Rights and Lefties

So Cutie pointed out some inconsistencies nuances in my post about Rawls. I should make my position clear, if only so that I can be pilloried even more effectively in the future.

In a rare bout of respect for my readers, I have taken the advice of a commenter and checked out The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes, by Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein. It's good so far, and I'll write up a post once I'm done. Chapter six, which I haven't read yet, is entitled "How Rights Differ from Interests." Tentatively, I don't think rights do differ from interests much, at least in a philosophical sense. Clearly we have defined certain legal rights in this country, but I would argue that we have essentially set aside certain interests as more important than others and given them legal protection.

Anyway, as I said, all of this is tentative. What really matters is that I'm going to be using the language of rights a lot, simply because I want to deal with Rawls on his own terms. He reads his "veil of ignorance" hypothetical to yield certain rights orthogonal to (i.e., not subject to trade-offs with) mere interests. Even if you believe that's valid, I argue, almost all of the time those rights are subject to tradeoffs with each other by way of wealth. Expanding one right at the expense of wealth will often curtail the exercise of other rights.

So then the question is, do we care about people's ability to exercise their rights? I think so. I think rights are more or less meaningless if people can't exercise them. I'll have to read more Rawls before I can figure out his take on the question. In the meantime, the rights/interests dichotomy is not one that impresses me.