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Civil Rights vrs. Social Responsibility (page 1 of 2)

Unlike the Lincolnian perspective I assume relative to the abortion issue, which takes root in a precedent penned by political scientist George McKenna, there is very little precedent for pitting civil rights against social responsibility. Most often, the two concepts are viewed as complimentary, and the annals of philosophy offer few starting points for any view that holds them as ideological opponents. Presumably, this pattern is a function of a new democracy over-shadowing centuries of sovereign regimes. At least I'd like to think as much, both for the sake of this essay and for the sake of democracy.

 

I. HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The way we think of civil rights and social responsibility tends to be a matter of compliment; that is, it is our social responsibility to secure and preserve our civil rights. The two concepts walk together in struggles against social injustice. And the force providing moral direction for the good path toward a righteous society is an informed, unified citizenry. This formula is conventional, at best, as it is an adherence to well established philosophies of political organization.

John Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government, wrote of a certain political force he called prerogative, which he defined as "[the] power to act according to discretion, for the public good, without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it."¹ Prerogative is something similar to the social force we will deal with in this essay—a force that acts for the public good, guided by a unified moral sense. Ninety years after Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau described a social compact in which similar ideas of right and responsibility are expressed, the basis of which (as it is repeated numerous times) is to confirm: "What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses."²

Like Locke, Rousseau was working from a standpoint that saw civilized man as a person advanced beyond a natural state in which desire is the guiding force. Some sense of morality enters into one's consideration for her fellows and the idea of common good becomes the guiding principal almost as an imperative. That much, anyhow, is the most simple foundation of democracy. But, as important as these texts may be for the foundation of democracy, they are quite old. Both Locke and Rousseau wrote of the common good in the context of a citizenry beholden to a sovereign form of government. For Rousseau, in particular, the concepts of civil right and social responsibility were certainly complimentary because the social compact demanded a responsibility to the Sovereign in exchange for the protection of civil liberties. Individuals concede the freedoms of nature, but gain the benefits of a good and just society.³ However, democracy complicates this exchange.

As democracy has evolved, it has wandered from the establishment of sovereign rule, (although the degree to which this separation occurs is constantly in debate). Our democracy in the United States doesn't deal so much with the search for the common good as it must be affected on the Sovereign, but instead has developed an intense battlefield for deciding what the common good really is. The way in which civil rights and social responsibility push and pull against one another is a function of increased focus on the individual citizen. No longer are we so concerned with affecting the decisions of a sovereign, but we are more concerned with affecting the intimations of each other. Subsequently, the question of civil rights and social responsibility is less political than the philosophies of Locke and Rousseau, although they still have beneficial ideas to contribute.

II. THE CONTRADICTION EXPLAINED

This ideological battlefield is perhaps best described as an unfortunate flaw of democracy; it concerns the lexicon of freedom we've established in the United States. Specifically, we must acknowledge that a civil right as declared by a certain group of American citizens is sometimes in direct conflict with a civil right declared by another, disparate parcel of American citizens. The idea of social responsibility, as I define it, is the notion that two groups of American citizens with competing declarations of civil rights must acknowledge that democracy—and, in a more general sense that elusive notion of the common good—requires a measure of sacrifice in order to reach a balance of policy that is good for all Americans. Or, in the terms we've established, individuals with differing opinions must find room for sacrifice within their beliefs in order to derive a pleasing political outcome.

This contradiction rebukes an assumption shared by Locke and Rousseau, that the common good can be realized easily by a measure of majority sentiment, which may more likely be the case under sovereign rule, but becomes increasingly difficult to realize as individuals are granted more and more power to affect political decisions. And so we derive a basic contest to the way we're accustomed to dealing with civil rights and social responsibility: When the operation of the common good is removed from the citizenry acting upon a sovereign government to a system in which the citizenry is largely self-governed, the concept of civil rights carries less absolute moral direction. Therefore, the role of social responsibility must change from that which supports the promotion of civil right to that which informs individuals of the sacrifices necessary to uncover and agree upon what defines civil rights in the first place. In other words, the common good is contentious, and it is our social responsibility to contract with one another in order to define and describe a mutually agreeable common good that, in turn, can be brought to a political result beneficial to a large majority of the citizenry, (if not the entirety).

III. A BRIEF EXAMPLE

Among the most important points I wish to impress upon those who declare a passionate interest in securing civil rights is this: The idea of civil rights is not a blank permission slip to perpetually hold the acceptability and goodness of acting in one's own interest. To describe this point in terms of Locke, when the management of deciding the common good is returned to the individual, society takes a step back toward a nature state, because there's nothing to prevent any individual from deciding that a personal desire is, in fact, an unalienable right.

This concept is questionable in the opinion of many Americans. Americans are accustomed to believe in constitutional power; and many will very quick reach the conclusion that no action defined by the Bill of Rights, or inferred by the constitution, can be restrained. But—and this is a large, important conjecture—democracy and a constitutional government cannot prescribe freedom for its citizens to any large degree without facing contradictions that arise naturally between disparate groups of citizens who declare rights that are naturally contradictory.

At this point, I must enter an example; these are numerous, and the first to come to mind might be the right to life vrs. the right to chose. But for the purpose of brevity, and for the length of attention given to that contentious debate in another dedicated essay, we will touch upon something different.

Relevant is the right to bear arms, specifically upheld by the our constitutional government in the Bill of Rights under the Second Amendment. The current political climate witnesses confrontation between those who declare the right to bear arms is acceptable and good, and those who declare the right to live with an acceptable degree of safety and bifurcation apart from the harm of weapons is good. The contradiction within this conflict is that the former group of Americans opposes gun control legislation because it impinges upon their declared freedom, and that the latter group of Americans favors gun control legislation because a lack-there-of impinges upon their declared freedom. And the strange flaw of democracy is thus scripted: The promise of America's constitutional government stands behind, bolsters, and encourages the declaration of both groups of Americans and the rights they support.

Straight at the heart of this sort of confrontation, those involved must regard themselves with a degree of skepticism. For it is a democratic promise that both groups of American citizens can support their declaration with uncompromising passion, only that the rational perspective on their confrontation is that both groups of Americans cannot uphold their respective declarations of civil right at the same time, to the fullest extent. An equivalent statement for those who do not wish to admit a necessity of skepticism, perhaps for fearing the word's relevance in ideological matters, is to state: Americans cannot allow themselves to become disillusioned with the promise of freedom through democracy.

Not to remain obsolete, Rousseau was aware of this sort of confrontation, questioning whether the force acting for the common good, something described by the term general will, could always exist without contention. In his words, "the general will is always right and tends to the public advantage; but it does not follow that the deliberations of the people are always equally correct. Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is."⁴ Here, again, is some agreement with Locke, referring to a belief that individuals act out of desire, and admitting that an individual's ability to decide what is best for all citizens is always corrupted by personal inclinations.

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