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Index:
Adler
on Inalienable Rights
A right is either inalienable or it is not --
you cannot have it both ways.
What is being denied by the negative statement
that certain rights are not alienable? Human beings
living in organized societies under civil
government have many rights that are conferred upon
them by the laws of the state, and sometimes by its
constitution. These are usually called civil
rights, legal rights, or constitutional rights.
This indicates their source. It also indicates that
these rights, which are conferred by constitutional
provisions or by the positive enactment of man-made
laws, can be revoked or nullified by the same power
or authority that instituted them in the first
place. They are alienable rights. The giver can
take them away.
What the state does not give, it cannot take
away. Human rights are natural rights, as opposed
to those that are civil, constitutional, or legal,
then their being rights by natural endowment makes
them inalienable in the sense just indicated.
Their existence as natural endowments gives them
moral authority even when they lack legal force or
legal sanctions. Their moral authority imposes
moral obligations, which may or may not be
respected or fulfilled.
A given state or society may or may not, by its
constitution and its laws, attempt to secure these
rights or to enforce them. It may even do the very
opposite. It may transgress or violate these
inalienable natural or human rights. When it fails
to enforce these rights or, worse, when it violates
them, it is subject to condemnation on moral
grounds as being unjust.
If unjust governments can violate these human or
natural rights, in what sense do they still remain
inalienable? Are they not being taken away by such
violations?
When a human right is not acknowledged by the
state, or when it is not enforced or when it is
violated by a government, it still exists. It
retains its moral authority even though it is not
enforced or has been transgressed. If these rights
did not continue in existence in spite of such
adverse circumstances, then we would have no basis
for condemning as unjust a government that failed
to enforce them or that trampled on them.
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Adler
on Fairness
Fairness, consists in treating equals equally
and unequals unequally in proportion to their
inequality. And that is only one of several
principles of justice, by no means the only
principle and certainly not the primary one.
If justice consists solely in fairness,
murdering someone, committing mayhem, breaching a
promise, falsely imprisoning another, enslaving
him, libeling him, maliciously deceiving him, and
rendering him destitute, would not be unjust, for
there is no unfairness in any of these acts. They
are all violations of rights, not violations of the
precept that equals should be treated equally.
Only when the facts of human equality and
inequality in personal respects and in the
functions or services that persons perform provide
the basis for determining what is just and unjust
can justice and injustice be identified with
fairness and unfairness.
When, on the contrary, the determination of what
is just and unjust rests on the needs and rights
inherent in human nature, then justice and
injustice are based on what is really good and evil
for human beings, not upon their personal equality
or inequality or upon the equality and inequality
of their performances.
The fact that all human beings, by nature equal,
are also equally endowed with natural rights does
not make their equality or their equal possession
of rights the basis of a just treatment of them. If
only two human beings existed, one could be unjust
to the other by maliciously deceiving or falsely
imprisoning him. That wrongful act can be seen as
unjust with out any reference to equality or
inequality. It is unjust because it violates a
right.
Murder, mayhem, rape, abduction, libel, breach
of promise, false imprisonment, enslavement,
subjection to despotic power, perjury, theft --
these and many other violations of the moral or
civil law are all unjust without being in any way
unfair. They are all violations of natural or legal
rights. That is what their injustice consists in,
not unfairness.
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Adler
on Justice
The domain of justice is divided into two main
spheres of interest. One is concerned with the
justice of the individual in relation to other
human beings and to the organized community
itself--the state. The other is concerned with the
justice of the state -- its form of government and
its laws, its political institutions and economic
arrangements -- in relation to the human beings
that constitute its population.
Two serious errors that affect our understanding
of justice have already been touched on and
corrected in earlier chapters of this book,
explicitly or by implication.
One, the mistake of giving primacy or precedence
to the right over the good, had its origin in the
moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant and was given
currency in this century in a book, The Right
and the Good, published by an Oxford
philosopher, Professor W. D. Ross, in the early
thirties. It stems from ignorance of the
distinction between real and apparent goods --
goods needed and goods wanted -- an ignorance that
could have been repaired by a more perceptive
reading of Aristotle's Ethics.
