What are your views on rights? Are they innate, or are they constructed? Do you think rights are a good thing to have in society, or do you believe they cuase problems?
Interesting question as to whether Rights are innate or not, I’m not sure what you mean by innate in this context. Anyway, one could argue as Levinas does, that our own subjectivity is in some way defined by our ethical responsibility to the Other in the face-to-face, for him the ethical is pre-ontological and is therefore contra-Heidegger and National Socialism. Maybe ‘rights’ are a legislated extension of this responsibility and in that sense they are innate (in a relational sense) and yet constructed in response to actions / events. The idea of someone or something having ‘rights’ certainly derives from the ethical domain of life and in my view they are without doubt ‘good’ for society and for any sentient beings (in whatever form) for that matter. To ask whether something is good is in itself an ethical question, and maybe even the very call and response structure of questioning itself has an ethical dimension. An obvious example of the ‘goodness’ of rights (following the reference to National Socialism) would be the introduction of the European Convention on Human Rights after the abuse of state power resulting in atrocities of the 2nd World War when people were discriminated against and in some cases horrifically exterminated en masse merely on the grounds of prejudice against a persons race, beliefs, gender, sexuality, disabilities etc. The balancing of people’s rights do however create ethical dilemma’s and the law is an interpretive / hermeneutical art rather than a science, so we may not always get it right…sometimes all we have is the weight of probabilities, sometimes undecidables resulting in an impasse or an injustice, we know this, this is life, this has been the case for millennia, yet isn’t the whole of the legal system based in some way on the notion of rights and protecting rights and when judgements (ethical decisions based on the current law) are made correctly, do we not believe this to be Justice?
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