|
| |
Rights and Responsibilities: Putting Them Into Practice
From: The British Library
| By:
Matthew Taylor |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The concept of rights and responsibilities has been central to the policies of the British New Labour government. Far from disagreeing with the concept, Matthew Taylor (right) believes that the idea of swapping rights for certain responsibilities is a notion already built into people's expectations. According to Taylor, the difficulty lies in the varying and ever-changing interpretation of what constitutes a fair exchange of rights with responsibilities. Taylor addresses a number of issues: the imbalance of responsibilities between the classes; the context and proportionality of rights in exchange for responsibilities; and the growing debate surrounding the rights and responsibilities of technologies such as the mobile phone. |
 rofile can be a dangerous thing. The senior economist at IPPR (Institute of Public Policy Research) is a guy called Peter Robinson. He was on "Newsnight" the other night, talking about the fact that by the time Labour leaves office, or by the time of the next election, it will actually have reduced the proportion of gross domestic product and public expenditure. |
 | |
| Matthew Taylor recounts an anecdote about the senior economist at IPPR. | |
The next day, I got an e-mail at IPPR from someone who said, "I regularly travel the London Bridge/Lewisham train on a weekday evening, and there's a guy who often sits on the train. I always thought he was intellectual." I guess that means he's bald and he's got glasses! "And one day, imagine my shock and horror when somebody on the train's mobile phone went off and this man, who'd never previously said anything, turned round and shouted, 'Will someone turn that fucking mobile phone off!' You will be very concerned," she said, "I'm sure, to hear that this was your economist, and you will want to do something about it." I wrote back to her and said that I was "Peter's employer, not his parent." But it seems to me that this opens up some of the knotty questions about rights and responsibilities. And I will turn to mobile phones at the end of my very brief comments. |
Just to say something at the very beginning about the concept of rights and responsibilities. I do think it is a deeply problematic concept. It's problematic because in a sense it's a truism. The relationship between the state and the individual is based upon some notion of rights and responsibilities, whether it's the taxation system, whether it's the system of business regulation, whether it's the criminal justice system. There are certain things that we're expected to do: pay our taxes, obey laws, observe regulations. And if we don't do them, then we will in some ways have our rights infringed, our freedoms taken away, or our money taken from us. So in some senses rights and responsibilities are the definition of--however problematic it might be--the relationship between the state and the individual. |
Giving the people what they want
 | |
| Matthew Taylor on political moralizing. | |
I think where the notion of rights and responsibilities has come from politically has been a conscious attempt by Social Democrats, in particular, to what I would call "re-moralize" the state. And there is something very ugly about politicians moralizing. But the fact is that the state will always embody somebody's values. It's not a question of whether we want a state that has moral values or a state that doesn't have moral values. It's a question of whose moral values will we have. |
And the reality is that many people, many citizens, in the '80s and the '90s--I saw it in the focus groups which came out after the '92 election and in what people were saying about the Labour Party--felt that the left stood for a set of moral attitudes for the state which did not accord with the way in which they ran their lives. It was expressed in people saying, "Labour's for minorities," "Labour's for extremes," "Labour's for other people," "Labour's not for families." People didn't feel that Labour somehow represented ordinary mainstream morality. |
And indeed quite a lot of research, important research, in America by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis has demonstrated that actually people are not opposed to egalitarian principles, and they're not even opposed to quite strong notions of redistribution. But they want to do this on the basis of what they call "strong reciprocity"--that actually there is a very strong notion of people's duties, a notion that people have responsibilities which they should exercise in return for the rights which they enjoy. |
So, in a sense, saying that "one shouldn't be entitled to benefits or assistance in getting work unless one is willing to look for a job," that "support for families should be dependent in some ways upon ideas of proper care for children" (although, of course, this has not been operationalised; it's only been articulated rhetorically)--these are the concepts that people apply in their everyday lives. They apply them to their neighbours, and they apply them to their friends. |
