Two small comments about rights (Shiffman’s piece). The smallest one is that Hobbes’ “right of nature” is not a right in the relevant sense here (what is called a claim-right); it is a liberty implying no duty on the part of others. So what Shiffman says about Hobbes seems to be based on a misreading.
Attributing (claim-)rights to people does focus attention on them and what they can claim or demand, namely that others respect their duties or obligation owed TO them. Locke is an important theorist of this sort of view. But the implications for the contemporary scene are not clear. Yes, young whiners are individualistic in important ways, but they seem to point to the “harms” they have suffered as victims, not to the rights others have violated. The shift from rights violations to harming is culturally important. I don’t think I adequately understand the contemporary cult of victimhood, but it does seem to focus on harms more than rights.
Why are young radicals not punished when they misbehave or break laws? What makes authorities in general, and university administrators in particular, so weak?
Mark Shiffman ably demonstrates the problems with modern writers on rights: they read Hobbes and Locke and consider themselves done, while entirely misunderstanding, and not bothering to apply, the concept of rights. Note that he doesn't mention negative vs positive rights, nor does he reference Grotius, Smith, Hume, Puffendorf or even Cicero. Concern with punishing those who victimize others, or violate their rights, starts with Christianity? Euthyphro would like a word with you.
Further, conflating the "victim" with the "weak" is a misleading rhetorical move. One's right to property is not negated because the person who stole it is weaker than you; the notion that that would be the case would be laughable to any premodern person. The lord of the manor doesn't experience a free-for-all on his property just because he has more of it than other people.
The simplest application would allow one to see how these ideas break down. For instance. if a Roman is attacked by an equal, does he have the right to kill that man in self defense? Yes, of course, and that is a pattern we see in all societies of which we have records. Are thieves not punished in pre-Christian societies because no one has a right to property?
Shiffman is correct that a sense of rights stems from sympathy with victims, but his notion of "victim" is all over the place. People agree on rights because they are agreeing on rules about how they are going to interact with each other, and what they can agree upon because it minimizes violent conflict. Animals manage this at a basic level, after all, so it isn't too hard for humans to take it even further. When those rights are violated we are justified in harming those who did the violating; a good way to get a sense of the rights agreed upon in a society is what people are willing to see people harmed for doing. But if we are to use victim as shorthand for "someone whose rights have been violated" we cannot also use victim to mean merely the weak, or the poor, or any of the vague uses of victim people toss around today. There needs to be a specific right that has been violated. A victim of theft or a victim of homicide is a meaningful statement; a victim of self defense, or a victim of inequality is not. If one doesn't keep clear in their mind how the words' use is changing, both over time and in the essay, things get very confusing very quickly.
Having trouble swallowing that naive realism is all bad. When for example Musk says:
My positions are centrist:
- Secure borders
- Safe & clean cities
- Don’t bankrupt America with spending
- Racism against any race is wrong
- No sterilization below age of consent
Is he not engaging in naive realism? Where is the profound harm? There are trade offs between simplicity and complexity and often the advantages of simplicity outweigh any advantages of complexity.
Reverend Kling’s readings today present a convincing case for the existence of complex social scholarship if not complex social problems, what with all of the citations to Hobbes, Locke, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Nietzche, Girard, Friedman, Lippmann, Tetlock, et al. A wonderful cornucopia. A couple of the links were for paid subscribers only or I would still be reading and likely be worn out as one might find oneself after a Thanksgiving dinner. It is tempting to fit all of the links into a narrative but it also equally tempting to try to simplify it all. So I will attempt both. Nothing that follows is original except perhaps the nature of the butchery of the thought of the fine thinkers who influenced it.
First, in an attempt to simplify, one might observe that human history includes two defining struggles; adapting to the environment in order to survive, and, competing with other humans for control of resources. Before launching into the more abstract spheres, perhaps human behavior might be considered in reference to these two struggles?
