Ken’s theory of rights, discussed in the segment on abortion in the conversation “On the Front Line of the Culture War” is not very convincing. The idea is that, like consciousness (or interiority), rights go all the way down to the simplest particles of matter - molecules, atoms, perhaps even quarks. The theory of natural rights of humans is difficult enough to defend, never mind its extension to non-living matter. A right most basically is a concept, and only humans, as far as we know, are capable of conceptualization. So no non-human species have rights except insofar as they might acquire them through human agreement or legislation. Rights are an emergent property in evolution, not one of the tenets of all holons.
In humans, at the archaic-infrared level, there is no language, so ancient clans could not form the idea of rights, so there were none. No rights at the magic-magenta level either, although something like them might have existed in the form of established ways tribe members could make claims against others who treated them badly in violation of tribal rules. Ethnocentric rights may have emerged at the red-warrior stage, but they came into clear existence at mythic-amber in the codified laws of the first civilizations. Universal human rights had to wait for the European Enlightenment to give birth to them as a culturally significant idea.
The foregoing line of argument has strength because it appeals to historical realities, but I fail to see anything like it that would work to establish the rights of non-human beings.
, consider people. It seems to me that legislated civil rights for racial minorities, for instance, are related to issues of self-preservation. Are not those rights founded on identified certain conditions that are required for a social group/holon (or individual) to have a capacity for self-preservation that is on a (more) equal footing with say, whites? You may say, “yes, but these are conditions, or needs, for staying whole, not really rights.” Most legislated rights, or morally agreed upon rights, began in the realm of need. Think of police or fire protection or public education, which most people in democratic societies would agree are rights; they are in fact codified in statutes. But these began as needs, as conditions required for people (and society) being able to ‘stay whole,’ have greater capacity for self-preservation. That seems to be the way society works–rights are legislated or morally agreed upon once they are recognized as conditions for preserving the wholeness of an individual or group or society–but the conditions were there before the legislation or the moral agreements, so one could hold the view that rights existed before they were legally sanctioned or instituted by a society. This is what I mean by rights in the most fundamental sense.