Once that distinction is acknowledged and its
full significance understood, it will be seen at
once that it is impossible to know what is right
and wrong in the conduct of one individual toward
another until and unless one knows what is really
good for each of them and for everyone else as
well.
Real goods, based on natural needs, are
convertible into natural rights, based on those
same needs. To wrong another person is to violate
his natural right to some real good, thereby
depriving him of its possession and consequently
impeding or interfering with his pursuit of
happiness. To wrong or injure him in this way is
the paradigm of one individual's injustice to
another.
In short, one cannot do good and avoid injuring
or doing evil to others without knowing what is
really good for them. The only goods anyone has a
natural right to are real, not apparent, goods. We
do not have a natural right to the things we want;
only to those we need.
"To each according to his wants," far from being
a maxim of justice, makes no practical sense at
all; for, if put into practice, it would result in
what Thomas Hobbes called "the war of each against
all," a state of affairs he also described as
"nasty, brutish, and short."
If, as Professor Ross maintained, the right had
primacy over the good, we should be able to
determine what is right or just in our conduct
toward others without any consideration of what is
really good for them. But that is impossible.
The second mistake, equally serious for the
subject at hand, made its appearance more recently
in a widely discussed and overpraised book, A
Theory of Justice, written by Harvard professor
John Rawls. The error consists in identifying
justice with fairness in the dealings of
individuals with one another as well as in actions
taken by society in dealing with its members.
Fairness, as we have seen, consists in treating
equals equally and unequals unequally in proportion
to their inequality. That is only one of several
principles of justice, by no means the only
principle and certainly not the primary one.
If, as Professor Rawls maintained, justice
consists solely in fairness, murdering someone,
committing mayhem, breaching a promise, falsely
imprisoning another, enslaving him, libeling him,
maliciously deceiving him, and rendering him
destitute, would not be unjust, for there is no
unfairness in any of these acts. They are all
violations of rights, not violations of the precept
that equals should be treated equally.
Only when the facts of human equality and
inequality in personal respects and in the
functions or services that persons perform provide
the basis for determining what is just and unjust
can justice and injustice be identified with
fairness and unfairness.
When, on the contrary, the determination of what
is just and unjust rests on the needs and rights
inherent in human nature, then justice and
injustice are based on what is really good and evil
for human beings, not upon their personal equality
or inequality or upon the equality and inequality
of their performances.
The fact that all human beings, by nature equal,
are also equally endowed with natural rights does
not make their equality or their equal possession
of rights the basis of a just treatment of them. If
only two human beings existed, one could be unjust
to the other by maliciously deceiving or falsely
imprisoning him. That wrongful act can be seen as
unjust with out any reference to equality or
inequality. It is unjust because it violates a
right.
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Adler
on the End Justifying the Means
Does the end justify the means? Can it sometimes
be right to use a bad means to achieve a good end?
Don't the conditions of human life require some
shadiness and deceit to achieve security and
success?
First, let us try to understand the sense in
which the word "justifies" is used in the familiar
statement that "the end justifies the means." After
that we can consider the problem you raise about
whether it is all right to employ any means -- good
or bad -- so long as the end is good.
When we say that something is "justified," we
are simply saying that it is right. Thus, for
example, when we say that a college is justified in
expelling a student who falls below a passing mark,
we are acknowledging that the college has a right
to set certain standards of performance and to
require its students to meet them. Hence, the
college is right in expelling the student who
doesn't.
Or, to take another example, if a man refuses to
pay a bill for merchandise he did not receive, we
would say that he is justified. He is in the right.
But if a signed receipt can be offered to show that
someone in his family received the merchandise
without informing him, the store would be justified
in demanding payment.
Now, nothing in the world can justify a means
except the end which it is intended to serve. A
means can be right only in relation to an end, and
only by serving that end. The first question to be
asked about something proposed as a way of
achieving any objective whatsoever is always the
same. Will it work? Will this means, if employed,
accomplish the purpose we have in mind? If not, it
is certainly not the right means to use.
But the purpose a man has in mind may be
something as plainly wrong as stealing or murder.
With such an end in view, he may decide that
certain things will help him succeed and others
won't. While he would be right, from the point of
view of mere expediency, in using the former and
not the latter, is he right morally in taking
whatever steps might serve as means to his end? If
not, then he is not morally justified in employing
such means.