These struggles of adaptation and control are not unique to humans and they are faced by nearly every other type of organism. And the strategies employed to win these struggles are similar, if not identical, to the ones that humans employ. For example, we see cooperation, in all its myriad forms, across a wide variety of organisms. Bumblebees, for example, learn and teach behaviors that they could not independently develop (“Bumblebees socially learn behaviour too complex to innovate alone” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07126-4?fromPaywallRec=false ). And even in plants “In the fight for survival, plants are capable of complex social behaviors and may exhibit altruism towards family members, but aggressively compete with strangers.” (See Susan Dudley’s work: https://experts.mcmaster.ca/display/sdudley ).
But you will argue, insects and the like are much more sophisticated and advanced than humans: they have had a much longer time to evolve, we must use look deep into our primitive subconscious to really understand human behavior. And that may be true, but, as I will argue later, the insect example might provide a useful model for mapping that dark descent. Lacking all those years of fine-tuning, niche exploiting evolution, we need to explain humans’ ability to adapt and compete. One simple foundational fact is that humans, as do insects, engage in exchange, but to such a greater extent that exchange is perhaps a major defining human characteristic.
The patterns of sustainable specialization and trade in humans that explain so much require exchange. But how did exchange become such an important human behavior?
Great minds are at work on this pivotal question (see for example: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2011.2614 ). But one might imagine that the early exchanges may not have been so different than what Barry Cunliffe, in his wonderful book Facing the Sea of Sands, writes:
Herodotus provides one further story about the Atlantic, which he had learnt from Carthaginian traders. Somewhere along the African coast there was a favoured beach where they went to trade with the natives. On arrival they would lay out their trade goods in an orderly fashion along the strand and would then retire to their vessels and send up a smoke signal:
‘The natives would see the smoke and come down to the shore, and, laying out to view so much gold as they think to be the value of the ware, withdraw to a distance. The Carthaginians then come ashore to look. If they think the gold enough, they take it and leave. But if it does not seem sufficient, they go back on board the ship and wait patiently. Then the others approach and add to their gold, till the Carthaginians are satisfied. Neither party deals unfairly by the other, for they themselves never touch the gold until it comes up to the value of their goods, nor do the natives ever carry off the goods until gold is carried off.’”
(Facing the Sea of Sands p. 107)
Cunliffe later recounts the same pattern in an Arabic account of the early African gold trade
(pp. 239-240)
Isn’t this story pregnant with pluralist interpretations? How many different ways might we not interpret it as a foundation for the development of human culture, norms, laws, art, religion, war, hierarchies, etc?
Might insects offer a possible taxonomy for sorting all the competing tensions inherent to the exchange story and its interpretation?
“Eusocial animals share the following four characteristics: adults live in groups, cooperative care of juveniles (individuals care for brood that is not their own), reproductive division of labor (not all individuals get to reproduce), and overlap of generations (Wilson 1971).” (https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/an-introduction-to-eusociality-15788128/ )
“cockroaches possess a collective decision-making process previously thought to exist only in highly social species, such as ants and bees, according to the study scientists. [... ...]
'There is certainly no signal intentionally emitted. Instead the cockroaches seem to glean information inadvertently provided by the others,' researcher Mathieu Lihoreau at Queen Mary, University of London, told LiveScience.
The process sheds new light on simple ways in which societies self-organize.
"We should definitively pay more attention to cockroaches and other simple 'societies' as they provide researchers with good models for co-operation and emergent properties of social life, that we could extrapolate to more sophisticated societies, like ours," Lihoreau said.”
Thus, it might be interesting to look at exchange from the perspectives of a termite and a cockroach. For the termite, Encyclopedia Britannica, exchange is a matter of:
“As with other social insects, not all members of a termite colony feed directly. Because reproductives, soldiers, and young nymphs in lower families (all nymphs in Termitidae) cannot feed themselves directly, they must be fed by workers. Workers, or in families without them, the older nymphs, feed for the entire colony and transfer food to dependent castes either by mouth feeding or by anal feeding.”
