Four arguments about rights

They're all bad ones, and they're all from this same article by Tom Stoppard. Here's the first:

The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world. It is easily and often overlooked that when Thomas Jefferson asserted that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were inalienable human rights, he did so on the ground that they had been endowed by God, our Creator.

That is how Jefferson deemed "these truths to be self evident". Yet, we do not find that insistence on human rights is the preserve of believers. Still less do we find the right of free expression being derived from God's endowment.

The idea of rights is only unintelligible in a Darwinian world if you imagine that all things in such a world, and therefore rights among them, have to be the same kind of things as rabbits and raccoons, or for that matter rocks - or rocking chairs and rugs. But they don't. There are, for example, values and norms, even though you won't find these by searching any natural habitat or paying a visit to your nearest Habitat. Values and norms aren't things of that visible and palpable sort. But neither are purposes, aims, promises and verdicts, and these are all real enough; they can exist without a divine Creator - or so a lot of us believe. Likewise rights. Though there is philosophical argument over different conceptions of rights, I'll just go here with one of these, the interest theory of rights. According to this, basic human rights are justified by reference to what is in the fundamental interests of every human being, just as a human being: needs that humans have (say, survival needs), or protections against assaults that cause them death or grave suffering (violence, torture, etc), and irrespective of cultural differences.

Note, here, that if Stoppard's argument were effective - as it isn't - against the right of free expression, it would be effective against every kind of right, including the right to life itself: the right against being killed, being sacrificed for the benefit of others, being boiled alive for the pleasure of onlookers.

Here's Stoppard's second bad argument:

That I have the right to express myself freely at all times in all circumstances entails the idea that free speech is a "basic human right" possessed by each individual, and, as such, trumps the interests of the society or group, including my neighbour. But there is something odd about this. The trumper is, after all, a member of the group. The interests of the group is the only game in town. That's why the group is a group. The trumper is trying to trump himself. He has produced from his sleeve a card that was never in the pack and which he insists wins the trick.

So it might, if we believe the card was divinely bestowed, that there is a "superior" game going on. If, however, we don't believe that (and even those who believe in our divinity do not generally believe that God said, "Let there be free speech"), then it follows that "rights" are a psycho-social phenomenon, and there are no rights more human than others; no trumps.

That some particular right can't be a trump because rights are not divinely bestowed doesn't mean no right ever takes priority over another. Even if the interest of the group is the only game in town - and it isn't - it may be that there's a strong argument for the hypothesis that groups and the individuals that make them up flourish better when certain individual rights are treated as being nearly always compelling. Where does Stoppard get that the interest of the group is the only game in town? He doesn't tell us. But there are also the interests of individuals. Rights theorists, campaigners for human rights and a lot of ordinary folk give these interests and the rights derived from them moral weight. That does not mean they do not take account of the interests of the group - on the issue of free speech and on other issues - but it does mean they don't see group interests as resolving all moral questions. They may have some awareness of the harm that has been done historically on the basis of this collectivist assumption.

A third bad Stoppard argument:

Freedom of speech, far from being an absolute, a given, seems to have less to do with rights than with rules. But that's the good news. Now we can avoid the clash of absolutes...

Rights theorists don't have to, and mostly don't, take even the most basic human rights as absolute, though they may think that some of these are close to absolute. Few serious defenders of the right to free expression think that it is an absolute. Hence, laws against incitment, hate speech, defamation and so on.

Lastly:

A "human right" is, by definition, timeless. It cannot adhere to some societies and not others, at some times and not at other times. But the whole parcel of liberties into which free expression fits has a history.

The historical genesis of an argument, theory or set of ideas doesn't determine its cognitive or normative value. The world is no less shaped as it is because human beings took a while to discover its shape. Similarly, the idea that there are some basic human rights, free speech amongst them, is no less valuable for having taken a long time to emerge. To confuse the genetic question of an idea's social origins with its truth value or its normative force can land you with not being able to discriminate morally between rituals of human sacrifice and, oh, you know, the rule of law (as now understood).

Perhaps Tom Stoppard would have done better to embody these thoughts of his in a new drama.