MacDonald

After our numerous class discussions about the nature of moral rights, I was a little relieved to read MacDonald’s claim that “Intellectuals often complain that political propaganda, for example, is not conducted as if it were scientific argument. But if moral values are not capable of scientific proof it would be irrational to treat them as if they were” (40). For some reason, I think I’ve been overlooking the obvious: there are few (if any) easy answers in our discussion of the nature of moral rights. If there were, we wouldn’t need to read such a variety of viewpoints on the nature of moral rights. I know I should have thought of this earlier, but it made me a little more comfortable nonetheless.

MacDonald’s idea that one should argue to defend a right in the same way that a critic may argue seems intuitive to me (after all, it seems that much of the rights discourse that we encounter in our everyday lives are simply arguments for or against the existence of a particular right), and it ties in well with Wellman’s oft-asserted idea that some may claim that a moral right exists when such a right does not actually exist. Of course, this leads to the following question: who decides? I’m not entirely convinced by MacDonald’s argument here. She writes: “Decisions concerning the worth of societies and social institutions are not made by an elite, or by rulers, or by a governing class but, explicitly or by acceptance, by those who live and work in a society and operate its institutions. But these decisions may be changed by the effective propaganda of a minority who have reached other decisions of whose value they desire to convince the majority” (36). Thus, it seems to me that MacDonald is implying the majority rules over rights, but a well-organized minority can create a new majority. This is troubling for me because I see rights as a shield (of sorts) that prevents the government from intruding into certain aspects of our lives; as such, rights often benefit the minority because they protect those without power from those who have it. If the majority is determining our rights, then what can prevent the tyranny of the majority? I also get the sense that MacDonald would argue that the majority agrees to these norms through some type of informal consensus rather than a formal decision-making mechanism (like voting). If this is correct, I’m wondering about the fluidity of rights. In MacDonald’s conception of rights, do rights come and go as time and social context change, or are rights static over time?