Help me w/ an argument against "group rights"?

Political Philosophy
21

Fanofayn,

The basis of rights is man’s faculty of REASON. A “group” does NOT possess reason _ qua group _ . ONLY individual members do. And THAT is why only individuals have rights.

It is important to differentiate between the basis of ethics and the basis rights. The standard of value is man’s life. The standard of value of any living being is its own life. But it is NOT basis of any right. If it were, then EVERY living being would have rights.

Let me reiterate: It is because man is a RATIONAL being that he–and ONLY he–has RIGHTS.

You should have checked you premises very carefully: a little bit of reading and discussion would have easily uncovered that mistaken premise that the value of man’s life is the basis of his rights.

22

The non-sequitur in his argument is the idea that the values created by “grouping” are not traceable to the individuals. Where the hell does that come from? Has he ever heard of the division of labor? If I live longer because a doctor healed me, the value came from the doctor. No matter how complex a society may get, all that exist and are acting *in reality* are individuals. Even if one points out that one’s life is much better with people in it, it is still those individuals who are the source of that value.

Since rights only become morally relevant in the context of society (because of the possibility of the use of force; your rights cannot be violated in solitude), they are the necessary organizing principle of any society. All rights that a society may claim for itself (such as national sovereignty) are merely delegations of said rights (e.g. law enforcement) and do not exist apart from them. At the point that any society attempts to override those rights, it has committed the fallacy of the stolen concept right there, and thereby wipes out its moral claim to exist. When that happens, what is actually happening is an attack by some individuals against the rights of others, and the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence apply.

Living in the state of society (i.e. associating with others) is a way of life that yields certain benefits. As such, it’s a solution to a problem, a *method* (teamwork) of solving problems that are outside the reach of solitary men to resolve. I don’t see how a state of association can acquire existence, let alone rights. Does my method of working acquire rights because of the benefits I reap from it?

The proof that rights are individual consists in the fact that only individuals *exist*. Individuals associate; associations do not individuate. The group has no existence apart from individuals, but individuals may exist apart from the group. Groups are existentially dependent upon individuals. Individuals *cause* groups.

And since morality IS reason and rights are a moral concept, none of this applies to non-sentient entities. A bear isn’t violating your rights if he eats you, nor does a hurricane do so when it deposits your boat fifty miles inland. So, the whole issue pertains only to rational individuals interacting with one another, in a state of society.

As for the exceptions to that rule, e.g. mentally disabled individuals etc. well they are classified and dealt with as exceptions to the rule, of what Don Watkins calls “broken units”; as an issue they can be dealt with only after the basic principles have been defined by reference to human nature as such. Without the concept of rights, the question of the rights of the disabled makes no sense.

People who commit crimes forfeit their rights, but the principle of “let the punishment commit the crime” should guide society on which of those forfeited rights it can abrogate.

23

He argued that the value of life is cumulative/exponential, that each additional day increases the total value of the life (that each day is not equally valuable, but the fact that each day is built upon the previous day makes that new day more valuable).  When people come together in groups to create institutions such as states and markets, their lives are enabled to be much longer then they would have been in a Hobbesian state of nature; in anarchy or total solitude.  He argued that all the days each individual in the group lives longer than they would have lived without the group are not traceable back to those individuals.  He said that the group creates these new days, and the group appropriates the life that it creates.  In this way, the group has its own life, untraceable back to the individuals who constitute the group, and this life gives the group a basis for rights just as individuals gain the basis for their rights from their lives.

The professor’s argument is that the group has rights because it makes it possible to prolong the life of an individual who lives in that group? The group has life?

The problem with the professor’s argument is that it equates the group with the individual. He says it has the property which can only be traceable back to a single individual - life. The group of people to him is a living organism. And therefore, the group has rights. The group has the right to its own life, the professor says, and what he doesn’t say is that anyone leaving the group is killing the group, therefore he is violating the group’s rights. It is unjust for an individual to leave because others have right to his services and he must sacrifice his interests for the group’s needs.

As Ayn Rand stated, altruism is not a life loving philosophy, but “…a theory of ethics which holds death as its ultimate goal and standard of value.” And that death refers to the individual, not a group - because a group objectively has no and can have no life of its own and because an individual is supposed to sacrifice for the group. No matter what an individual does and no matter what he “contributes to the community,” all his efforts are useless to an altruist/collectivist unless he is willing to make that ultimate sacrifice of his own life for the sake of the collective he lives in. Only then will he be noticed and given all the second-hand honors that the world can give to a man.

24

In the June 1963 Objectivist Newsletter, in an article entitled “Collectivized Rights”, Rand writes: “Any group or ‘collective’, large or small, is a only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the ‘rights’ of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary, individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking…A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess. The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations…Any group that does not recognize this principle is not an association, but a gang or a mob”.

You professor’s mistake is that he assumes associations take on a life of their own; that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Suppose a group of people come together to push a car. Clearly one individual can not do so, but a group of individuals can. The group pushing the car does not suddenly ‘morph’ into a ‘superhuman’ entity. The task is accomplished by combining the strength of the individuals. They do not transmogrify into a super entity. So it is with all groups they are simply equal to the sum of their parts. An association of geniuses will produce a different result, than an association of mental defectives every time when given the same task. No synergy or transformational magic that supposedly results from the ‘joining’ can overcome that fact.