This brings us to the heart of the matter. Since
a bad end is one that we are not morally justified
in seeking, we are not morally justified in taking
any steps whatsoever toward its accomplishment.
Hence, no means can be justified -- that is, made
morally right -- by a bad end.
But how about good ends? We are always morally
justified in working for their accomplishment. Are
we, then, also morally justified in using any means
which will work? The answer to that question is
plainly Yes; for if the end is really good, and if
the means really serves the end and does not defeat
it in any way, then there can be nothing wrong with
the means. It is justified by the end, and we are
justified in using it.
People who are shocked by this statement
overlook one thing: If an action is morally bad in
itself, it cannot really serve a good end, even
though it may on the surface appear to do so. Men
in power have often tried to condone their use of
violence or fraud by making it appear that their
injustice to individuals was for the social good
and was, therefore, justified. But since the good
society involves justice for all, a government
which employs unjust means defeats the end it
pretends to serve. You cannot use bad means for a
good end any more than you can build a good house
out of bad materials.
It is only when we do not look too closely into
the matter that we can be fooled by the statement
that the end justifies the means. We fail to ask
whether the end in view is really good, or we fail
to examine carefully how the means will affect the
end. This happens most frequently in the game of
power politics or in war, where the only criterion
is success and anything which contributes to
success is thought to be justified. Success may be
the standard by which we measure the expediency of
the means, but expediency is one thing and moral
justification is another.
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Adler
on Descriptive vs. Prescriptive
A prescriptive statement or judgment is one that
asserts what ought or ought not to be done. A
statement about what ought or ought not to be
desired imposes a prescription that may or may not
be obeyed. In contradistinction, a descriptive
statement or judgment is one that asserts the way
things are, not how they ought to be. A statement
about what is desired by a given individual simply
describes his condition as a matter of fact.
How, it is asked, can prescriptive injunctions
be true or false? Have we not adopted the view that
the truth of statements or judgments consists in
their conformity with the ways things
areÑwith the facts that they try to
describe? If a statement is true when it asserts
that that which is, is, and false when it asserts
that which is, is not, how then can there be truth
or falsity in a statement that asserts what ought
or ought not to be?
Even if we possessed all the descriptive truth
that is attain able, how could our knowledge of
reality, our knowledge of the way things are, lead
us to any valid conclusion about what ought to be
done or about what ought to be desired?
It was long ago quite correctly pointed out by
the skeptical philosopher David Hume that no
prescriptive conclusion (in the form of an "ought"
statement) can be validly inferred from a set of
premises, no matter how complete, that consists
solely of descriptive statements about the way
things are. Even if we had perfect knowledge of all
the properties that enter into the description of
an object, we could not infer the goodness of the
object or that it ought to be desired.
We are thus confronted with two obstacles, not
one. The first is the difficulty raised by the
question, How can prescriptive statements be either
true or false, if truth consists in the
correspondence between what is asserted and the way
things are? The second is the objection raised by
David Hume, to the effect that truths about matters
of fact do not enable us to reach by reasoning a
single valid prescriptive conclusionÑa true
judgment about what ought or ought not to be done
or desired.
Unless we can surmount these difficulties, no
prescriptive statement or judgment can be true or
false. If we cannot truly say what ought to be
desired, then the good is the desirable only in the
sense that it appears good to the individual who in
fact desires it. Acquiescing in the rejection of
the alternative sense of the desirable as that
which ought to be desired, we also must give up the
notion that some objects are really good as
distinguished from other objects that only appear
to be good and may not be really so.
To refute the skeptical view, which makes all
value judgments subjective and relative to
individual desires, we must be able to show how
prescriptive statements can be objectively true. An
understanding of truth as including more than the
kind of truth that can be found in descriptive
statements thus becomes the turning point in our
attempt to establish a certain measure of
objectivity in our judgments about what is good and
bad.
Only through such understanding will we be able
to show that some value judgments belong to the
sphere of truth, instead of all being relegated to
the sphere of taste and thus reduced to matters
about which reasonable men should not argue with
one another or expect to reach agreement.
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