The Injustice of a Rights-based Society
and how to fix that
[This originated as a Response to “Are human rights universal?” by Raphael — with an umlaut over the “e” — Champiermont here in Medium]
The problem for rights is that they are beliefs. There is no way to demonstrate their existence within material reality. From the point of view of any other person all beliefs of every person are arbitrary: they are things people just happen to believe.
John Locke correctly identified injustice with arbitrariness in human relations. To base the governance of society on beliefs is therefore to erect society on a foundation of injustice.
Justice requires universality. Universality precludes arbitrariness. Universality for human beings can only come from our shared experience of material existence.
Even facts of material existence can be denied by people: global warming or even that Earth is a sphere are but two examples. Yet, in their lives people who make such claims experience the truth of those facts: material reality is governed by those facts, and no human being can change those facts. (We can act to change outcomes within material reality, but only within the conditions imposed by material existence.)
One fact of material existence is that human beings have no choice but to effect choices. Even to utter a claim that is contrary to that observation is to effect a choice.
Choosing is therefore integral to human being. We are therefore required to respect the capacity of one another as human beings to choose, beginning with whether/how/to what extent to be involved whenever any choice is being effected.
So mutual respect in effecting choices is the ethic of what I call real justice. A society governed by real justice would have the maximum liberty that coexisting people can share and a democratic political process; in the economy the “democratic distributive principle” would be applied to money, in the form of a “democratically distributed income.”
A requirement of mutual respect follows from a belief in equality. Because that requirement also follows from observation within material existence, people who believe in equality can legitimately advocate for mutual respect as the ethic of justice — and its implications for the political process and the economy — on that basis.