Rights

Here’s something about “rights” that will run counter to today’s way of thinking! It comes from the footnotes of Aristotle’s “Nichomachean Ethics”, translated with notes by C.D.C. Reeve

“Other people’s rights for example, may set absolute limits to our pursuit of happiness and so be limiting ends. But it is not obvious that respecting the rights of others is the best good.”

Are other people’s rights the best good? This is the thought that comes to my mind. If other people’s rights are a subgroup of the whole, then these are special and unique rights afforded this subgroup for some special reason. These rights are now special and additional rights that the majority do not have. If in this case, these unique, special and additional rights of this subgroup interfere with or run counter to the “best good” of the majority, then yes, these minority rights should not be permitted.

The purpose of law and justice is to achieve the best good for all who are governed. Giving special rights or creating a unique law for a particular group within the whole would by definition be unjust, for the minority and the majority would be served differently, causing an imbalance, making it impossible for one or the other to achieve the best good.

Here’s the tricky part. What is the “best good”? This is where we as a country have been failing. We can’t define the best good in particular for an individual. The best good will always change. What we can do as a country is insure and secure everyone’s opportunity to achieve their best good. So, “best good” becomes defined by the individual and not the state. The one caveat being that in your pursuit of the best good, you can’t interfere with your neighbor’s pursuit of his best good. That’s where the country makes sure that no domestic or foreign power oversteps its boundaries and interferes.

Since the state does not define the particulars, but rather concerns itself with the universals, it creates a hands-off environment and approach to governance.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have been established as the “best good” here in the United States. This country was established to universally govern that way. The problem that has arisen is that the government has gotten into the individual rights business. This serves one while hampers or halts the majority. We are now a nation brimming over with individual rights and laws. The government is now offering a solution of a hands-on approach. We have gone from Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to individual rights, privileges and laws to insure some best good for that particular group, to finally the government having to step in to control the mess they created by giving those special rights and privileges to so many different and unique particular groups. The state now will determine the best good for everyone and it will be the state that enforces this policy. No more individual rights. No more particulars. No more life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as defined by the individual. The one universal law and purpose is not only defined by the state, it is the state.

With that said, what do you think of the initial footnote from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, minus my thought? And what do you think of it with my comments added?

Bill Hitchcock