Last week, Emily Runge responded (“West’s political solution goes in the wrong direction,” Nov. 6) to my original article (“The unappealing politics of universal rhetoric,” Oct. 30), which had claimed that the intractability of political discourse stems from “rights-talk.” She insightfully highlighted several of my unclear original claims, and I’d like to clarify these by responding to some of hers.
She writes: “While human rights are a bad standard [for evaluating the justice of a the political order], the alternative of human goods that West advocates is worse. The first and most obvious problem with human goods is that they lack an objective standard.”
Human goods do provide an objective standard because they flow from common human nature. Reason directs each human person, by nature, to certain goods as the ends of action, and thus every choice evaluates the circumstances and chooses a good to attain. If we seek the “reasons” for this choice — the purpose of the action — then we ultimately arrive at some reason that can no longer be explained in terms of anything else. That is, we choose some things for their own sake. In this category, I would place life, knowledge, friendship, and perhaps certain others. These are basic human goods.
Imagine, for example, that I have chosen to read a book, and you ask me why I’m reading it. I could give all sorts of tentative or relative reasons: My professor assigned it, I’m avoiding homework, I have 10 minutes to kill before dinner, etc. But all of these relative reasons demand a more final reason: Why avoid homework in this way? Why does your professor affect your choices? If this is not to go on forever, there must be some terminal reason that is, in some sense, self-evident: I have chosen to read this book because knowledge is a human good, and that is a sufficient explanation.
To complicate things, the Aristotelian tradition claims that political organization arises for the sake of these goods — self-preservation (life), friendship, etc. If this is the origin of the political, then its justice must be determined in terms of the attainment (or not) of the human goods that bring it into being, and each person must be respected as a locus of human flourishing.
This account of the political is emphatically grounded in human nature.
But if this account describes the human condition, then Runge improperly presumes that one can only have a conception of “permanent human nature” if one understands it in terms of natural rights.
Indeed, speaking primarily in terms of rights can undermine a robust understanding of human nature. Runge’s article helps make this point: “Evaluating [the justice of welfare] from a natural rights standpoint, the law of self-preservation and the right to life offer a clearer solution [than the standard of human goods]. Welfare is justified only to preserve a person’s life.”
She cites the right to life as the justification for a welfare state. Yet this usage of the right to life certainly has a different meaning from, say, debates about abortion. There we might say it secures a negative right; here, a positive one. But if the right to life has these two different but somehow related meanings, then some rationale for applying the term to both situations must exist. If Runge hopes to justify this positive right, then she must give a reason for extending the original right to this additional class of cases; if she does not give this rationale, then she opens herself up to the criticism that she has equivocated.
But she has not equivocated: The implicit rationale that justifies both applications depends upon the insight that life is a human good, a necessary condition of full human flourishing, and that any just society must respect life in countless distinct but analogous situations.
When we simply apply the right to life in a variety of situations, it covers over that central rationale and that more original recognition that life leads to full human flourishing and ought to be protected. This concealment prevents us from thinking critically about the real justifications of the policy, and therefore encourages a superficial understanding of human nature.
