Wellman Chapter 4

As I was reading this chapter, I kept thinking about our discussion of third generation rights from Tuesday's class. I know that our course deals mainly with the rights of individuals, but I thought that some of the recurring themes in this chapter resonated with our class discussion. In particular, Wellman notes several times the argument that the rights which women have received in recent decades do not compensate for the wrongs done to them in the past. Particularly, he writes: "Some feminists explain that no right could possibly be adequate to remedy the unjust treatment of women. Rights, in theory and in practice, are paradigmatically rights of individuals. Thus, women's rights are taken to be rights of each and every individual woman, not rights of women as a group" (80). Reading this passage reminded me of the "is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?" portion of class. Here, the feminist argument to which Wellman is referring says that there is something intangible that makes "women" greater than the sum of every individual woman. Still, Wellman draws the distinction between any possible group right and an individual right. Based on my reading of Wellman, it seems that women's rights are not a group right; rather, they are individual rights bestowed upon someone by nature of her participation in a certain category (i.e. womanhood).

As such, I'm wondering if these rights are universal. I suppose some would argue that they are universal rights because, theoretically, men already had these rights. Others would probably argue that they are universal rights because they apply to all people (some people just needed the right more than others). Still other people would claim that these rights are exclusive to women and do not apply to men. Looking at history, I can see that some rights (like the right to vote, the right to own property, etc.) were afforded to only a few individuals by virtue of their participation in a particular property (i.e. white or male). So, I guess my larger question is the following: why are some rights universal and others not? Do some individuals or classes of individuals "need" rights more than others (for example, do we try to give people rights to make up for past injustice)? What kinds of rights can justly be attributed to some individuals and not others?

One concept in the chapter that I struggled with was the concept of social atomism. In his conclusion, Wellman states that the concept of rights does not require any social atomism; however, earlier in the chapter, he entertains Wolgast's argument to the contrary. Wolgast argues that the individual who has any particular right acts completely independently of other individuals, society, and culture; the individual acts simply to further his or her own self-interest. Wellman, writing about the theory, writes: "Because both employers and employees are assumed to be motivated purely by self-interest, there is no room in their theory of rights even to conceive of a moral right to equal pay for work of comparable worth to society" (77). I'm confused as to how the idea of social atomism cannot accommodate moral rights. my guess is that, in the pursuit of self-interest, there is no room for a moral right that could derail an individual from his or her pursuit of self-interest, but I'm not sure if this is correct. I see Wellman's larger point that such social atomism is not required for rights (after all, I think that some rights are probably formed based on the knowledge that one gains through his or her interaction with others in society); yet, that particular critique of Wolgast had me confused.