Is the protection of rights enough to ensure a democracy? Or is Virtue needed? - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

kangaeru · 10-01-2006, 04:41 PM

I was given the following question as a paper assignment for a political science class:

Quote:

Is the protection of rights enough to ensure a democracy or is virtue needed? If virtues are necessary, what virtues are required in a democratic polity?

Below is my response. I am very proud of this paper-- I think it's one of the best I've ever written. I haven't browsed the TFP politics forum in months, mostly because I thought there was way too much partisan bigotry, which snuffed out meaningful discussion on most topics. However, I think this is a topic we can all debate without bringing our affiliations into the mix. Feel free debate either the question itself or the arguments in my paper.

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The term “right” only exists because it was necessitated in response to a grave transgression against human dignity. Rights, when considered one-dimensionally, are the undeniable human utility considered natural based on the laws other men began creating long ago. You have a “right” to a 15 minute break for every six hours you work in the state of Massachusetts. This is something which cannot be denied to you by law; but what was the need that gave birth to the law’s creation in the first place?

It was needed because the virtue of the people was provoked. I do not profess to be a perfectly accurate historian, but from what basic history I do know, America has always been a big fan of cheap labor, and when children began working in sweatshops by the millions during the industrial revolution, and in doing so helped shape this country’s path to global economic hegemony, people were abhorred at the inhumanity of making children, sometimes no older than five or six years old, work fifteen hours a day, six days a week, under horrendously unsafe conditions and brutal treatment by their employers. The concept of “workers rights” emerged only because society opened its eyes to the parallel that the denial of the rights of workers was dually a fundamental denial of their humanity. Over the next 20 years after this epiphany, we outlawed child labor, and gained workers rights like the 40-hour work week, and the example cited earlier. But the question then becomes, how do we define human? Are people defined as different from us deserving of the same definition of humanity with which we afford ourselves?

Would a race described as, “‘Automatic engines of flesh and blood’, of, ‘obtuse nerve,’ marked by degradation and demoralization, and thus far below the Anglo-Saxan, but still [were] a threat to the latter’s livelihood in a market economy.” be considered human in the same way which we think ourselves? By John Miller’s above description of the Chinese in 1882, my educated guess would be no.

This is essentially the crux of the entire Roger Smith piece; that although the country at large enjoys savoring the delusion that we are a pragmatic and egalitarian society, the history of the civilization of the United States has been many times marred by the hypocrisy we have shown towards this belief through our actions. We are all guilty of dehumanizing other cultures and races, creating a psychological assessment in which we define Them as aliens, different from Us. Our history is full of examples where we attempted to create the illusion of a utopian free society by doing things like allowing any child born on US Soil to become a citizen, when all the while we were deporting their parents. The child was of course afforded the rights of a citizen, but her parents weren’t. Where is an infant to go if her parents must leave the country? This is an example of how there is no true merit in professing a belief when institutional mechanisms are deliberately created to undermine the scope of its application. It is in the nature of man to manifest this ethnocentric behavior because we have a seemingly biological need to feel that we are in some way special or superior to all other life on the planet. If such is the nature of man, how can one argue that rights would even exist without the presence of virtue?

And what is virtue? If you read the Abraham Lincoln paper, the definition is succinctly described in the quote, “Here I stand. I can do no other”. When Abraham Lincoln realized that slavery was a fundamental transgression against the dignity of a human being viewed in the same manner with which he viewed himself; when he ceased to see a Negro as an object, as merely a cog in the wheel of society which he took for granted, but as another human being—a brother of the same brood—did he realize that he could no longer morally tolerate the existence of slavery. This is the kind of virtue which must be present in order for there to be a reason to create rights. Moreover, Abraham Lincoln was late to the game; slavery had been around since the time of the bible, and the right to live free was not widely acknowledged throughout the world for thousands of years prior to the twentieth century, and today in some parts of the world it is still not. Did human dignity itself suddenly change? No, of course not, but as we have evolved as a society, our perceptions of what constitute the concepts of humanity and dignity have changed, and this change can be directly correlated to the existence and subsequent provocation of the human capacity to exercise the very emotional intelligence which separates us from all other animals on the planet--the ability to think on a higher plane of emotional reflection-- a cognitive gift which breeds higher thought processes such as virtue.

The most important parallel to be drawn from America’s struggle for a common ground between the egalitarian ideology upon which it was founded and the natural human instinct to categorize humanity in such a way that it applies differently to people based on circumstances such as race, class, gender, education, etc, is that this is by no means an anomaly confined only to the development of American civilization, but in fact is one of the defining frameworks upon which humans have based the concept of society. Nationalism, racism, endemism—these are forms of systematic psychological disqualification of others with which dehumanize those not fitting into the same class as ourselves. Through these mechanisms, a person is able to illogically convince themselves that those people who do not share common characteristics are fundamentally different; they do not think like me, they do not feel like me—they are an independent species from myself who may share basic biological characteristics with my race, but none of the other qualities by which I define my existence. When this thought process is adopted, the lives of people who are deemed to be like oneself are held in the same esteem with which one values the sanctity of their own life. If one viewed the thought of being tortured as morally offensive, people who fit one’s ambiguous and narrow definition of similar humanity would also not deserve torture, because in those people they see themselves. However, people who are not defined as being like oneself are afforded a completely different set of considerations, because the one in judgment does not see the same value in the existence of such a person as they do in themselves. Rather than seeing an outsider as another human being of flesh and blood, capable of feeling the same passions and despairs as oneself, they are distinctively dehumanized in that we see them as being so different from us that they do not receive the same psychological valuation which we afford ourselves. This is what allowed Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Imperial Japan to attempt to conquer the world in World War II. They believed their societies to be fundamentally different from the rest of the human race, and because of this psychological belief they were able to kill without remorse because they mentally grouped those human beings in the same category as animals. They ceased to see their own humanity in their fellow man, and this mass blindness, this brainwashing of entire societies, is what simultaneously led and psychologically enabled them to justify to themselves executing some of the gravest transgressions against human dignity in the history of man’s existence on earth.

In summation, the protection of rights alone is not enough to ensure a democratic polity because the need for the creation of a right is necessitated by the existence of virtue. Virtue is then defined as the product of the higher cognitive ability with which a human being is able to, through emotional reflection, realize the existence of their own humanity in their fellow man regardless of race, gender, class, or any other metric by which we mentally differentiate ourselves from others. Virtue is itself the manifestation of actions taken by an individual who has had such a realization, such as when Abraham Lincoln realized that he could not abide the existence of slavery, and then had the personal conviction to do everything within his power to end it. The recognition of an injustice is, by itself, not virtue; rather, virtue is the compulsion which makes one feel morally obligated to act towards alleviating an injustice. Thus, without virtue, rights have no seed from which to be birthed. Therefore, as the evolution of American democracy, and global civilization for that matter, moves forward, the existence of virtue will continue to be a necessary and integral part of discovering and implementing new rights. The concept of a right is not something which can independently assert or maintain itself; rather, rights are created and protected by the existence of virtue, which must be present in any successful social structure, democratic or otherwise, in order to guard against the proliferation of tyranny.