For the cockroach:
“It is difficult to conceive of any group of animals that are as diversely social as cockroaches. Although individual taxa are typically described as solitary, gregarious, or subsocial, cockroach social heterogeneity is not so easily catalogued. Cockroaches that live in family groups are a rather straightforward category [… …]
Parental care is typically maternal... ...
A unique aspect of cockroach parental care is the wide range of mechanisms by which embryos and neonates are nourished. In the one known viviparous species, the brood sac acts as both uterus and mammary gland; it oozes a type of milk that is orally imbibed by developing embryos. In several taxa, mothers progressively provision neonates on bodily fluids.”
With these differences in mind, might we aggregate human political intuitions into two competing camps whose ascendancy in human struggles alternately wax and wane, the termites and the cockroaches?
The termite camp would seem to have moral intuitions about exchange similar to those of Sparta, the Dominicans, the Roman Catholic church, the feudal king-peasant alliance against the barons, historicism, majoritarian democracy, and the cult of science.
The cockroach camp would seem to have the moral intuitions about exchange that we find in Athens, the Franciscans, non-conforming Protestants, history, consensus democracy, and populism.
Democracy writ large might not produce the right answer every time, but it does seem to afford a pluralist structure in which the tensions surrounding the basic fact of exchange can coexist.
All of these treatises about the validity or shortage of knowledge in the process of democracy and policymaking are interesting, but ultimately they are all a way of not saying this: we need a good and decent elite, that is "better" in certain ways, than the populace.
That we don't have that at present, doesn't alter the fact.
“Why are young radicals not punished when they misbehave or break laws? What makes authorities in general, and university administrators in particular, so weak?” Now we’re talking! See my post “Why Do We Shield Our Fellow Man From Justice?” for my answer.
Two small comments about rights (Shiffman’s piece). The smallest one is that Hobbes’ “right of nature” is not a right in the relevant sense here (what is called a claim-right); it is a liberty implying no duty on the part of others. So what Shiffman says about Hobbes seems to be based on a misreading.
Attributing (claim-)rights to people does focus attention on them and what they can claim or demand, namely that others respect their duties or obligation owed TO them. Locke is an important theorist of this sort of view. But the implications for the contemporary scene are not clear. Yes, young whiners are individualistic in important ways, but they seem to point to the “harms” they have suffered as victims, not to the rights others have violated. The shift from rights violations to harming is culturally important. I don’t think I adequately understand the contemporary cult of victimhood, but it does seem to focus on harms more than rights.
Why are young radicals not punished when they misbehave or break laws? What makes authorities in general, and university administrators in particular, so weak?
Indeed!
Mark Shiffman ably demonstrates the problems with modern writers on rights: they read Hobbes and Locke and consider themselves done, while entirely misunderstanding, and not bothering to apply, the concept of rights. Note that he doesn't mention negative vs positive rights, nor does he reference Grotius, Smith, Hume, Puffendorf or even Cicero. Concern with punishing those who victimize others, or violate their rights, starts with Christianity? Euthyphro would like a word with you.
Further, conflating the "victim" with the "weak" is a misleading rhetorical move. One's right to property is not negated because the person who stole it is weaker than you; the notion that that would be the case would be laughable to any premodern person. The lord of the manor doesn't experience a free-for-all on his property just because he has more of it than other people.
The simplest application would allow one to see how these ideas break down. For instance. if a Roman is attacked by an equal, does he have the right to kill that man in self defense? Yes, of course, and that is a pattern we see in all societies of which we have records. Are thieves not punished in pre-Christian societies because no one has a right to property?
Shiffman is correct that a sense of rights stems from sympathy with victims, but his notion of "victim" is all over the place. People agree on rights because they are agreeing on rules about how they are going to interact with each other, and what they can agree upon because it minimizes violent conflict. Animals manage this at a basic level, after all, so it isn't too hard for humans to take it even further. When those rights are violated we are justified in harming those who did the violating; a good way to get a sense of the rights agreed upon in a society is what people are willing to see people harmed for doing. But if we are to use victim as shorthand for "someone whose rights have been violated" we cannot also use victim to mean merely the weak, or the poor, or any of the vague uses of victim people toss around today. There needs to be a specific right that has been violated. A victim of theft or a victim of homicide is a meaningful statement; a victim of self defense, or a victim of inequality is not. If one doesn't keep clear in their mind how the words' use is changing, both over time and in the essay, things get very confusing very quickly.
