What Rights Could Not Be
Monday, June 30th, 2008Last week, Noah Millman wrote a long meditation on the issues raised by the SCOTUS decision banning the death penalty in child-rape cases. Leaving aside how persuasive it was (hint: it does more to bolster confidence in the future of the conservative movement than Matthew Continetti’s assay of the same controversy), I was struck by something in Millman’s closing:
I’m comprehensively skeptical, as I’ve noted before, of our rights-based discourse. I don’t think we have inalienable rights; I think we have inescapable duties.
Disclaimer: I haven’t read Millman’s previous critique of the “rights-based discourse,” but I think there is enough evidence in the death penalty post to make an educated guess about what he’s getting at. Here is how Millman cashes out what it means for something to be inalienable: “If our humanity is inalienable, that really does mean that nothing we do can take it away from us.” In traditional metaphysics, the way to put this thought is that humanity is an essential property of anything that possesses it. (more…)