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The interactional pragmatic account of morals described in the last chapter also provides the core elements of a pragmatist theory of rights. But it is worth spending some time here on rights because the topic raises a number of interesting problems and, thus, offers an opportunity to consider the resources pragmatism affords for addressing those problems. In the broadest sense, rights, for the pragmatist, pertain to the terms of our relationships with others and with the ways those terms are produced, articulated, adjudicated, and enforced. For clarity’s sake, we can start with Maurice Cranston’s influential definition of rights (although what I have to say in the rest of the chapter will modify this starting point). Cranston tells us that a right is a claim recognized as legitimate and, as a result of that recognition , enforceable. The one who possesses a right is entitled to something , and the one to whom the claim is addressed has an obligation to honor that right. So, for example, if you have a right to vote, the appropriate institution has the obligation to ensure that you have the full opportunity to exercise that right. Cranston usefully distinguishes between legal (or, in his terms, “positive”) and moral rights. Legal rights (like the right to vote) are ones that are articulated in a legal code and enforced by legal institutions . Moral rights are more nebulous, but exist where the rights 4. Human Rights Human rights is misunderstood . . . if it is seen as a “secular religion.” It is not a creed; it is not a metaphysics. To make it so is to turn it into a species of idolatry: humanism worshiping itself. Elevating the moral and metaphysical claims made on behalf of human rights may be intended to increase its universal appeal. In fact, it has the opposite effect, raising doubts among religious and non-Western groups who do not happen to be in need of Western secular creeds. . . . Human rights might become less imperial if it became more political, that is, if it were understood as a language, not for the proclamation and enactment of eternal verities, but as a discourse for the adjudication of conflict. —Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry 119 claim made by someone is acknowledged by others as legitimate outside of any specific legally instituted right.1 An example would be our general sense that a worker has a right to a living wage. The “living wage” movement in the United States today is an attempt to leverage the general recognition of that moral right to secure a positive, legal instantiation of it. Even though moral rights are more nebulous, are not specifically encoded in law, I think Bernard Williams is correct to state that when it comes to “human rights . . . their basis is not positive law but a moral claim which is taken to be prior to positive law.”2 In short, rights are claims, and they depend on an intersubjective recognition of their validity if those claims are to be satisfied, either legally or more informally. Dewey’s account of rights is exactly what we would expect: “Right is only an abstract name for the multitude of concrete demands in action which others impress upon us, and of which we are obliged, if we would live, to take some account. Its authority is the exigency of their demands, the efficacy of their insistencies” (HNC, 326). He dismisses the “abstract moralism” that locates the origin of rights (or of the moral law) in some transcendent realm, rather than in “the concrete facts of the interactions of human beings with one another” (HNC, 324). “[C]onsiderations of right are claims originating not outside of life, but within it. . . . Accordingly, failure to recognize the authority of right means defect in effective apprehension of the realities of human association” (HNC, 327–28). Rights arise from the claims others make upon us and that we make upon others—and are negotiated in the give and take through which, together, humans forge the terms of their relationship(s) to one another. Rights are “empirical ,” where “empirical here means only actual” (HNC, 327), the product of our interactions, not an ideal or principle serving to structure those interactions from outside of them. Dewey critiques the abstract or transcendental account of rights (his main target here is recognizably Kantian theories) for responding to the very real failure of humans to recognize and respond to rights claims by retreating to an assertion of a standard by...

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