Hello, good afternoon. So in this video today I'm going to give a brief introduction to the topic of rights. So actually I hope you can see what's on the board. I understand that the glare from the overhead lighting is a bit harsh. If you have digitally seen what's on the board, don't worry, I'll also be posting some notes that are exactly the same wording as this.
And also, whatever is on the board right now is actually something that is found in your readings so it's nothing really you know new here I'm just putting up here for ease of reference so anyway coming back to the topic of rights so as I said in this video I'm going to give you a brief introduction to rights to the topic of rights so um so basically I'm going to talk about what are rights and also on what what kinds of rights they are and also what kind of basis do we have for rights. I mean, why do we have rights in the first place? What are they for? So let me just start with the first question. What is a right?
So I'm going to start with this particular definition that we have on the blackboard. Actually before I go into this, let me just also say a couple of things about why it is important to talk about rights in this course. You know, let's start with something more general.
It is important as an informed citizens of the world to have some idea of what rights are because you will notice that rights are very we talk about rights very much in our everyday political and social life so people say things like they have a right to freedom of expression they have a right to vote some people even go further and say things like they have a right to be to be cranky so one gets the sense that there are so many things that might be rights but why what make something a right as opposed to a bogus right. So because of this, it is useful to get clear about what exactly makes a right a right. I mean, I think most of us agree that we have a right to freedom of expression, but do we have a right to be cranky if you're having a bad day?
So yeah, I'm not going to answer this question right this very moment, but the thing about this, the other reason why it is important to talk about rights has something to do with what's going on in this course. So you will notice that in this course many of the issues that we discussed such as abortion, cloning and euthanasia and many other issues are all framed in terms of rights. You know for example if you are a pro-choice, if you adopt the pro-choice position in abortion then you say that the woman has a right to control what happens to her body.
If you are in favor of abortion. if you support euthanasia, then you say that just as somebody has a right to live, somebody should also have a right to choose when to die and how to die. So you will see that rights feature very heavily in discussions of various issues in medical ethics.
So for this reason, I think it is good to start the semester with a brief discussion and some thinking about what rights are in the first place. Okay, so let me get into this. So, um, Jeremy Walden, a professor at NYU, has actually come up with a very succinct definition of what a right is. So, very abstractly, now this is a bit formal, but an abstract, but I can fill you in on more details later. So, very simply, Walden says that if a person P has a right to do X, and X can be anything, it could be express himself, or it could be being cranky.
has the right to do X, then others have a duty not to prevent P from doing X. And secondly, the point of such a duty is to promote or protect some interests of P's. And thirdly, P should feel no embarrassment about insisting upon this duty. So let's talk about, you know, let's apply this formulation to a particular, to a very common example of a right.
Let's think about the right. to freedom of expression. So if you, that's URP, if you have a right to freedom of expression, then others have a duty not to prevent you from expressing yourself freely. And if I prevent you from expressing yourself freely, such as if I were to try to throw you in a jail for expressing yourself then I have you know I'm going against this duty not to prevent you from expressing yourself. And secondly the point of such a duty is to promote or protect some interest of yours.
So we are assuming that if you have a right to freedom of expression, then there must be some vital interest that is served by your being able to express yourself. So the duty exists to protect your right so that you can safeguard and protect that particular interest that is served by expressing yourself. The same goes for something like the right to vote.
I have a duty not to prevent you from voting because voting promotes some very vital political interest that you have. No. can you can also use this to you can also use number two to kind of think about whether some things that you might think of as rights are actually rights so suppose you say I have a right to be cranky after a long hard day at work well does being cranky promote a certain interest any interest of yours mmm I don't know but probably not so if being cranky doesn't if you cannot prove that being cranky promotes a particular interest of yours then then you probably don't have have a right to be cranky. Now later in the semester we will look at the issue of human cloning and you know some people are against human cloning because they say that you know human cloning violates my genetic, my unique genetic nature.
If there is somebody else that's running around that is exactly like me then you know then somehow my unique genetic nature is being violated. My right to a unique genetic nature is violated. But think about number two again.
So if you say that you have a right to a genetic unique nature, a unique genetic nature, then there must be some particular interest that is being served by your having a unique genetic nature. There must be some particular interest that is being served by nobody else having the same exact DNA sequence as you. But is that true?
Is there a particular interest? Is there any particular interest that... that serve by having a unique genetic nature. So, the answer, I'm not going to tell you the answer right now, the answer could be yes or no. But, you know, what that shows, what all this shows is that if you believe that cloning is wrong because it violates your unique genetic nature, then it is up to you to prove that having a genetic nature protects some vital interest of yours.
So, the point of all this is to show that number two is very important in train bliss. whether something is a right or not. In order to establish whether something is a right or not, we have to find a way to show that that particular thing that we say we have a right to actually promotes a particular interest that we have.
