Helen is fond of telling me that I "haven’t gone far enough." Turnabout is fair play. The trouble with rights language isn’t that it clings, fluke-like, to an existing moral framework . If rights were simply an inefficient middle-man, I wouldn’t mind keeping them around. After all, an obsession with efficiency does not become any organism more complex than a termite.
My problem with rights lies in the way that they shift the burden of enforcement to the individual. Consider the different ways in which I react to the natural right "I have a right to life" and to the natural law "Thou shalt not kill." From a purely pragmatic perspective, they may have equivalent effects on what my sovereign believes that he can do to me. When it comes, however, to what Ralph refers to as "the soul’s self-understanding," they are radically different.
The law is something which exists above and apart from me. It is something against which I can judge the actions of others and myself. A right, on the other hand, can only be asserted, and in extreme cases even renounced, by myself. Just think of all the modern moral theories which claim that human beings become fit objects for moral obligation only after they are able to assert their rights. The real problem with rights isn’t that they are clumsy and foolish way of expressing true moral claims, it is that they make the sovereign individual the arbiter of whether those claims have been violated.
Every man a sheriff, every man a judge. Welcome to the Wild West.
