Elements of a Theory of Social Rights

In the Natural Rights tradition, the wholly abstract Individual becomes a Person via the social compact. But that tradition also conflates individual rights with property rights. The individual is he (traditionally never “she”) who owns property. In this way, property rights are established as superior to and conditioning the rest of the Rights spectrum. Here is established the principle that Your liberty ends at my property! The Individual not so much consents to this social compact as merely assents to it. So in fact this system of property titles replaces, to analogous effect, the previous titles of nobility. Aristotle famously wrote that a person is what he knows, what he loves and what he does. (One must overlook all those uses of “he”.) This chapter develops a theory of specifically social rights based on the idea that personhood derives from our contributions to the work of our common society. The concept, increasingly popular, of a guaranteed annual income independent of one’s work, is rejected as introducing a too fundamental bi-class stratification. Instead, the chapter argues for a restoration of the central place of work as a human experience that is inherently social—and civic—and one that brings with it learning and the capacity for learning, full citizenship in the legal and extra-legal sense of being a full member of society, with a sense of belonging, worth and participation. Any conception of rights, the chapter argues, must begin with work as a fundamental human capacity and characteristic and build a social, not individual, understanding of rights. Furthermore, as is argued in Chapter 3 , parenthood and family responsibilities, along with those of citizenship, are also important social, not individual rights.