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Three ECONOMIC RIGHTS ANDPHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY Leslie Armour 1. Two Sets of Rights; Two Views of the Human Being When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was put forth a little over fifty years ago, there was a rough division of the world in two- anda rough division of the proclaimed rights into two groups. Traditionalpersonal rights and liberties fell into one group and what came to be known as economic rights fell into the other. But in between were what might be called "social rights," and blurring these perhaps permitted both sides to feel that they had done roughjustice to the ideas of the other. Though both groups were able to agree on the Declaration, despite its mixture of personal, social, and economic rights, each side tacitly agreed to bury a number of clauses. In the West, personal and social rights associated with political activity were deeply entrenched, and the signatories had every intention of maintaining them. The relations between government and the press might differ a good deal as one traveled from Paris to London and on to New York, but (though Jean-Paul Sartre is supposed to have said, wryly, that he was not a Maoist because he was too old to run from the police) freedom of speech was broadly recognized. In the American south it was still difficult for a black man or woman to vote and, in Quebec, Maurice Duplessis was making life hard for Jehovah's Witnesses, but political and religious freedoms were well established over large areas. Economic rights, the right to a job and the right to health care and adequate unemployment insurance, varied widely. Nearly a half-centurylater, William Clinton could win an election by promising universal health insurance, but he could not produce it. In 1948, in what was oddly called the "Eastern Bloc," unemployment was a rarity; health care was universal, even if its quality was sometimes questionable; and higher education was generally available without fees. But the right to form a political party or advocate for an alternative economic system was non existent, and religious freedom was more difficult to obtain in Moscow than in Montreal. Some economic rights held only sporadically. Universitieswere free, but applicants whom the authorities thought politically unreliable were often denied entrance. Differences between East and West reflected differences in widely held philosophical anthropologies. They also represented, on both sides, a license to inflict or permit a good deal of misery, and many millions of lives were devoted to hopeless drudgery within both. The thesis that we can have political freedom 42 Leslie Armour without the ability to act in the physical world - the notion that negative political freedom, freedom that is simply the absence of interference by others, is possible without its positive counterpart - was roundly attacked in the last quarter of the nineteenth century by Thomas Hill Green' and a host of those who followed him. In the last half of the twentieth century, however, a philosopher as reasonable as Isaiah Berlin could view Green's doctrine as foreshadowing tyranny - as a step on the road to a world in which society forces one's choice of incommensurable goods.2 The belief that negative freedom, effectively guaranteed, would bring about positive freedom was often held - more often by the rich andpowerful than bythe poor and helpless. The corresponding belief, vaguely enunciated by Marx, that economic control of institutions by the people brings about negative freedom was also widely held, though probably not by people in the gulags. 2. A Free Mind in a Bound Body? The thesis that negative freedom can exist withoutpositive freedom reflects a mindmatter dualism that became deeply entrenched during the major economic and political reorientation which characterized the period from the end of the thirteenth century to the development of the great empires of the nineteenth century. It was supported in its middle years by arguments poorly drawn from the philosophies of Descartes and Locke. This dualism, which (although it had ancient origins) took shape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, held that the human mind somehow exists in isolation or independently from the humanbody in a way that enables our minds to be free even though our bodies are enslaved. Bodies were widely supposed to be controlled mechanically in two different senses, while the mind was not. Bodies obeyed the laws of physics and chemistry, but were controlled by inheritance. Curiously, people thought therefore that black persons could not behave like white persons, or women like men...

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