Rights, duties and misunderstandings

[sawyl]

Today's choice from the Guardian is this somewhat odd comment piece about rights and duties. Unfortunately, the potentially interesting subject is undermined by a series of faults.

For example, the article baldly asserts that:

The harms being done to [modern free societies] by exploitation of their liberties are real; the harms being caused to them by the erosion of those liberties are largely imaginary.

This is a strong statement. Or it would be if it were backed up by evidence. As it is, it's nothing more than absurd turn of rhetoric. The article goes on to claim that:

..the vacuous notion of liberty [the left] now espouse is really a claim to the right to do as one pleases. This is the same idea about liberty as the "free marketeer" who brooks no interference with "choice", even if it wrecks society and the planet.

This seems doubtful. Almost all libertarians, whatever their political origins, would agree that there need to be some checks on freedom, e.g. to prevent the strong inflicting harm on the weak or to support the types of private contracts required for the marketplace to function. The base message of libertarianism, as it is generally understood, is not so much the right to do as one pleases, as the right to be left alone.

After a series of complains that society is falling apart because everyone is so busy enjoying their new-found freedoms that they've forgotten that they actually have duties, the article states:

Indeed, government ministers today speak hesitantly of a need for "constitutional renewal" or for a more "contractual" relationship between citizen and state. Under it, the performance of civic duties would be made a condition for the gaining of rights, many of the latter now routinely and shamelessly exploited by rich and poor alike.

Although I'm not expert on contractarianism, this seems to me to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of social contracts. Both Rousseau and Hobbes are clear on nature of the social contract: it is an agreement drawn up between individuals in order to advance their own situation; the duties it outlines are owed by citizens to each other. It is most emphatically not a contract between the state and the individual. Rather, the state emerges out of the contract agreed upon by like minded individuals.

Even when read with a degree of charity, the article manages to pack a worrying number of misunderstandings in to a relatively short piece. Examined from a more jaundiced perspective, it looks a lot less like an analysis and a lot more like a whetstone.