Guest Post by Neera Badhwar, Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma and is affiliated with the Departments of Philosophy and Economics at George Mason University.
In Part I, I showed that justifying liberty rights on the grounds that we need them to pursue eudaimonia fails to show why people who are incapable of pursuing eudaimonia have liberty rights. Here I will ask if a less ambitious justification can include the excluded people.
According to Loren Lomasky, most of us are project-pursuers (CE*), setting long-term goals for ourselves and creating personal value. Personal projects give our lives structure and meaning. Indeed, they are part of our very identity (CE*). Lomasky argues that it is this that endows each project-pursuer with a separate, irreplaceable value, and grounds rights.
However, according to Lomasky, it is not only project-pursuers who have rights. Some non-project-pursuers have rights by virtue of their membership in the moral community of project-pursuers who have “the rational motivation … to recognize and respond to” non-project-pursuers (199). This is why those born so mentally incapacitated that they will never pursue projects, as well as those who can no longer pursue projects on account of dementia, have rights. They are proper objects for “the respect of others” (199). All these individuals ‘piggyback’ on the status of project-pursuers as rights holders. If the vast majority of human beings were not project-pursuers, no one would have rights.
So there are two bases for ascribing rights to people: project-pursuit and membership in a community of project-pursuers. This argument, if sound, justifies the ascription of rights to far more people than the eudaimonistic argument. In addition to those who will never pursue projects and those who can no longer do so because of dementia, it also allows hopeless addicts to count as rights-bearers. But it leaves the fate of the psychopath and the vicious man in limbo. Full-fledged psychopaths are not and never were project-pursuers because they don’t have long-term goals. One of the most enduring traits of a full-fledged psychopath is his impulsivity – giving in to the desire of the moment. Hervey Cleckley observes that the “[full] psychopath shows a striking inability to follow any sort of life plan consistently, whether it be … good or evil. He does not maintain an effort toward any far goal at all. … On the contrary, he seems to go out of his way to make a failure of life…. At the behest of trivial impulses he repeatedly addresses himself directly to folly” (CE*) (364).
Is the psychopath a member of the moral community of project-pursuers? If being a member simply means ‘living in society’, then of course he’s a member of the moral community. But if it means that he is recognizable as “a proper object for the respect of others” (199, my italics), then he is not, since he inflicts harm and psychological pain on family members and strangers without guilt.[1] It seems that neither of Lomasky’s arguments can justify ascribing rights to a psychopath. Yet we do think that he has a right to liberty unless or until he violates someone’s rights.
The vicious man described in Part I, whose supreme joy lies in seeing others suffer, but who is smart enough not to violate others’ rights, poses a different problem. He does have a project: the project of making others suffer. This project might give meaning and structure to the vicious man’s life, but its meaning for others is completely negative. Hence he, too, is not a proper object of our respect. The same applies to other varieties of anti-social personalities. Yet we do think that they ought to live free so long as they don’t violate anyone’s rights.
We are either wrong to believe that full-fledged psychopaths (who, by their nature, cannot become project-pursuers), vicious people (whose projects are intentionally inimical to other people’s projects), and anti-social personalities have liberty rights, or we have to look for a different justification.
Let’s start by asking why we might not want such people to have liberty rights. The main reason is that they inflict misery on others without rhyme or reason. But we don’t have a right against misery, because such a right would conflict with many of our liberty rights. It is morally wrong to be a treacherous lover, an unjust boss, a hateful neighbor, a domineering parent, or a nasty teen, but we all have a right to be thus. A right against misery would also conflict with our liberty to behave in perfectly decent ways, because even decent behavior can be a source of misery for some. For example, a young woman who marries someone with the ‘wrong’ politics, religion, or skin color can make her parents miserable. So if the parents had a right to be protected from misery, it would follow that their daughter did not have a right to marry the person she wants. Again, a son’s decision to become a businessman, instead of a musician like his father, might make his father miserable. But the father’s right against misery would mean that the son does not have a right to become a businessman. As these examples show, a right against misery can be self-defeating, since A’s lack of liberty to inflict misery on B is often B’s liberty to inflict misery on A. The idea that we have a right to be protected from misery opens wide the door to government overreach and a violation of many of our rights. It invites the government to become a predator instead of a protector. If we are made miserable by others’ behavior, we need to rely on friends, relatives, or psychologists for support. So psychopaths and other trouble-makers can’t be denied their liberties on the grounds that they make us miserable.
But what is it about them that grounds their rights? The only answer is that, for all their badness, many psychopaths, vicious people, and anti-social personalities have the ability to not violate our rights, even if only for purely instrumental reasons. It is this ability that gives them a right to liberty. This answer of course applies to everyone with this ability – the virtuous as well as the vicious, and everyone in between. But in the case of everyone other than the vicious, the anti-social, and the psychopathic, we also have other reasons to regard them as rights-bearers, reasons that show the importance of rights in human life.
[1] It’s possible that what Lomasky means by ‘respect’ is simply ‘respect for us as rights holders. But that makes his argument circular: we have rights because we are proper objects of respect, and we are proper objects of respect because we have rights.
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