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.
I think the victim/victime thing is not confusing if you accept that there is a hierarchy, with bottom replacing top. The very worst individual representative of a class viewed as les-miserables must be at the very top or the logic of it breaks down.
This was a recent sequence of events (I'm not going to look up the details, but this is the gist): open records requests from the local media (we still have that, here) revealed that the local DA was continuously emailing with a radical non-profit based in the (slightly more liberal) city north of here, a non-profit that is under the umbrella of this group --https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/social-and-environmental-entrepreneurs-see/
-- and basing his decisions about filing charges and diversion and setting bail, on their "recommendations". As is the custom in that other city.
Their say-so, really. And basically their say-no. Or if bail *was* set, this group made it their business to promptly pay it without any sort of vetting of criminal history, if the family didn't step forward to do it (!). Thus thugs or mentally ill repeat offenders, were rapidly cycled back to the community. (Oddly they couched their involvement, when mildly confronted, in terms of "messaging" which deserves some sort of deep dive, in my view; investigation showed this was false, it was much more than messaging! - not that one perhaps immediately sees why a non-profit should have interposed between DA and public at all ... ?)
Inevitably these offenders would commit more crimes, and when there was a rather newsworthy murder spree - and the media delved into the perpetrator's background, including his springing by this activist group that admitted it knew nothing about him - this curious collaboration could no longer remain quite in the shadows. (Please understand, there has been no big fracas over this; it merely got a story or two in the purely local news.)
Why would a concern for victims (sense 2, above) ever lead to turning a blind eye to more victims (sense 1, often of course persons who should also have claims under sense 2)?
The answer is the logic of the "world turned upside down" hierarchy, combined with the inescapable truth that mercy and justice cannot occupy the same space at the same time. They will ever and always be opposed.
I think you are pointing out an interesting aspect: there has been a recreation of an unequal, stratified society. Instead of a notional society of equals, where the rights of the poorest members are held equal to those of the richest, we have a new culture created where the "victim classes" are not equals but superiors in the moral hierarchy. The intersectional strata define people as inherently unequal and thus their rights are not comparable.
There is also the corruption, or at least redefinition, of the concept of rights at play. One doesn't have rights against the superiors at all it seems, the superiors being defined by their intersectional strata. Even among equals the rights are changed: property rights do not matter, nor do rights to life or other standard rights based on which strata the perpetrator occupies often without regard to the strata of the victims.
However, one needs to be consistent with their language. Victim as a measure of intersectional strata vs victim of a rights violation are different. Those claiming victimhood strata do not point to specific rights that have been violated, and certainly not universal rights that apply to everyone.
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.
I think that is part of an important point. Administrators are quite willing to crack down on behaviors that are counter to their sense of morality. Where they are perhaps weak is in cracking down on behavior they might not like that is motivated by their own sense of morality. I think this is due to the sense that leftist misbehaving is largely what those administrators saw themselves as doing when they were young; the leftist rioters etc. have the moral high ground in other words. Even if the administrators do not agree entirely and wish those sorts of things wouldn't happen (at least on their campuses) they have no limiting principle to use to argue that the rioters should stop. There are no enemies to the left, and so ever more extreme behavior is always morally superior in their framework.
I don't think it's so much administrators seeing themselves being disruptive activists when they were young, as believing that those people are history's good guys. They are why good social change happens. So the conventional narrative that gay rights came because of "acting up", that it begins with Stonewall's patrons "fighting back" against the police (so much so that the spot is now a National Monument).
When actually gay rights happened because there are two equilibria, one where people think "gay" is something you catch, and thus should be quarantined and disapproved, and one where people think gay people are "born that way" and thus shouldn't be treated any worse than someone who is different in a way they can't control.
That's fair, although I'd bet that if you fed most college administrators a few drinks and asked them about what they did in the activist vein, they would tell you stories. They might be making them up, but they would tell you stories. Their diversity statements certainly had some.
As the partial architects of the underdogma, they stand to lose not simply their place, as precariously held as it has been, but faith in a strand of thinking that may be central to identity in some way (I'm still waiting for someone to really take this up, Howard Jacobsen did a little bit but he's not exactly well-known, in fact I will need to doublecheck his name) and and may even have been necessary to survival and eventual thriving.
ETA: by "precariously held" I refer not to long history (much more existentially precarious) but only to the recent decades of the ascendance and wild success of the civil rights movement.
It's hard to imagine politics without "grievance." If you can't articulate what the alternative is, it's hard to see how "victimological" politics is a distinct phenomena and not just ordinary politics.
That became true when people learned that they could live by voting money out of each other’s pockets. When wealth is distributed according to the rule, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” the incentives are to demonstrate minimum ability and maximum need. Intersectionality is little more than a way to determine the order in which people get to feed at the government’s trough.
That's always existed; Roman history is all about the plebes versus the patricians. I haven't read Shiffman's book but I'm dubious that there is any politics that doesn't begin in some felt injustice.
Making distinctions is important. There is a difference, for example, between someone who has been mugged and a student at a prestigious university who is holding a trashcan over his head and saying, "Look at how the world is dumping on me."
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.
I had a question on the original post
"Would a kind soul help me out?
