Rights, Responsibilities, and Communitarianism

Sometimes so many people seem to be screaming about their rights, while neglecting to answer to their responsibilities, that many of us may become completely disgusted with the whole discourse of "rights." A whole movement exists, billing itself as "Communitarianism," that promotes an effort to restore the notion of responsibility and to establish a balance both between rights and responsibilities and between individuality and community. There has actually been talk of building a "Statue of Responsibility" on the West Coast as the counterpart of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor. The movement is spearheaded by sociology professors Robert Bellah, in Habits of the Heart, and Amitai Etzioni, in The Spirit of Community. Their viewpoint is shared by many others, including historian Garry Wills; and it is reflected in the title of Hillary Clinton's book on the responsibilities of government in child rearing, It Takes a Village.

Communitarians, however, promote a certain view of rights and responsibilities that is quite different from that of John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, etc. It is more in the tradition of G.W.F. Hegel, where the community, or the state, is more real than the individual and the individual who does not fit in with the social norms or the law is objectively irrational. Hegel has been regarded, justly, as the father of modern totalitarianism. How different these attitudes are comes out in the Communitarian treatment of things like seat-belt and motorcycle helmet laws. Etzioni would deny to the automobile or motorcycle rider the right to decide for themselves whether to wear seat-belts or motorcycle helmets because, if they are injured, the public is liable to end up paying for their injuries. Thus the riders have a duty to protect themselves in such a way as to not impose a burden on the public through their injuries.

This is interesting reasoning, for the denial of the right of choice about seat-belts and motorcycle helmets is really predicated on the concession of another right: that the injured riders have the right to be treated at public expense. The claim of that right is then used to deny the other [3]. The question is not even asked: do those who don't want to use seat-belts or motorcycle helmets really want their liberty curtailed for the privilege of their injuries being treated at public expense? Evidently they are not even asked. The consequence, then, is not that Communitarians want to balance rights and responsibilities; it is that they want to deny certain rights in favor of certain other ones, without asking whether that is the particular choice other people really want to make.

The rights that Communitarians seem to prefer curtailing are what traditionally are called "liberties," and the rights they seem willing to sacrifice those to are what traditionally are called "powers" or "privileges." A "right" can mean a number of things. The following diagrams (versions of the logical Square of Opposition) show the relationships between different kinds of rights:

Rights, liberties, powers, and immunities are all kinds of "rights." Most importantly, each kind of right implies a certain kind of liability in others, and each kind of right also has its opposite form of liability. Thus a "right," plain and simple, always implies some duty in others: they must observe your right through some kind of appropriate behavior or recognition. Thus, if you have a "right" to have a job, it is going to mean that someone is going to have the duty of giving you a job. A "responsibility" is a duty [4]. What we can call the responsibility to take care of one's own interests really means a duty not to be a burden to others, which means a duty not to use them by trying to fraudulently impose a non-contractual duty of commission on them.

The opposite of a "duty" is a liberty, which means that there are no rights of others that need be observed in a particular case. A liberty is a right to act without restraint, which means that a liberty implies no right in any other -- bringing us back to the opposite of a right. Similarly, in the other diagram, a "power" [5] is the ability to change the legal status of something or force a legal compliance in another. A power thus implies a liability in another, that they must recognize or comply with the power exercised upon them. The opposite of a "liability" is an immunity, which is an exemption from being subject to someone else's powers. An "immunity" implies a disability in another, that they are without a power to affect the immune person in that case. Since liberties, powers, and immunities are all rights, any right may be said, after a fashion, to imply certain duties, liabilities, or disabilities in others.

In the case of the seat-belt and motorcycle helmet laws, the conflict is between a "liberty" to use one's own judgment and be responsible for one's own injuries, and a right or a power to be treated at public expense, which imposes a duty or liability on the public to do that. Communitarianism wishes to deny the liberty and give to the public (the "community") the power to regulate the behavior of individuals (impose disabilities) in order to limit public liabilities. That is the point: the Communitarian emphasis on the "community" makes everyone a ward of the community and responsible to the community, rather than their own keeper and responsible to themselves for their own actions. This is not a "balance" between individualism and community; it is a historic reversal of the manner in which mediaeval society, in which everyone was a ward of the King and/or the Church, was replaced by modern conceptions of autonomy and freedom.

This also comes out in the Communitarian attitude towards the War on Drugs. Etzioni says that drugs cannot be legalized because the laws "communicate and symbolize those values that the community holds dear." Repealing the drug laws would send the message that "the community approves of people being in a drug-induced stupor." This is a common response from both Conservatives and Liberals; but it is not right. The proper role of the laws is to forbid and punish judicial wrongs (of negligence, violence, and fraud) and protect judicial rights (of person, property, and contract). The law should not be used to send any "messages," especially messages that reflect moralistic views of prudential virtues as imposed by the tyranny of the majority. The absence of drug laws does not mean that drug usage is endorsed or promoted. Frederic Bastiat addressed this issue in relation to socialism in his 1850 classic The Law:

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.

