Only in America

I think that it is important to point out, or what I've concluded from the first chapter in Wellman, is that "rights" are conditional. As with many aspects of life nothing is guarenteed and unfortunatly and surprisingly, to some, rights are not the exception. This may be why we as Americans enjoy "rights" that others in other countries may not. For example the right to an education that we listed as one of our rights pertaining to this class. We also talked about how that right may not be granted or even expected in a culture different from ours. Rights in America have become an ingrained part of our culture to the point that we may take them for granted or not even appreciate them. The abundance of and lack of appreciation for rights has led to that proliferation that Wellman discusses by making them empty rhetoric.

What I mean is that we make think that as humans we are born with certian rights but actually we are only granted what our surrounding society and culture allows, what is useful. This is why others in other societies may not have the same rights as us and why we may feel deprived of something that we always believed to be ours when we leave our society and go to a different one and realize it was never ours to begin with. If it was ours to begin with, just for being born, nothing could take that away but that is not the case. So DO absolute rights exsit or SHOULD they exsit?

To answer Ernie's question, Is most of our legal rights discourse really a veiled discussion about moral rights? I think yes and that is the percise reason that our rights are not never fully guarenteed because as a society our morals are always changing. Something that may have once been considered just may not be considered just today, i.e. slavery. Or something that was considered unjust may now be considered just by some, i.e. abortion. I think that this is what Wellman is talking about when he is mentioning the "core". As MLK Jr. said in his "Letters From a Burmingham Jail", an unjust law is no law at all. This is why are laws are always changing, and our legal rights are always changing because morals of society are always changing and majoity rules. When the law no longer protects a right it is no longer really a right and that is it's "assoiciated elements". The problem is when laws don't really do what they are meant to, Wellman gives the examples of child laws that don't protect children and harrasment laws that no longer prevent harrasment. So I don't think that he is saying that those laws are unimportant but when you have a proliferation of legal rights and no way to protect them it compromises the moral right and the morality of the society that it represented in the first place and its correlation to it.