The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Editorial Staff
• Associate Editors
• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Wendy Mcelroy, Benjamin Tucker, Individualism, & Liberty: Not the Daughter But the Mother of Order
• I: Liberty Vs. Authority
• Inventing the State: the Investiture Conflict
• True Whiggism: 1688–1694
• Locke's Justification of Rebellion
• Locke's “two Treatises” & Revolution
• Property In 17th-century England
• Revolutionary Committees of Safety
• Hayek's Defense of Liberty
• Medieval Liberty & Its Evolution
• Isaiah Berlin On Liberty
• James Mill's Utilitarian Feminism
• The Idea of Peace: 500–1150
• Medieval Monks On War and Peace
• Transcendatalists Vs. Slavery
• Ingalls: On Land and Liberty
• II: The Ethics of Liberty
• J.s. Mill: Paternalism Vs. Autonomy
• The Limits of Paternalism
• The Psychology of Selfishness
• Self-awareness: Freud Vs. Jung & Adler
• Business Ethics As Casuistry
• Liberty, Rational Choice & Public Affairs
• Jean Gerson and Ockhamism
• The Varieties of Equality
• Rights, Liberty, and Priorities
• Locke and Natural Law
• Grounding Natural Rights In Needs
• Individual Vs. Social Rights
• Property Rights and Body Rights
• Property and the Right to Liberty
• Is Justice Prior to Property?
• III: The Political Economy of Liberty
• British Anti-socialism: 1870–1914
• Income Tax Laws and Contingency
• Government Subsidies In France
• Brazilian “liberalism” & State Protectionism
• Herbert Hoover & Federal Welfare
• Neoconservatism and Capitalism
• IV: Law, Liberty, and Political Thought
• The First Amendment & the Court
• Is the Tort/crime Distinction Valid?
• The Economic Approach to Law
• Corporations, the People, and Italian Jurists
• London's Charter of Self-government
• Liberalism, Virtue, Rights & Manners

Individual vs. Social Rights

David Braybrooke

• Dalhousie University

“Our Natural Bodies, Our Social Rights; Comments on Wheeler.” Nous 14(1980):195–202.

“Samuel Wheeler's amusing paper demonstrates wittingly or unwittingly, that it is as feasible in philosophy as in modern art to produce an undetectable spoof.” Thus David Braybrooke begins his generally negative assessment of Prof. Wheeler's philosophical justification of property rights. For Braybrooke, the assimilation of every possible item of property to parts of the body constitutes a reductio scarcely meriting serious analysis; nonetheless, he harnesses himself to the task.

First of all, Braybrooke states, Wheeler's theory of “incorporation” will not stand up in the face of the most minor complications of civilized life. Wheeler concentrates, for example, on the classic case of a single producer, working without collaboration on, say, a canoe, thereby incorporating that mode of locomotion into his body. Imagine, however, some primitive form of cooperation—2 men working together to make the dug-out canoe. Would not each have a claim to the craft as a new body part? But where does the claim of the one stop and that of the other begin? If no line can, in fact, be drawn, will not the completed canoe become part of both their bodies? When full account is taken of collaborative production, original and derived body rights may turn out to be much less individualistic than Wheeler anticipates.

Near the end of his paper, in a supplementary argument, Wheeler goes to great lengths to separate rights from life in the community, thus establishing in his own mind the universal applicability of rights despite the differences that exist among human societies. Braybrooke challenges this and insists that rights always involve other people—in addition to the person enjoying the rights. One person's right implies obligations that fall selectively upon others—obligations to refrain from impairing the right, obligations to assist in gaining

Wheeler also holds that ‘“person qua person’ is a notion which is metaphysically independent of society.” By this, does he have in mind mere animated human bodies capable of learning? Little effort is required to see that the capacities of such beings atrophy if they are not stimulated in a social setting. Persons are beings with socially established characters imbued with learning which results from interactions with others in various modal systems (one at home another or several at work, another at worship, etc.) Socially evolved systems of behavior apply also to rights—with sets of rules concerning status, exercise, assistance, non-interference, and redress.

Moreover, the very notion of rights evolved by means of a long social process which was based on a long series of precedents. At every stage, a concensus concerning the nature of rights grew out of particular institutional developments. This process of evolving concensus continues today.

The developing, open texture of rights may be one of their most useful characteristic features. At times when a certain amount of stability has been achieved, philosophers may ponder which rights are most valuable, considering the nature of man. The right to move and use one's body may number among the most valuable of these. Prof. Braybrooke, however, doubts whether the right to own and dispose of other items figures among these crucial rights; or, if it does, whether it embraces the right to own oil refineries. But whether it does or not, are not the rights to body and property, like all other rights, plainly social in character? redress when the right has been violated, obligations sometimes to carry out certain actions when exercising the right. (If it is my dugout and I ask for it, you must get off and give it to me.)