike other things – it’s far less easy to define things in such a way that basic differences are skirted around (keeping on the gay rights theme, cf. the decision to create same-sex civil partnerships with all the legal rights involved in marriage, only without the term ‘marriage’ being used).
