[lit-ideas] Re: Paying taxes for months on end

Phil Enns wrote:


> There are the rights granted by a government and then there are
> inalienable rights.  The former is an unfortunate yet comprehensible
> usage of the word while the latter is both unfortunate and
> incomprehensible.

We were speaking of 'the language of rights,' if I remember correctly.
You said in your reply to Teemu 'Rights-talk is both incoherent and
unnecessary.' I'd thought until then that you found only talk about
inalienable rights comprehensible. In fact, you expressed your views on
their derivation and their scope, so a fortiori (as Mirembe often says)
you must have found talk about them coherent. Now, apparently, you want 
to deny that it is, and I find this odd.

The quote from the Tractatus seems to be about mistaking apparently 
identical symbols as being co-referential. That is not the case here. 
'Right,' in 'right to life' can be understood in the same way that 
'right' is understood in the sentence 'The police have no right…' In the 
former case, so it is thought, the right can neither be taken away nor 
given away; in the latter one can imagine a law's being passed which 
does away for the need for search warrants, and its being upheld as 
constitutional. Yet this does not make the use of the word 'right' 
ambiguous. Some sweeteners are natural, some artificial, but they are 
both nevertheless sweeteners.

'The police have no right…' can be understood as meaning that the police 
may not enter one's home without a search warrant, and this may be all 
that needs to be said. However, by way of explanation of why they may 
not one can appeal to the Bill of Rights. No doubt there's some sort of 
hermeneutical loop here, but hermeneutics was my second-worst subject.

I have no copyright on the word 'right,' and neither does Phil, of 
course. But when I said earlier that the sentence 'The police have no 
right…' was comprehensible, I think I said something with which most 
English speakers would agree, political theorists, judges, and the 
police themselves aside.

All the best,

Robert Paul
Reed College


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