A Right to Inclusion? A Modest Addendum

A follow-up to my three recent posts, Inclusion and Authority, Foundations of Authoritarian Inclusivism, and Evidences for Authoritarian Inclusivism.

While editing Person-Centered Pluralism for Contract Theory, I reached a paragraph that I have broken into three for this post. It draws on "What Is A Person?" by sociologist Christian Smith, and seems apropos to the nature and place of a right to redress for a sense of exclusion.

Virtue theories of contracts reflect four more capacities. Capacities eleven through thirteen are closely bound together: the capacities of valuation, truth-seeking, and moral awareness and judgment. ... Valuation is the power “to assess in fairly abstract terms the relative goodness, rightness, worth, importance, or virtue of various objects, situations, beliefs, and behaviors.” Valuation is an unavoidable activity that is crucial to assessing the worth of objects, persons, and ourselves.

The normative moorings of valuation tie closely to the capacity of truth-seeking. Humans have the capacity to distinguish the truth of reality from their personal preferences. ... The human capacity for truth-seeking is “susceptible … to perceptions biased by … interests, desires, and preferences.” Yet it remains the case that human beings are inextricably bound to understand that there is a difference between the truth of states of affairs and their desires about them.

Both valuation and truth-seeking are reflected in ... a thirteenth capacity: moral awareness and judgment. Moral awareness [is] “an orientation toward understandings about what are right and wrong, good and bad, worthy and unworthy, just and unjust …” The human experience of this orientation takes the resulting moral evaluations as “not established simply by our desires, decisions, or preferences, but instead believed to exist apart from them …” (Emphasis added.)

A sense of exclusion from a common enterprise such as a university or school may be real. It is not, however, on that account alone, a legitimate basis for moral judgment. A sound moral judgment must point to something beyond the preference of the disaffected subject. To avoid "rights cannibalism," subjective rights must be tethered to the right.

A word of clarification: even if I am correct that there is no right to a feeling of inclusion, that does not entail disregard of the sense of exclusion. It means only that a foundation for repair of that sense should be found outside the universe of rights. 

There is much more to human life than rights. Indeed, there is more to life than justice. What that more may be is a topic I hope to address soon.