Rights and morality

In this whole Kosovo debate, my ideological friends on the Right have refused to state the fundamental issue as I think it ought to be stated–fully, categorically and without apology: that we have absolutely nothing to gain from this protracted military campaign in Yugoslavia. It is not in America’s vital national self-interest to spend seven billion dollars and spill American blood to save Kosovo. It is not America’s sacred obligation or moral duty to be the world’s policeman.

To be sure, the opposition to this gross military misadventure has been tame. There have been no violent protests on American college campuses. The war opposition cowers under public cultural pressures and the worship of altruism. The television scenes showing devastated Albanian refugees have the Republican Right timidly mumbling something about “clear exit strategies, goals and objectives,” without ever really questioning the basic mission or understanding the deeper philosophical moral issues involved.

What is needed? A proper recognition of the nature of rights and morality (as a foundation for sensible political policy).

Let us begin with “rights.” As Philosopher David Kelley points out in his book, “A Life of One’s Own”: “A right is something an individual can demand as his due without apology for asking and without gratitude for receiving. The classical right to life was conceived as a right to act with the aim of preserving oneself. It protects the individual from murder, assault, and other forms of aggression that threaten life. But it does not entitle the individual to the goods required to support his life….”

A “right,” in other words, is an entirely negative recognition. That is, one has the right not to be raped, not to be murdered, not to be deliberately or unjustly harmed in any way. Rights, in the true and classic sense, as defined by John Locke and other great enlightenment thinkers, involve minimum negative restrictions from harm, not rampant positive obligations for action.

A man, for example, has the right not to be assaulted. He does not, however, have the right to a $50,000 labor union-dictated annual salary. Nor does he have the right to home ownership or any other material object that would require the sacrifice–or the violation of rights–of others. So-called “positive rights” simply do not exist in nature (or as a logical philosophical conception).

Morality–and, to a large extent, the criminal code–is the same way. Morality primarily involves not performing deliberate and unreasonable harm toward others. The law, for example, will not convict you as a criminal if you fail to act as a good Samaritan by coming to the aid of a distressed person. There is no moral or legal imperative to help, only to refrain from hurting others.

The Albanians certainly have a right not to be harmed by the Serbs. At the same time, they do not have the right to demand $7 billion in American tax dollars and the sacrifice of, say, 3,000 American boys who each have a right to pursue their own individual happiness.

It is time that the President and the Congress start standing up for the rights of American citizens under the constitution of the United States (not Kosovo, Albania, Rwanda, Somalia, or Haiti).