[p2p-research] should we cover natural rights?

Sat Sep 11 19:58:17 CEST 2010

very interesting, I posted it to the facebook commment as well

On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 8:05 PM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hiya,
>
> Mixed feelings.  Of course, nobody says "natural" anymore, they say "basic
> rights" or "human rights", and the arguments to derive them are multiple,
> not necessarily from nature so much as from conditions for certain kinds of
> social relations.  Natural rights are best-known from bourgeois theories
> which try to make out that capitalism is a natural product of human nature
> (e.g. Locke).  I have suspicions, however, that this is a recuperated
> version of an earlier tradition of bottom-up rights-based ethics rooted in
> common law and the rejection of the "Norman yoke", which is coextensive with
> the defence of bottom-up claims of the kind still recognised in some places
> under the name *usos y custombres*.  There's another line of derivation of
> rights which starts from the Salamanca debates and Christian objections to
> genocide, which is also more benign than the usual account starting with
> bourgeois thought.  Also, rights have been very effectively appropriated by
> social movements opposed to some of the more extreme manifestations of state
> tyranny (see people like Brisk, Sikkink and Burgerman on human rights
> movements as a kind of networked recomposition, articulating claims blocked
> at a national level through transnational connections).
>
> I also think there's something in Arendt's idea that a "right to have
> rights" is central to the difference between totalitarian and other kinds of
> regimes.  Rights-claims are quite different from other kinds of ethical
> claims in that they are borne diffusely, i.e. any and every person can have
> a right, and can make claims that rights are violated, whereas (say)
> equality, welfare, utility, justice and so on can be "substitutionised" more
> easily, identified with the supposed aggregate effects of a particular order
> (as in "substitutionism")...  Hence, rights-claims are major ethical
> barriers to total control by a particular discourse.  This said, there's a
> whole industry of substitutionising rights nowadays, particularly in terms
> of rights-creep, the "right to feel safe", the "right not to be harassed"
> and so on (actually privileges of the included dressed-up as rights).  But
> there is still a certain allergy on the part of bigots, crackdown freaks and
> statolaters to any talk of rights.  And if these people hate something, it's
> probably because it's stopping them from doing something nasty.
>
> I think a rights-based vocabulary is quite useful for articulating an
> ethics of difference, particularly if rights are viewed as stemming from
> each person's needs and particularities rather than from abstractions,
> though it needs to be reframed to be used in this way.  In particular the
> distinction between rights stemming from difference and privileges stemming
> from unmarked status needs to be asserted for it to be used in this way,
> otherwise a "right" just becomes doublespeak for any aspect of a particular
> system.  It's also necessary in order to gain such critical purchase for
> rights to be used in a human/natural rights way where rights "exist"
> separately from a dominant order, so that they can be used to ground claims
> *against* an order.  Of course there are other languages which can be
> used, a vocabulary based on dignity and honour for example can have diffuse
> effects, or an approach based on an ethic of care, but there are a lot which
> can't be used, for example I've never found much use in communitarian or
> utilitarian vocabularies, they are very unfriendly to difference, and
> ultimately put all the discursive resources in the hands of dominant groups,
> who can monopolise the "good" signifiers in these systems.  It worries me
> when I see oppositional movements using communitarian signifiers, it is
> asking for the exclusion of "other others", the imposition of some new
> fascism in place of the old.
>
> bw
> Andy
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 2:55 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> any suggestions to this comment?
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: Facebook <notification+pjiidwm at facebookmail.com<notification%2Bpjiidwm at facebookmail.com>
>> >
>> Date: Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 8:41 PM
>> Subject: Seth Johnson commented on your link.
>> To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
>>
>>
>> Seth Johnson commented on your link.
>>
>> Seth wrote:
>> "Do you think you could pay some attention to the notion of natural
>> rights?  Really fundamental to the history of human liberation."
>>
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