A Questionable Distinction

So I've been reading some Rawls. You know how it is: you hear people prattling on about something long enough, and it seems implausible enough, that eventually you have to read it for yourself. Anyway, it's been pleasant so far, but Rawls keeps drawing a distinction between fundamental human rights and mere social interests. I'm having trouble thinking of a way of affecting overall wealth, or utility, or whatever, without also expanding or diminishing human rights.

My inspiration is a comment in Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman. At some point (I would tell you exactly where, but Amazon's "Search Inside" feature is crap), Friedman comments that an American doesn't really care whether his trip to England is barred by brute force or by an unfavorable exchange rate. For an extreme example, most of us would see it as a rights violation if the government banned books. Millions of people can't read, though, or can't afford written material. When incomes rise, some people are newly free to read books. This is true for all sorts of rights, trivial or crucial, all along the continuum of incomes.

So let's take a hypothetical example. Imagine we are designing a new country, and we have a choice between a society in which the per capita income is $3,100 and a society in which the per capita income is $40,100. For comparison I've used the purchasing power parity of India and the United States, respectively. Now imagine that in the poorer country, everyone has a right to be Mirandized once in police custody, but in the richer country judges consider a totality of the circumstances to detect police coersion.

In effect, in designing our hypothetical country we have to trade off Miranda rights against a lot of money. Rawls might say that, assuming Miranda rights to be fundamental, we should choose to make our country poor but just. Rights always trump social interests. I would say that choosing the lower income is condemning large segments of the population to illiteracy, effectively denying them, among many other things, the right to read books. It's not a rights vs. utility question, it's a rights vs. rights question, one that I would definitely decide in favor of wealth. Of course, none of this is to say that Miranda rights are worthless. A reasonable person might trade away some GDP for Miranda rights. On the other hand, a reasonable person would probably trade away Miranda rights for a sufficient improvement in utility without regard to rights, but that's a post for another day.

The point is that you can seldom trade away wealth (or social interests, or whatever) without also trading away rights. The way I see it, this renders a lot of the hand-wringing about rights vs. utility moot. I'd like to throw in a vivid example about a dictator who allows capacious freedoms but keeps his population poor enough that they can't afford to exercise any of them. Though his people are free on the books, they are deprived of liberty just as surely as if he kept them down with dogs and fire hoses. I won't bother throwing in the example, though, because I think you get the drift.