So having the right to vote, voting promotes a certain interest that we have, a political interest, so therefore we have a right to vote. Freedom of expression promotes a certain interest that we have, so therefore we have a right to freedom of expression. The same...
probably cannot be said of being 20. Okay so number three and then let's go on to number three. Number three says that P, that's you, should feel no embarrassment about insisting upon this duty. So you know not only do other people have a duty to not prevent you from exercising your right. If other people do not do their job, if they do not prevent you, then it is up to you and you should feel no embarrassment in insisting.
existing that other people fulfill their duty to not prevent you from doing, you know, from doing, exercising a right. So, basically this, you know, this is Jeremy Morgan's formulation of what a right is and you will see that it is a very useful tool, it is a very useful tool for understanding whether something is a right or not. So the next time you are confused about whether somebody has a right to do something, you should ask yourself, are there any rights uh... do uh... do that that's that's something of the movie street so on the case if you are the reason i was right also uh...
you know besides the question of what i think he's right but also a question this is a question of what police off country that there is such a thing ...as the right to freedom of expression, the right to freedom of association, the right to vote, the right to live your life as you see fit. So everybody agrees that we have all these political rights. But what about economic rights?
Do we have a right? to things like healthcare, maybe employment, maybe food. You know, there are people, there are philosophers in recent years who have argued that we also have a right to welfare and food and employment.
in addition to freedom of expression and all of those political rights. And the reason, I think, is because they say that if you don't have food or health care or all those things, how can you possibly exercise yourself politically? So in the recent literature, the political rights that we are familiar with, freedom of expression, freedom to vote and so forth, all these are known as first generation rights.
Whereas the economic rights such as as healthcare and food and employment, those are known as second generation rights. So the question, a very interesting debate that has happened in recent years is second generation rights, the right to employment and food and healthcare, are these rights actually really rights? Or are they just goods and services that the government may provide to these citizens? I don't want to try to answer this question here because it will make this video too long.
But please read that article by Jeremy Waldron on rights that I posted on Moodle for more detailed discussion on this. Okay, there's this other thing, there's this last thing that I want to talk about, about rights. So, and that's the question of the topic of How do we base rights? Why do we have rights?
I mean, you might say that you have rights because you are a human being. That is not a very good answer because what about aliens? I mean, if there are intelligent aliens somewhere else in space and they are just as intelligent and just as technologically advanced as we are, shouldn't they have rights too?
So one gets the sense that rights are not just about the human being. shouldn't just be you know you shouldn't just have rights just because you are human But if you don't have rights just because you're human then then why do you have rights? How you know or to put it more philosophically?
Upon what basis do you base your rights? so Many philosophers have come up with different answers to this question. I'm just going to quickly go over three possible answers to this question. Okay, so give me a second. Okay, so the question is, what is the basis of rights?
Okay, now over the last couple of centuries, there are three main answers that have been given to this question. The first answer is utility or well-being. The second answer is our status as rational beings.
And the third answer is social contract clearing. Okay, let's start with utility. So if you believe that rights should be based on a notion of utility or well-being, then you believe that we have rights because rights help to promote the well-being, not just individual well-being.
but the well-being of human society in general. So John Stuart Mill was a famous proponent of this first view. His view is basically that we have rights because human beings are better off human civilization in general will be better off if we have rights because if we have rights then we will be able, everybody will have the space that they need to do the things that they want, to carry out their projects and to exchange ideas freely. So freedom of expression on this first view is very important because if everybody is free to express themselves freely then they there will be a free marketplace of ideas and with the free marketplace of ideas, good ideas will flourish whereas bad ideas will just get you know shut down so so and good ideas flourish in this free marketplace of ideas then the well-being of humanity is being promoted so so view, long story short, rights are important because they serve to promote the well-being of humanity as a whole. And then there is a second view, which is that rights are important because they are in order to preserve and promote our status as rational beings.
So the German philosopher Immanuel Kant was a proponent of this view. His view is that rights are important because we are rational beings. We are beings that have rational abilities.
We are able to think, we are able to use our ability to think to carry out projects and so forth. And because of this, we need rights so that we will be protected from will be protected from being treated in a way that is not befitting a rational being. So, for example, a chair is not a rational being.
You can treat a chair any which way you want. You can kick it, you can burn it if you want to, or whatever, do whatever you want to it. But you can't do the same thing to a rational being. A rational being like me is deserving of a certain amount of dignity and respect. And so the purpose of rights, is to prevent other people from doing things to me that do not befit my status as a rational being.
Now, the third view of the basis of rights is social contract theory. So, this social contract theory was famously put forth by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. So, according to social contract theory, in the beginning we were all... savages living in the wild.
This is before the beginning of human civilization. So we were living in the wild as savages and then one day we decided to come together and live together so that we can reap the benefits of living together in society. So when I give up my status as a...
as a savage and come to live in society, I give up certain things but in exchange I gain even more things, even more freedoms. So I gain certain freedoms that come from not having to hunt for my own food, from not having to make my own shoes and clothes. So with all of these freedoms, I gain the freedom, you know, I basically gain the freedom to have more time to pursue projects that are really important to me. human beings came together out of the wilderness to form societies and civilizations, we agreed to a contract.
We agreed that in order for us as human beings to live together productively as human beings, we have to refrain from doing certain things to each other. And so rights exist as a kind of articulation, as a kind of formulation of that refrain. So for example, you have a right to life, which means I have a right to life. I have a duty to not murder you, for example. You have a right to property, so I have a duty to not steal or violate your property.
And all of this is part of the social contract. So the idea is that rights exist because they enforce the social contract and allow humans to live well in society. So anyway, these are the three main bases of rights.
so again all this is also mentioned in the article by Jeremy Walden so please have a look at it okay I think I this is as this has been a pretty long lecture so I'll end my lecture for now so that's all I have to say for right now so thank you for listening