Wolterstorff on Rights Grounded in Respect of Worth 3.1.2

If rights aren’t boosters, what are they? Citing Ronald Dworkin for coining the phrase, Wolterstorff characterizes rights as trumps. Unlike boosters that add some points to a utilitarian calculation, one who plays the trump card of a right takes the hand: “If I have a right against you to the good of some action on your part, then your performing that action is to take precedence for you over whatever balance of life-good and evils might ensue . . . .” (291)

Well enough. But whence comes this trumping, peremptory significance of a particular claim to a certain action? To our status (or properties, in the Aristotelian sense), replies Wolterstorff. To my status as an employee of Regent University comes my right to my paycheck. From my status as a citizen of the United States of America comes my right to be free from governmental deprivations of life and liberty without due process of law. From my status as a human being . . . well, just what rights come from that, the most fundamental status or property which I possess?

Here Wolterstorff notes a distinction between socially conferred rights and natural (and inherent) rights. For example, the social practice of promising makes sense only if the promisor can invoke the social convention of trust. Invoking trust on the part of the promisee and then reneging is a wrong. Some sorts of this wrong are also legally sanctioned (e.g., a breach of contract) but most by a long shot are not. (My upcoming piece, Principled Pluralism and Contract Remedies, 40 MCGEORGE L. REV. __ (2009), discusses this point.) The fact of the wrong, evidenced by the universal feelings of anger, resentment, and the like make clear that a wrong has been committed regardless of the lack of legal consequences. But the presence of a wrong is common in deprivations of natural (however defined) as well as socially conferred rights. To the nature of a wrong we must thus turn.

What is the common denominator of rights? Or, more simply, what makes a wrong? In brief, “to wrong a human being is to treat her in a way that is disrespectful of her worth.” (296) But what’s that? What does it mean to “under-respect” someone? Three things, per Wolterstorff. First, we must presuppose that human beings have non-instrumental worth. If they did not, then we would be back to the utilitarian calculus that entails the non-existence of rights. Second, wrongs presuppose that certain (in)actions can have a “respect-disrespect” import. To say otherwise would deny human agency and, similarly, deny the existence of rights. Third, the respect-disrespect import of human actions can be out of accord with the non-instrumental worth of another. In other words, under certain conditions one can act in such a way as not to respect the worth of someone else; we can wrong him.