Too many rights make wrong

Having more than 300 human rights is leaving us all less free

Two wrongs don’t make a right. But can two rights make a wrong? Or 200? In a paper on “rights inflation” at the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences in Ottawa, Dominique Clément of the University of Alberta warns that international law now recognizes over 300 “rights,” including affordable Internet access. This cheapens the very concept of human rights without improving people’s lives.

A “right” is not simply anything we call a right just because we want it. Nor is a “right” simply anything good. Hope is a good thing, perhaps the best thing. But no court can give it to us. And water may be “better” than free speech at least in being more immediately necessary to life than a trenchant discourse on the rights of man. But a “right” to water is not like a “right” to free speech.

Isaiah Berlin famously distinguished “negative” and “positive” rights. But it is highly unfortunate terminology, and not only because of the inescapably negative connotations of “negative.” The real problem is that what we wish he had called “classical” or “real” rights are things no one can properly take from us. The so-called “positive” kind are things we may grab from others. Thus they are not rights at all.

It is a warning sign that positive “rights” can clash where classical ones cannot. Our right to free speech does not constitute licence to shout you down, only to speak to a willing audience on premises we legitimately occupy. But if we both have a right to, say, “water,” and meet at a pond, who drinks first or, at a small pond, at all? And if we have a “right” to affordable Internet access, you must provide hardware, software and power not at a price you consider fair return on your time and effort, but at one we or our friends with guns prescribe.

Thus our “right” converts you into a slave. And that makes it a wrong.

How did we get into this mess, creating a shopping list of “rights” a greedy child would be ashamed to send Santa? Precisely by getting greedy. Instead of insisting on getting our just desserts, based on what we have done with our time and energy, and then sharing it with others as we see fit, we have petulantly demanded what we want based on what others have done with theirs.

We claim not the right to create, but to take what others have created. And as Clément warns, this undermines the very concept of limits on state power, as necessary when protecting classical rights as they are intolerable when enforcing modern ones.

The result is an endless, unstable list of peremptory claims no one can understand or enforce that turns us against our fellows, forcing us to escalate our own demands to avoid being submerged by the rising tide of theirs while promising social and psychological satisfaction no amount of coercion can deliver.

It’s not right.