Is it victimhood all the way down? Locke/Hobbes/Rousseau and by extension Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton ...
This is some excellent company to keep :)"
Which I think you answer, thank you!
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.
I think the victim/victime thing is not confusing if you accept that there is a hierarchy, with bottom replacing top. The very worst individual representative of a class viewed as les-miserables must be at the very top or the logic of it breaks down.
This was a recent sequence of events (I'm not going to look up the details, but this is the gist): open records requests from the local media (we still have that, here) revealed that the local DA was continuously emailing with a radical non-profit based in the (slightly more liberal) city north of here, a non-profit that is under the umbrella of this group --https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/social-and-environmental-entrepreneurs-see/
-- and basing his decisions about filing charges and diversion and setting bail, on their "recommendations". As is the custom in that other city.
Their say-so, really. And basically their say-no. Or if bail *was* set, this group made it their business to promptly pay it without any sort of vetting of criminal history, if the family didn't step forward to do it (!). Thus thugs or mentally ill repeat offenders, were rapidly cycled back to the community. (Oddly they couched their involvement, when mildly confronted, in terms of "messaging" which deserves some sort of deep dive, in my view; investigation showed this was false, it was much more than messaging! - not that one perhaps immediately sees why a non-profit should have interposed between DA and public at all ... ?)
Inevitably these offenders would commit more crimes, and when there was a rather newsworthy murder spree - and the media delved into the perpetrator's background, including his springing by this activist group that admitted it knew nothing about him - this curious collaboration could no longer remain quite in the shadows. (Please understand, there has been no big fracas over this; it merely got a story or two in the purely local news.)
Why would a concern for victims (sense 2, above) ever lead to turning a blind eye to more victims (sense 1, often of course persons who should also have claims under sense 2)?
The answer is the logic of the "world turned upside down" hierarchy, combined with the inescapable truth that mercy and justice cannot occupy the same space at the same time. They will ever and always be opposed.
I think you are pointing out an interesting aspect: there has been a recreation of an unequal, stratified society. Instead of a notional society of equals, where the rights of the poorest members are held equal to those of the richest, we have a new culture created where the "victim classes" are not equals but superiors in the moral hierarchy. The intersectional strata define people as inherently unequal and thus their rights are not comparable.
There is also the corruption, or at least redefinition, of the concept of rights at play. One doesn't have rights against the superiors at all it seems, the superiors being defined by their intersectional strata. Even among equals the rights are changed: property rights do not matter, nor do rights to life or other standard rights based on which strata the perpetrator occupies often without regard to the strata of the victims.
However, one needs to be consistent with their language. Victim as a measure of intersectional strata vs victim of a rights violation are different. Those claiming victimhood strata do not point to specific rights that have been violated, and certainly not universal rights that apply to everyone.
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
I think that is part of an important point. Administrators are quite willing to crack down on behaviors that are counter to their sense of morality. Where they are perhaps weak is in cracking down on behavior they might not like that is motivated by their own sense of morality. I think this is due to the sense that leftist misbehaving is largely what those administrators saw themselves as doing when they were young; the leftist rioters etc. have the moral high ground in other words. Even if the administrators do not agree entirely and wish those sorts of things wouldn't happen (at least on their campuses) they have no limiting principle to use to argue that the rioters should stop. There are no enemies to the left, and so ever more extreme behavior is always morally superior in their framework.
I don't think it's so much administrators seeing themselves being disruptive activists when they were young, as believing that those people are history's good guys. They are why good social change happens. So the conventional narrative that gay rights came because of "acting up", that it begins with Stonewall's patrons "fighting back" against the police (so much so that the spot is now a National Monument).
When actually gay rights happened because there are two equilibria, one where people think "gay" is something you catch, and thus should be quarantined and disapproved, and one where people think gay people are "born that way" and thus shouldn't be treated any worse than someone who is different in a way they can't control.
That's fair, although I'd bet that if you fed most college administrators a few drinks and asked them about what they did in the activist vein, they would tell you stories. They might be making them up, but they would tell you stories. Their diversity statements certainly had some.
As the partial architects of the underdogma, they stand to lose not simply their place, as precariously held as it has been, but faith in a strand of thinking that may be central to identity in some way (I'm still waiting for someone to really take this up, Howard Jacobsen did a little bit but he's not exactly well-known, in fact I will need to doublecheck his name) and and may even have been necessary to survival and eventual thriving.
ETA: by "precariously held" I refer not to long history (much more existentially precarious) but only to the recent decades of the ascendance and wild success of the civil rights movement.
It's hard to imagine politics without "grievance." If you can't articulate what the alternative is, it's hard to see how "victimological" politics is a distinct phenomena and not just ordinary politics.
That became true when people learned that they could live by voting money out of each other’s pockets. When wealth is distributed according to the rule, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” the incentives are to demonstrate minimum ability and maximum need. Intersectionality is little more than a way to determine the order in which people get to feed at the government’s trough.
That's always existed; Roman history is all about the plebes versus the patricians. I haven't read Shiffman's book but I'm dubious that there is any politics that doesn't begin in some felt injustice.
Making distinctions is important. There is a difference, for example, between someone who has been mugged and a student at a prestigious university who is holding a trashcan over his head and saying, "Look at how the world is dumping on me."