Reconciling Liberalism and Communitarianism

This chapter explores the debate between liberalism and communitarianism. It shows that placing a high value on individuals and their rights does not entail sacrificing the common good or the good of the community. To begin with, both personal identity and individual rights are inseparably linked to membership in communities. Individuality and community are mutually constitutive, and the generation of social norms by persons in community with one another is the precondition and the source of all the rights that are actually operative in society. Furthermore, being reciprocal—consisting in mutually recognized entitlements and obligations to respect them—rights are not adversarial. They do not divide people from one another, nor do they set them against governments or states. At least in principle, then, individual and community rights are compatible.

Difference, Otherness, and the Creation of Community

This chapter addresses the problem of conflict resolution, treating it in terms of the creation of community rather than negotiation or mediation as they are commonly understood and practiced. What the author is suggesting is a way of uniting the combatants in a new, inclusive community that will serve them both and, at the same time, preserve the integrity of each. Part of what this new perspective must accomplish is to help bring about a change in the attitudes of the opposing parties toward one another, to help them overcome their hostility and fear and the pervasive attitude of otherness. At the same time, if it is not to pose a threat to the parties involved, it is important not to jeopardize their sense of their own identity or their freedom to participate in determining their future. To this end, whatever steps they take must foster the mutual acceptance of difference.

Deep Diversity: Charles Taylor and the Politics of Federalism

This chapter studies a concept introduced by Charles Taylor, who is an advocate of special status for Francophones and the province of Quebec. What Taylor calls for is a more decentralized and more complicated federal system than that which presently obtains in Canada. He specifies that the “asymmetrical federalism” he is talking about “means special status for Quebec.” But in fact, the kind of “deep diversity” he recommends would confer special status on each constituent, including several new political entities that would be created. That is, each might have different powers, different spheres of autonomy. He would like to see Quebec retain all its current provincial powers, but other provinces might “opt for the centralization of several powers” and while some “coordination will occur through interprovincial agreements,” in certain cases “it would be better to imagine a shared or concurrent jurisdiction.”

Multiculturalism, Identity, and Minority Rights: Will Kymlicka and the Concept of Special Rights

This chapter focuses on the arguments of the Canadian philosopher Will Kymlicka for “special rights” designed to protect indigenous minorities and their cultures. Kymlicka rests his argument for the rights of cultural minorities on the fact that membership in a cultural community is “an important good for the individual.” He finds this good to be, in the first place, a function of the relation between membership in cultural communities and personal identity. However, he seems to be thinking of identity more as a matter of “identifying with” than as consisting in the traits by which a person can be identified and recognized. This identity would include, in addition to such traits as that person's appearance and voice, the characteristic ways in which she or he deals with the world and with other people. Identity in this sense can include having a sense of belonging to a cultural community.

The Democratic Solution to Ethnic Pluralism

This chapter argues not only that minority rights are compatible with political unity, but also that they are a means to and a necessary condition of that unity. There is an obvious defense of this thesis: minorities who are denied rights will fight for them, and the result will be turmoil in the wider society. The only stable solution to any conflict among communities, including ethnic conflicts, lies in the establishment among the warring parties of an inclusive community of dialogic reciprocity: a community in which each is accepted as an authoritative and autonomous member, equally respected by all as a participant in determining the policies and principles by which the inclusive community is to be governed, both internally and in its relations with yet other communities. It is this ideal of unity-in-multiplicity that the author proposes as applicable to a multi-ethnic nation.

Pragmatism, Rights, and Democracy

This chapter discusses the views of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead on key aspects of both rights and democracy. John Dewey is well known for his writings on democracy, but after 1920, his references to rights were largely critical, and it is widely assumed that Pragmatism is antithetical to the assertion of rights. However, Dewey's criticisms were largely directed at particular features of traditional theories of rights, not against rights as such, and there is to be found, in his earlier writings, a positive conception of rights. But the most important pragmatist theory of rights, and one that has also received very little attention, was developed by George Herbert Mead. The heart of Mead's view is not only that rights rest on acknowledgment and recognition, but also that in claiming a right one is at the same time attributing it to others. Rights, that is, despite their seeming adversarial character, are mutual.

Four Principles of Traditional Theories of Rights

This introductory chapter provides a critical analysis of the central features of traditional and contemporary theories of rights as well as criticisms of those theories. Even as human rights come under attack in one part of the globe after another, various bodies are trying to extend the protection afforded by rights to peoples—even to nonhuman animals and the environment—and also to widen the scope of rights to cover such diverse entitlements. Concurrently, especially in the United States, the concept of rights is being subjected to intensive scrutiny, and new understandings of the nature and ground of rights are emerging. Contemporary rights theory has three main sources: (1) the Christian tradition of natural law; (2) the Enlightenment theorists Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant; and (3) the American legal theorist Wesley N. Hohfeld. Theories in this tradition assert or assume, inter alia, the following interrelated principles: Individualism; A priorism; Essentialism; Adversarialism.

Postscript: But I Have a Right!

This postscript provides answers to the criticisms and questions to the author's previous book, summarizing the features of the theory presented in this volume. In characterizing rights as social institutions rather than as inherent traits of essential human nature, the author rejects the traditional concept of “natural rights.” The author argues that, where a right is operative, every member of the community has both the entitlement and the correlative obligation that make that entitlement a matter of right. Rights and their correlative obligations are social imperatives; they must be mandated by a community's social norms. Therefore, one who does not belong to a community in which a given set of rights-norms is operative would “not have” that right.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Hill Green on Natural Rights

This chapter discusses three modern philosophers whose views run counter to the established tradition of “natural rights”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Hill Green. While they all reject the concept of “natural rights” in the classical sense, Rousseau, Mill, and Green have given theories of rights that are naturalistic, in the sense that they are grounded in these philosophers' respective analyses of empirically observable human behavior and motivation. According to Rousseau, rights neither are innate nor belong to individuals prior to or outside the framework of society. For Mill, rights are products of empirically discoverable psychological tendencies, including the interest of all in protection by society. Meanwhile, Green argues that for rights to exist is for people not only to conceive them, but also to understand them to serve a common good that each conceives as his own and that each therefore acts to promote.

An Alternative to the Dominant Tradition

This chapter suggests an alternative theory of rights. Instead of saying that there are duties correlative to rights-entitlements, the author prefers to say that there is a correlative obligation to respect them, binding upon all. It is this obligation that distinguishes an entitlement that is a right from other entitlements. Apart from the obligation of all to respect it, which entails implementing this respect in action when one is in a position to do so, the entitlement would not be a right. Therefore, the norms making respect for it obligatory are constitutive of the right. To put it another way: the rights-entitlement and the obligation to respect it are constitutive of each other. The chapter then examines the ramifications and implications of this view.