Positive Rights are front and center in political activism protests and politicians’ election campaigns—“A chicken in every pot.” (That was a Republican slogan in the 1928 presidential race. It would come back to peck the Republicans in 1932.)
This chicken isn’t mentioned in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence because our founding fathers—savvy political thinkers—would have asked, “Where did the chicken come from? Who did it belong to before? How did the chicken get into every pot, apparently for free, without impairing someone’s right to make a living as a chicken farmer?”
Your right to do, be, think, and say in no way impinges on anyone else’s right to do, be, think, or say. And, if you have even a rudimentary understanding of free market economics, you know that your right to buy and sell doesn’t impinge on the buying and selling rights of others.
But your right to physical items, such as a free education, impinges on everybody. In order for you to be given a thing, that thing (or some tax-and-spend portion of it) has to be taken from somebody else. The person from whom the thing is taken loses negative rights so that you can gain positive ones.
This is not to say that Negative Rights are always wonderful or ought to be unlimited in scope. You have the right to stand on a street corner and say, “I’m a Nazi pig!” Whether you have the right to stand on a street corner and say to passersby, “You’re a Nazi pig!” is a more complicated question. And if you stand on a street corner with a bullhorn and yell, “YOU’RE A NAZI PIG!” in the middle of the night the police should come and negate your negative right with a pair of handcuffs.
Nor are Positive Rights evil. Free public primary and secondary schools are a benefit to society. (Although vouchers for private school tuition might be more beneficial.) And I’m in favor of college degrees that are at least reasonably priced. (I got government help paying for school. And not because of academic merit. The government’s attitude in my day was “America needs Mediocre Students Too.”) I believe America should have a medical system that guarantees everyone treatment without going bankrupt from hospital bills. (Nobody should lose the house. The boat? Maybe. But not the house.) And decent pay for every job ($12 an hour for congressmen) is a worthy goal even if I think an expanding economy is more likely than a law to provide generous paychecks without driving people into the labor black market. (E.g., congressmen getting paid under the table—except that seems to be happening already.)
But are these Positive Rights really “rights”? It’s the right question to ask. Idealists ought to ask it. They’d be better off changing their terminology. Idealism should be expressed as moral obligation not political cant. This particular respecter of Negative Rights is more likely to be moved by “Please” than “You’re a Nazi pig.”
When liberals, progressives, and democratic socialists quit demanding rights and begin invoking duties—our society’s duty to fund education, proved health care, and pay living wages even to congressmen—then I’ll start listening.
For Extra Credit: Why Do We Call Rights “Negative” and “Positive”?
Part of the confusion between the two types of rights comes from their bassackward names. Negative Rights produce mostly positive effects while Positive Rights can have negative consequences.
Blame the nomenclature on Russian-born philosopher, political theorist, and Oxford professor Isaiah Berlin (1909–97). He coined the terms “negative freedom” and “positive freedom” to describe how our desire to have a political system that (negatively) provides us with liberty clashes with our desire to have a political system that (positively) provides us with stuff.
Berlin was a great champion of “negative freedom” but he was not a native English-speaker.
Sympathy vs. Empathy
Is It Better To Hold People’s Hands or Bust into Their Heads?
The difference between sympathy and empathy is the difference between understanding what others feel and feeling what they feel. Whether you’re sympathetic or you’re empathetic can make a big difference. Especially if you’re neither and treat everybody like a cat treats an injured mouse. You’ll end up eating cat food, emotionally speaking.
Sympathy and empathy both would seem to be good things. Modern moralizing, however, tends to favor empathy over sympathy. The sympathetic formulation “Our thoughts and prayers are with you” is mocked. More to current taste in virtue is the empathetic saying—often cited as a wise Native American aphorism—“Never judge someone until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes.”
Yet it bears mentioning that, as the comedian Emo Philips says, “Never judge someone until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do judge him, you’re a mile away and you have his shoes.”
Also, after lacing up the other person’s footwear, a lot depends on where you’re walking to. If you’re walking a mile to his trailer home from his minimum-wage midnight shift job that’s one thing. If you’re walking a mile to the nineteenth hole across the fairways and greens of Augusta National that’s another, even if the shoes pinch.
Sympathy and empathy play important roles in business and politics. And politics is a business. But let’s delay discussing politics for a moment. Right now everybody on every side of every political issue is so pissed off that the finer emotions, such as sympathy and empathy, have been pushed into the dumpster at the trailer park or the sand trap at Augusta.
Let’s first take an example from business. Facebook and Amazon present a paradigmatic contrast between sympathy and empathy.
Leaving aside Facebook’s current reputational and regulatory problems and Amazon’s 50 percent dominance of online commerce and much larger market capitalization, Facebook is by far the more extraordinary business success.
That’s because Amazon is, with all its e-bells and e-whistles, just a store that delivers—which the corner grocery had a boy doing a hundred years ago.
Facebook came out of nowhere from