Having trouble swallowing that naive realism is all bad. When for example Musk says:
My positions are centrist:
- Secure borders
- Safe & clean cities
- Don’t bankrupt America with spending
- Racism against any race is wrong
- No sterilization below age of consent
Is he not engaging in naive realism? Where is the profound harm? There are trade offs between simplicity and complexity and often the advantages of simplicity outweigh any advantages of complexity.
Reverend Kling’s readings today present a convincing case for the existence of complex social scholarship if not complex social problems, what with all of the citations to Hobbes, Locke, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Nietzche, Girard, Friedman, Lippmann, Tetlock, et al. A wonderful cornucopia. A couple of the links were for paid subscribers only or I would still be reading and likely be worn out as one might find oneself after a Thanksgiving dinner. It is tempting to fit all of the links into a narrative but it also equally tempting to try to simplify it all. So I will attempt both. Nothing that follows is original except perhaps the nature of the butchery of the thought of the fine thinkers who influenced it.
First, in an attempt to simplify, one might observe that human history includes two defining struggles; adapting to the environment in order to survive, and, competing with other humans for control of resources. Before launching into the more abstract spheres, perhaps human behavior might be considered in reference to these two struggles?
These struggles of adaptation and control are not unique to humans and they are faced by nearly every other type of organism. And the strategies employed to win these struggles are similar, if not identical, to the ones that humans employ. For example, we see cooperation, in all its myriad forms, across a wide variety of organisms. Bumblebees, for example, learn and teach behaviors that they could not independently develop (“Bumblebees socially learn behaviour too complex to innovate alone” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07126-4?fromPaywallRec=false ). And even in plants “In the fight for survival, plants are capable of complex social behaviors and may exhibit altruism towards family members, but aggressively compete with strangers.” (See Susan Dudley’s work: https://experts.mcmaster.ca/display/sdudley ).
But you will argue, insects and the like are much more sophisticated and advanced than humans: they have had a much longer time to evolve, we must use look deep into our primitive subconscious to really understand human behavior. And that may be true, but, as I will argue later, the insect example might provide a useful model for mapping that dark descent. Lacking all those years of fine-tuning, niche exploiting evolution, we need to explain humans’ ability to adapt and compete. One simple foundational fact is that humans, as do insects, engage in exchange, but to such a greater extent that exchange is perhaps a major defining human characteristic.
The patterns of sustainable specialization and trade in humans that explain so much require exchange. But how did exchange become such an important human behavior?
Great minds are at work on this pivotal question (see for example: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2011.2614 ). But one might imagine that the early exchanges may not have been so different than what Barry Cunliffe, in his wonderful book Facing the Sea of Sands, writes:
Herodotus provides one further story about the Atlantic, which he had learnt from Carthaginian traders. Somewhere along the African coast there was a favoured beach where they went to trade with the natives. On arrival they would lay out their trade goods in an orderly fashion along the strand and would then retire to their vessels and send up a smoke signal:
‘The natives would see the smoke and come down to the shore, and, laying out to view so much gold as they think to be the value of the ware, withdraw to a distance. The Carthaginians then come ashore to look. If they think the gold enough, they take it and leave. But if it does not seem sufficient, they go back on board the ship and wait patiently. Then the others approach and add to their gold, till the Carthaginians are satisfied. Neither party deals unfairly by the other, for they themselves never touch the gold until it comes up to the value of their goods, nor do the natives ever carry off the goods until gold is carried off.’”
(Facing the Sea of Sands p. 107)
Cunliffe later recounts the same pattern in an Arabic account of the early African gold trade
(pp. 239-240)
Isn’t this story pregnant with pluralist interpretations? How many different ways might we not interpret it as a foundation for the development of human culture, norms, laws, art, religion, war, hierarchies, etc?
