[Human Rights: Fact or Fancy? by Henry B. Veatch (LSU Press, 185; xi + 258 pp)]
Last week, I criticized the professed Thomistic Aristotelianism of Alasdair MacIntyre, which I argued was a thinly disguised Marxism. In this week’s column, I’d like to discuss a philosopher who unfortunately did not acquire as wide attention as MacIntyre did. Henry Veatch worked within the Aristotelian tradition, as MacIntyre claimed to do, but he was the real article. In this week’s piece, I’m going to set forward an interesting argument Veatch advances in support of natural rights. The argument can be taken in a libertarian direction, although Veatch himself held back from full libertarianism.
To understand this argument, we must first grasp his account of the basis for morality. The argument is this: A system of ethics must offer a convincing answer to the question “Why be moral?” Answers to this question must meet two requirements, but the requirements seem difficult to meet at the same time. Only Aristotelian ethics can do this.
For Veatch, moral motivation is crucial. He says,
When it comes to a question of justifying anything like moral “oughts,” rights, duties, and the like, the teleologists, or partisans of a desire ethic, do appear to have the jump on the deontologists. For is it not true that with respect to any and every moral judgment of whatever kind . . . is not the question “Why?” always and in principle pertinent. . . . In other words, in a desire-ethic, “oughts” and obligations are held to be always and in principle relative to and conditional upon what our human desires, ends, and purposes happen to be.
The deontologists who oppose a desire ethic have a point, too. “There is no discernible necessary or rational connection, be it in fact or in logic, between my liking to do something or my enjoying it and it’s being the something that I ought to do.”
How do we get out of this bind? How do we get something that is both a desire and also more than a mere desire? Here we reach a key principle in Veatch’s philosophy. Ethics is not a free-standing science but must be grounded in metaphysics; moreover, human beings have the capacity directly to perceive reality and, by abstracting from it, to know its nature. Such abstractive inquiry—and here Veatch follows Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas—reveals that the world consists of substances, each with its own nature, and human beings are no exception. In the Aristotelian and Thomistic view, Veatch summarizes, the good of a substance is “that thing’s own proper end or perfection. For how else may we understand ‘good’ or bonum, save as the good of something? And what is the good of a thing if not its full being, or its fulfillment or perfection, toward which it is ordered by nature or its own nature” (emphasis in original).
What, from this perspective, is the good of a human being? Veatch says that the good of each individual is his own flourishing as a rational being:
So be it: the natural end or telos of a human being is attained only insofar as one actually lives and functions in a certain way. But what is that way? . . . man’s characteristic activity must consist of the practical exercise or use of reason. That is, the distinguishing activity of a human being must consist not just of living but in living intelligently—in being guided in one’s day-to-day conduct by a knowledge of what ought or ought to be done in the particular case.
But how can rights be derived from this framework? Veatch’s answer uses his key premise that the pursuit of a flourishing life is both a desire and a duty. If you have a duty to seek a flourishing life, then other people have an obligation not to interfere with you:
At the time when my own book was being readied for the press, I chanced upon a very significant article by Gilbert Harman. . . There to my astonishment I read the following affirmation: “[There is] an argument which I have sometimes heard about which goes roughly like this: ‘I ought to develop my own potential for flourishing. So others ought not to prevent me from developing my potential. So I have a right not to be prevented from developing my potential. So, by the principle of universalizability everyone has such a right. . .’” What is this, if not a statement in summary form of the very argument that I sought to develop in the text of how individual human right are to be justified in terms of what I called, perhaps rather infelicitously, our duties to self—i.e., the duties all of us have to perfect ourselves as human persons.
Further, these rights are for the most part negative rather than positive. Since each person must pursue his own flourishing, your rights involve other people leaving you alone. They do not entail other people providing you with goods and services: then they would be taking on a task that is yours. Also, other people cannot interfere with you, even if you do things that aren’t good for you. If, for example, using drugs is not a good way to lead a flourishing life, it is your own decisions that you have a right not to follow. Otherwise, the other people would be living your life for you.
Whether you accept this argument or not, I think you will agree that it merits your attention.
