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Rights, Law and Political Community

Most citizens of this country and of other advanced western and westernizing nations approve of human rights, some more guardedly than others; and most perceive rights to belong to the moral, political and legal fabric of modern liberal democracy. By rights, I mean rights attributable to subjects, to persons, whether individual or collective ‘persons’. To suggest that rights, freedom, and democracy go together (as does the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which has been the template for subsequent generations of declarations) is a modern truism, which, like most truisms, is largely true. Less clearly perceived, I think, is the extent to which human rights and democracy are bound up with liberal economics and free-market capitalism. Approval for free-market capitalism, even with a kinder face, is more equivocal in most advanced western societies, particularly, it would seem to me, among serious-minded Christians. Indeed, in today’s thinking circles, anxieties are rife about the threats posed by unrestrained market forces to social, economic and democratic rights in the developed and developing world, quite apart from environmental considerations. It is widely perceived that excessive corporate profit and inflated managerial salaries flout the democratic ethos of social equality, that the coercive features of market exchange diminish individual economic freedom, and that the influence on governmental policy of powerful financial and commercial interests threatens the commanding role of the democratic majority. Indeed, there is a mounting sense among democratic populations that the global flow of investment capital seeking larger profit margins, favourable tax benefits and speculative gains is robbing the majority of the world’s citizens of effective political controls over their economic and social futures. While this raft of anxieties are well-placed at the practical level, they somewhat cloud the deeper issue of how rights, democracy and liberal economic principles are related. To grasp this relationship, it is necessary to become acquainted with the liberal contractarian political tradition: the tradition of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, the apologists of the American and French Revolutions, and still vigorous, with utilitarian accretions, in the work of such contemporary contractarians as John Rawls and Robert Nozick. This, I would suggest, is the majoritarian tradition of liberal natural rights in the modern world. In this tradition, which has supplied much of the ideological glue of contemporary liberal democracy, the equality of individuals is economic before it is political: behind the multitude of naturally self-governing individuals, whose sovereign collective will government serves, is a multitude of naturally self-owning individuals, each with a proprietary right over his/her spiritual and corporeal capabilities and acts, to dispose of them in whatever way he/she chooses. Although individuals are (obviously) not equal in their physical and spiritual resources, they are equal (so it is asserted) in their ownership of them: they are equal as proprietors. Self-proprietors are interested in maximizing their powers of self-disposal or self-determination, their freedom of choice; and they participate in political society as a contractual creation to achieve maximum freedom through the protection of and provision for their rights. Believing in the equality of self-proprietors, individuals are not adverse to honouring the Rights, Law and Political Community: