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February 14, 2017

Universalist vs. Individual Rights

By Dr. Marek A. Suchenek

Copyright and all rights reserved.

This article is posted here for in-class use only. No other use or uses is/are allowed.

There is a fundamental difference between interpretation of rights from the universalistic viewpoint and from the point of view of individualism.

In individualism, there is a concept of desert that predicates some rights (for instance, the right to respect), while some other rights may be extended to all.

A fundamental reason why individualist societies extend some rights to all with disregard of desert is to make these rights stronger and more defensible. One would expect that if all individuals had right A then social resistance against revocation (say, by authorities) of A would be stronger than it only some individuals enjoyed it.

Some say that the above expectation gave rise to universalist democracy.

(Side question: What is the purpose of universalist democracy?

Possible answer: To make the society stronger and more defensible.)

For instance, from individualist perspective, the right to keep and bear arms is a right given to all so that if, say, an oppressive government begins disarming its citizenry then such a disarmament faces a wide-spread resistance.

The individualists may, and often do, yield to a fact that some individuals may lose their right while some others may still maintain it. For instance, those convicted of certain crimes may no longer have the right to keep and bear arms in individualistic society while the law-abiding individuals may maintain that right.

Universalists see individual rights from a more abstract point of view. At times, their main concern is not that the right A is not denied to individuals but that either all have it or no one has it.

When universalists notice that extending right A to all may be deterimantal to the society, they do not content themselves with a scenario that ony those who deserve it possess it. Their basic doctrine is that if some cannot have right A then no one can have right A.

This is a source of the following paradox.

Say, in society M many people had right A but some did not have it. In order to make the right A stronger, M decided to extend A to all its members. As a result, some undeserving individuals exercised the newly acquire A to inflict harm to M. Meanwhile, M became an univesalist society. As soon as the people realized that in some cases A is used to inflict harm, they revoked A completely.

The following paradoxical path of "progress" was followed:

Some have A => All have A => None have A

with the end point (an infringement of human freedom) being worse than the start point.

For instance, extending the right to keep and bear arms to all will definitely have profoundly detrimental effects on the society as, for instance, armed violent criminal may inflict much more harm to others than unarmed violent criminals. Faced with this fact of life, the universalists will demand that nobody has the right to keep and bear arms.

The argument of a law-abiding citizen that he and his  guns do not pose any danger to others is moot because universalists are staunchly against scenario that some people have the right to keep and bear arms while others do not.

A law-abiding citizen who tries to argue that there is no good reason for him to dispose of his gun is contronted with a necessity of maitaining universality of all rights. Universalists are unwilling to tollerate exceptionalism. (This may be the reason of their disdain towards the U.S. an exceptional nation, in its current form.)

Hence, the (universalistic) gun control. In this case the paradoxical path is shorter:

Some have A => None have A.

Just an infringement, no "progress".

Since social leveling has all the attributes of universalism (since all are equal in every aspect of life then all rights that they have are universal), social levelers, which classifier include socialists, communists, and others, do have a strong tendency to imposition of gun control.

For instance, in Soviet Union and its satellites possession of firearms by private citizens was - with very few exceptions - strictly prohibited.