[lit-ideas] Re: Paying taxes for months on end
- From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 27 May 2005 20:08:25 -0700
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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