We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

Similarly, just because we disapprove of the government attempting to forbid imprudent or self-destructive behavior, this does not mean that we approve of that behavior.

The emphasis of the authors of American Independence and of the Constitution was clearly on the liberties of individuals, who were responsible for themselves, and not on the powers and liabilities of the community to be responsible for individuals. Their emphasis on Liberty contrasts with the typical emphasis of older societies, which was on Duty -- still the keynote even in a generally liberal thinker like Immanuel Kant. The Preamble of the Constitution thus says that it is intended to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." The Communitarian emphasis on positive responsibilities to others, rather than on the mere negative responsibility not to be a burden to others, thus sounds like a return to the traditional emphasis on Duty.

The Communitarian pitch to balance rights and responsibilities thus masks an attempt to shift the basic nature of rights and responsibilities from individuals to the community, i.e. to the state. They can always refer to the clause in the Preamble that says to "promote the general Welfare" -- regardless of whether particular individuals want their welfare promoted by the state, as it sees fit, or not. Unfortunately, the people who often do seem to be screaming about their rights all the time, seem mostly to want to have it both ways: to have the liberties of individualism and to impose liabilities on the community for the errors in judgment and action that they make [6]. What needs to be made clear to people is that they cannot have it both ways. The Communitarians, in turn, don't seem to understand that there is a choice: they would just as soon strip individuals of their liberties every time there is a conflict with communal power and liability.

Behind the Communitarian shift of power to the state is a certain distorted preference about what a "community" is: Communitarians distrust and dislike voluntary communities. Robert Bellah especially believes that the only true community is one created and controlled by democratic political power, which also happens to mean that of the largest political unit possible. To him, small units, whether voluntary associations or smaller units of government, do not represent enough of "the People" to properly represent the General Will (as Rousseau would have said) of the Community. This is an amazingly credulous, dangerous, and naive view of the benevolence of democracy and of large government. What it reveals is that Communitarians are not basically advocates of real community, but they are statists and collectivists who confuse their own benevolent intentions, if they were in power, with what such a government would be like operating under the incentives for corruption that are created in the sort of unrestrained and absolutist, indeed totalitarian, government that they desire.

No "community" worth the name is founded on anything other than voluntary association. An interesting example is the mediaeval Jewish community. Most Jews in the middle ages lived in countries with Christian or Moslem majorities and governments. No Jew could be forced to remain a Jew, because all that a gentile government needed was the slightest hit that a Jew wanted to convert to Christianity or Islam and it would use, literally, all means necessary to "rescue" that potential convert. Such governments also provided various incentives for conversion, including greater freedom and security and more moderate taxation. Nevertheless, not only did the Jewish community survive (though there were many conversions), but the community also assessed contributions from its members to take care of its own. Such contributions, then, could only be enforced by persuasion. But that was a very effective means of enforcement, since the Jewish community mostly succeeded in taking care of its less fortunate members. Certainly nobody else was going to.

It is particularly sad, then, when many people in the 20th century (including Jews) look at something like the mediaeval Jewish community and think that it is precisely the same thing to use the power of government to care for society in the same way. It is not the same thing, because the power of government means the police. As George Washington himself said: government is not reason; it is not persuasion; it is force -- like fire, a dangerous servant and a terrible master. Community, in short, is not the State. The Communitarians don't seem to realize, or perhaps they do, that trying to create a "community" by the threat of the police kicking down people's doors, to enforce the laws and taxes dictated by the "habits of the heart" of people like Robert Bellah, does not create a "community" but instead a police state and a prison for anyone who isn't 100% in tune with the crowd of demagogues returned by the latest election. Thus the columnist Alexander Cockburn, although himself a strange kind of civil liberties Leninist (not realizing that is a self-contradiction), aptly parodied the title of Hillary Clinton's book, It Takes a Village, as It Takes a Police State.

No, the "heart" works by love and persuasion, not by force, by a free and voluntary community, not by government; and the Communitarian view that small and voluntary associations won't do the right thing by the community really means that they don't trust what anyone will do until they themselves have the absolute power, in the name of the "People," to control society the way they see fit. Since what they also want to do is control private property and "redistribute" income, it should be clear that they are not new, non-partisan lovers of Community but really very old, very remorseless leftists who love power and hate capitalism in the very same ways that they have all this century [7].