Might insects offer a possible taxonomy for sorting all the competing tensions inherent to the exchange story and its interpretation?
Cockroaches and termites are closely related in evolutionary terms (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2018.2076 ) but the termites took a turn to the eusocial:
“Eusocial animals share the following four characteristics: adults live in groups, cooperative care of juveniles (individuals care for brood that is not their own), reproductive division of labor (not all individuals get to reproduce), and overlap of generations (Wilson 1971).” (https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/an-introduction-to-eusociality-15788128/ )
And termite behavior and exchange are very complex but genetically controlled (https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4636 ).
Cockroaches, on the other hand are merely social:
“cockroaches possess a collective decision-making process previously thought to exist only in highly social species, such as ants and bees, according to the study scientists. [... ...]
'There is certainly no signal intentionally emitted. Instead the cockroaches seem to glean information inadvertently provided by the others,' researcher Mathieu Lihoreau at Queen Mary, University of London, told LiveScience.
The process sheds new light on simple ways in which societies self-organize.
"We should definitively pay more attention to cockroaches and other simple 'societies' as they provide researchers with good models for co-operation and emergent properties of social life, that we could extrapolate to more sophisticated societies, like ours," Lihoreau said.”
(https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/0610/Cockroaches-appear-to-use-collective-decision-making-prefer-to-dine-together )
Both cockroaches and (likely) termites have individual personalities (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5425029/ and
and termites as eusocial insects, extrapolating from bees: https://www.livescience.com/18924-scouting-bees-brain-behavior.html ) so the problems that researchers have in understanding their collective decision-making and exchange behavior (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2022.1058611/full ) are not at all unlike the great frustration Lippmann expressed with the “public.”
Thus, it might be interesting to look at exchange from the perspectives of a termite and a cockroach. For the termite, Encyclopedia Britannica, exchange is a matter of:
“As with other social insects, not all members of a termite colony feed directly. Because reproductives, soldiers, and young nymphs in lower families (all nymphs in Termitidae) cannot feed themselves directly, they must be fed by workers. Workers, or in families without them, the older nymphs, feed for the entire colony and transfer food to dependent castes either by mouth feeding or by anal feeding.”
For the cockroach:
“It is difficult to conceive of any group of animals that are as diversely social as cockroaches. Although individual taxa are typically described as solitary, gregarious, or subsocial, cockroach social heterogeneity is not so easily catalogued. Cockroaches that live in family groups are a rather straightforward category [… …]
Parental care is typically maternal... ...
A unique aspect of cockroach parental care is the wide range of mechanisms by which embryos and neonates are nourished. In the one known viviparous species, the brood sac acts as both uterus and mammary gland; it oozes a type of milk that is orally imbibed by developing embryos. In several taxa, mothers progressively provision neonates on bodily fluids.”
(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312003551_Cockroaches )
With these differences in mind, might we aggregate human political intuitions into two competing camps whose ascendancy in human struggles alternately wax and wane, the termites and the cockroaches?
The termite camp would seem to have moral intuitions about exchange similar to those of Sparta, the Dominicans, the Roman Catholic church, the feudal king-peasant alliance against the barons, historicism, majoritarian democracy, and the cult of science.
The cockroach camp would seem to have the moral intuitions about exchange that we find in Athens, the Franciscans, non-conforming Protestants, history, consensus democracy, and populism.
Democracy writ large might not produce the right answer every time, but it does seem to afford a pluralist structure in which the tensions surrounding the basic fact of exchange can coexist.
All of these treatises about the validity or shortage of knowledge in the process of democracy and policymaking are interesting, but ultimately they are all a way of not saying this: we need a good and decent elite, that is "better" in certain ways, than the populace.
That we don't have that at present, doesn't alter the fact.
“Why are young radicals not punished when they misbehave or break laws? What makes authorities in general, and university administrators in particular, so weak?” Now we’re talking! See my post “Why Do We Shield Our Fellow Man From Justice?” for my answer.
https://scottgibb.substack.com/p/why-do-we-shield-our-fellow-man-from?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2