I often hear the phrase “your right to swing your fist ends two inches in front of my nose.” Sometimes that distance is made aribtrarily small, but the idea is generally the same: you have the right to do whatever you wish so long as you don’t hurt anyone else.
I do not think “rights” are a particularly useful abstraction. Unfortunately, they appear to be the dominant paradigm of ethical thinking in our world. Consider, then, the commonly held belief that you have the right to do whatever you want ‘as long as you don’t hurt someone else.’ How can you tell whether you’re hurting someone else? I don’t think I could find too many people who would disagree over whether I hurt someone when I punch them in the stomach. Accordingly, not too many people agree that I have a ‘right’ to punch you in the stomach.
Similarly, I don’t think I could find anyone who would disagree with me when I say that being cheated on hurts. Do I have a right to cheat on my wife? Although I have never heard anyone say that you do have a right to cheat on your spouse, people I have encountered are pretty strongly opposed to making this illegal.
Personally, I’d much rather have a stranger (perhaps a quarellous philosopher who felt I had impugned him?) get mad and throw a punch at me than have my wife cheat on me: being cheated on would hurt a lot more than being punched. However, if my wife cheats on me, I only have legal recompense if we’ve signed some kind of agreement; yet if a stranger throws a punch at me, I can press charges. Why?
Why is it that an action that causes a lot of pain is legal and ‘within my rights’, whereas one that causes only mild, temporary pain, is not within my rights? Perhaps punching someone causes them “physical pain” whereas cheating on your spouse causes them “emotional pain”. How do you distinguisih between the two? They’re both caused by chemical reactions; the emotional pain I experience as a result of a severed relationship has a solid physical basis as well.
I submit that the answer is because we are are all arbitrary in the rights we think we have and don’t have. Instead of saying “You don’t have a right to hit other people,” It makes more sense to say “I don’t like people doing that to each other, and I am willing to enforce that preference upon others.” Unfortunately, most people I’ve encountered don’t like this construction. Liberals hate the idea that they’re enforcing arbitrary preferences upon others, and Conservatives hate the idea that rights are an abstraction and nothing is objectively ‘wrong’.
The thing is, regardless of whether you think my construction is metaphysically true, it’s still useful because everybody can understand it. Moreover, it’s still accurate. If you think punching someone is wrong, then you don’t like it, and you are willing to enforce that preference of yours on other people. The fact that you feel that there is some metaphysical basis for your preference is irrelevant and just gets in the way. We don’t have to quibble over whether something is or is not a right of ours. We can all agree that we have a preference against people hitting each other, and most of us are willing to enforce this preference.
Anyone unwilling to enforce this preference is, in the words of John Stewart Mill, a “miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” I don’t think such a person is metaphysically wrong, though, only because the idea of being wrong about a preference simply makes no sense to me. Am I judging anyone who doesn’t share this preference of mine? Of course. The idiocy of the ‘judgementalism is a bad thing’ mindset is a topic for another essay. It is irrelevant what the “reasons” for these preferences are – people have been arguing over what reasons are “valid” for centuries and they’ve never made any progress.
Stop using worthless abstractions, so we can communicate with each other and get some real work done. And If you’re not willing to enforce a preference for people not hitting each other, then get a job, you goddamn hippie.