What the shift from individual to communal rights also also amounts to is a shift from duties of omission to duties of commission. Thus, Communitarianism results in a new version of moralistic altruism and a new version of the feudal values that were replaced by capitalism. The "right" to medical treatment at public expense, regardless of one's own imprudence (smoking, drug usage, drag racing, sky diving, coffee spilling, etc.), imposes a positive duty of commission on others to provide, or at least to pay for, that treatment. On the other hand, the liberty to behave imprudently only imposes the negative duty to be left alone. The shift from one kind of right, the liberty, to the other, the power of compelling treatment, increases the power of individuals to compel positive action in others. Thus, while the authors of American Independence typically emphasized Liberty, recent political discourse is dominated by talk about "empowerment" [8]. Since an unlimited version of individual power is insupportable, the Communitarian answer, in turn, is not to strike out the new powers as cases of moralistic altruism, but to add new powers to the state to limit original individual liberties, like the liberty to be imprudent, in order to limit the state's new liabilities. The exchange in the end is the age old Satanic bargain of trading freedom for security -- real freedom for the security promised by the state. That security, of course, relies on the power of the state to compel others to do its bidding, i.e. its power to enslave the persons and loot the wealth of others. Since the others do not enjoy being enslaved and looted, their productivity declines and the value supplied by the state's promise of security declines as well. All that such a system can do, as Fidel Castro does to the Cubans, is to browbeat the people for their lack of selfless ardor and exhort them to greater sacrifices for the common good, i.e. goods for others that they will mostly never see, except what they see turning up in the flourishing of those privileged with political connections.

While movements like Communitarianism are trying to replace responsibility to self with responsibility to the state, on the grounds that this is responsibility to others, the very idea of personal responsibility has been damaged by the idea that the causes of people's actions are exculpatory (i.e. absolve us of responsibility) before the law. It has become rather common lately both to excuse the perpetrators of crime because they couldn't help themselves (because of "anger," etc.) [9] and to blame some remote conditions (poverty, capitalism, child abuse, television, drug abuse, pornography, video games, etc.) for the perpetrator's actions. There are two deeply malicious consequences to these views:

1. They are profoundly dehumanizing. Holding someone responsible for their actions is to credit them with the dignity of free will, whether the effect of this is either praise or blame. The opposite is to reduce them to a mechanism -- a machine that must be fixed or a computer program that must be rewritten. They become a link in a chain, where all the links are open to our tinkering so that the chain comes out the way we would like it. (Just who the "we" is supposed to be liking it is a good question.) This is deeply depersonalizing. Criminals become rats in cages watched over by behavior modification specialists. Even the death penalty is more humane than that: at least the death penalty is the ultimate "the buck stops here" attribution of responsibility. Most arguments against the death penalty presuppose that the only real argument for the death penalty is "deterrence"; but that stacks the deck. "Deterrence" is about tinkering with causes and motivations. Death is about retribution. Whether there should be a death penalty or not, that is the point on which the arguments speak past each other: all judicial penalty must be about retribution first of all, because that is the essence of holding someone freely responsible for the crime. All other issues -- restitution, rehabilitation, remorse -- are secondary and dependent.
2. They launch the law onto a sea of hypothetical uncertainties. The causes of things are usually concealed from casual inspection. Finding them out is what science is for, and it is not surprising that it took 4500 years of human history for science to find its feet and really begin to discover the inner workings of nature. It is still a process, as Karl Popper puts it, of "conjectures" and "refutations." That is what a scientific theory is: a conjecture. Some theories, at this point, seem to be things that we can trust in with some confidence; but it is much clearer now than it was fifty years ago that science is not just a simple march from ignorance to certainty. Indeed, the insights of Popper and Thomas Kuhn are that every scientific "conjecture" inevitably contains preconceptions and prejudices that are not easily weeded from the theory. That is unavoidable. But where Bacon had wanted to say that all prejudices are bad as such and must be avoided, we can say now that, not only cannot they be avoided, but that even the lamest prejudice sometimes actually turns out to be true. In light of this, however confident or distrustful we may be of science, it is in any case a weak reed upon which to begin manipulating, punishing, exhorting, and coercing people because of theories about the causes of criminal behavior. The way that science gets used in such projects is almost always shallow and credulous in the extreme: if scientific theories or results support some political agenda, then they are simply True; but if they begin to contradict it, then suddenly science contains all these vicious prejudices and preconceptions (!) and perhaps is even wholly unreliable and discreditable because of some underlying agenda. The most amazing move is when scientific truth is seen as inherently a matter of power politics, for that leaves knowledge of causes in general as a pawn of power and political ideology -- which means we can just believe whatever we want to, given our own particular grievances with things, and then call it our "science." The tough bullet to bite is that all such triumphant or recriminating uses of science are irrelevant if the causes of behavior, apart from out and out insanity, are simply irrelevant to the law.

A decent society is not based on rights; it is based on duty....Our duty to one another...To all should be given opportunity; from all, responsibility demanded.

Labor Party Prime Minister Tony Blair, elected 1997
[Washington Post, November 9, 1997]