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4. T. H. Green on Rights and the Common Good
- University of Ottawa Press
- Chapter
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Four T.H. GREEN ON RIGHTS AND THE COMMON GOOD Rex Martin T.H. Green's posthumously published Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (1886) is one of the finest books in the philosophy of rights to date. In it, Green emphasized two distincf elements of rights: the requirement of social recognition and the idea of a common good. But this leads to a tension in his theory. Either of the two principal elements could plausibly be said to exist in the absence of the other. Where this happens, or could happen, does the element that stands alone lose all claim to the status of a right? An attempted resolution of this potential source of confusion in Green's theory is one of the concerns of this chapter. It is not, however, my first order of business. Instead, I want to first consider Green's idea ofsocial recognition - adifficult and controversial idea - necessary to any right properly understood. Green writes, "The right to the possession of them, if properly so called, would not be a mere power, but a power recognized by a society as one which should exist. The recognition of a power, in some way or another, as that which should be, is always necessary to render it a right."1 This emphasis on the role of social recognition lies behind Green's notorious remark that "rights are made by recognition. There is no right but thinking makes it so."2 Green's notion of social recognition was developed dialectically out of his careful attention to the theory of natural rights, where such rights were understood as powers that held good in a state of nature. Against Hobbes and Spinoza, Green argued that rights were not mere natural powers, but had normative force (especially as involving duties and other kinds of normative direction of second parties).3 Against Locke, one of the first philosophers to make the preceding point about the normative force of rights, Green argued that the relevant duties necessarily implied some sort of awareness or recognition by the duty holders. Thus, by what amounted to an internal critique of the natural rights tradition, he could reach his own distinctive idea that all rights, including natural rights, involve social recognition. Social recognition belongs to the definition of rights, to the concept of rights. The notion of the common good or of a mutual and general good belongs, however, to the dimension ofjustifying something as a right. Or at least, it belongs to thejustification of the most important kind of right, the universal right (the right of each and all). 72 Rex Martin Green divides general or universal rights into two categories: the natural and the civil. In some sense each is a universal right. Natural rights, as normally understood, are rights of all persons. Active civil rights, for Green, are political rights universal within a given society.4 They are ways of acting or being treated that are specifically recognized, affirmed, and actively promoted in law, and apply to each and all citizens or, in the limiting case, to all individual persons. Thus, both natural rights and civil rights are special cases of what Green called general rights. They are rights of all people or all citizens and, in some important cases (for example, the right to life) they constrain generally all other people or all other citizens, either directly or through the mediation of public law. All universal civil or political rights are important rights and all reflect a high level of social commitment. But not all can be justified as natural rights, what we today call human rights. Still, all can be justified in a distinctive way - in accordance with one and the same pattern. The background supposition is that all rights, both natural rights and civil rights, are in some way, beneficial to the right-holder. Thus, all civil rights (all political rights universal within a given society) should identify specific ways of acting or of being treated that are of benefit to each and all of the citizens or to each and all of the persons there. For these claimed ways of acting or being treated are, arguably, part of the "good" of each person or instrumental to it. Where this requirement of mutual and general benefit is upheld, a legal civil right becomes a way of acting or being treated that is correctly understood to be in everybody's interest, or would be so understood, upon reflection, and given time...