And I think the argument is this: you might say that there's something objectionable about the state doing that, but it seems to me that the state (and I'm very much in favour of legitimizing the state, as a Social Democrat), if the state doesn't embody those values, it will embody somebody else's values. And the alternative values are technocratic values, or they are ultra-liberal values, which don't actually reflect the moral impulses of people, and therefore--when people elect politicians--if the state doesn't embody those values, then it's failing in its democratic duty. So that's the first point. |
The criticism I'd have with Labour in relation to that political task is that, as well as this notion of ensuring that the state represents what I might call demotic morality, it's also important that the state tells the truth. It's also important that the state seeks to educate and enlighten people. And one of the problems of New Labour's rhetoric is that it too often seeks to encourage moral panic, it too often attributes social problems to individual moral weaknesses rather than to deeper structural characteristics. |
Context and proportionality
 | |
| Matthew Taylor on the context and proportionality of reciprocity. | |
Let me turn now to the questions of rights and responsibilities in the context of what I might loosely call political philosophy. I have, as I have said, no problem at all with the notion of reciprocity. Indeed, as a Social Democrat I strongly support this principle; indeed, I wish that we had a more reciprocal society. I wish in particular that well-off people felt a greater sense of reciprocity. |
The problem with the concept, it seems to me as a Social Democrat, is that its relevance--the degree to which we support it--depends upon the judgement about the context in which it operates. As Stuart White has said, "There's no basis for saying that slaves have a moral responsibility to work under slavery, whatever the legal code, because that system is itself unfair." Take New Labour's phrase "There is no fifth option of a life on benefits without work," which is where the rights and responsibilities rhetoric was most clearly heard. The argument that people are not entitled to benefits if they are not looking for work does depend on the fact that there will be some work to find. And it also depends upon the work which they do find being reasonable work, not being demeaning, and being paid at a reasonable level. |
The second problem with the application of the notion of rights and responsibilities--in abstract, away from its social context--is the question of proportionality. That is to say that the loss of rights--which result from the exercise, the failure to exercise responsibility--must be proportionate. It seems to me that this is why, as a nation, we continue to oppose the idea that health care rights should be linked to a responsible lifestyle. It's not that the principle is inapplicable; it's simply that we feel the loss of right, in this case the right to treatment, or even the right to life, is disproportionate to the failure of responsibility: smoking, eating too much, or whatever the health risks that have been undertaken. But for me, as long as the responsibilities we expect people to exercise are reasonable, and as long as the loss of rights, welfare rights, is proportionate, there's no objection. |
Class divides
 | |
| Matthew Taylor talks about the consequences of class divides. | |
However, this does take us to a more fundamental problem with Labour's rhetoric in this area, which I've hinted at already. Which is if you apply this concept primarily in the field of welfare rights, it clearly applies much more strongly to those people who are dependent upon welfare provision. And because--quite simply--the middle classes are less dependent on welfare provision (indeed, well-off people use private health care and private education), they've hardly any need at all for state welfare. They are seemingly exempt from responsibilities. And this, of course, has been one of the great weaknesses of this line of rhetoric for Labour: it seems to have a very powerful message on rights and responsibilities towards the poor, towards people who work in the public sector, but it has absolutely bugger all to say about the responsibilities of the well-off. |
This seems to be a result of Labour's failure to question the principles of modern capitalism. Capitalism is seen not as a human creation--as a particular ordering of power--but as some sort of natural evolution of the human condition. Thus it is assumed that "the rich are rich because they have become so naturally," rather than "they have become so due to a set of circumstances which give them extra and additional responsibilities compared to other people." However, that's a bigger issue. |
The rights of technology
 | |
| Matthew Taylor talks about the impact that technology and urban living have had on the rights and responsibilities debate. | |
Finally, on the question of rights, I just want to question one thing which I think is often implicit in the debate, and that is the idea that freedoms and constraints represent, as it were, a zero sum, fixed today as it was at the time of John Stuart Mill. As Raymond Plant has put it, arguing a slightly different point, "There was no need for the Data Protection Act before the computer, there was no need for elaborate security at airports before the invention of plastic explosive. The enforceability of such rights is, therefore, always changing and open-ended, subject to technological change in exactly the same way as welfare rights." According to Plant, the neoliberal argument, that negative rights are more legitimate and operational than positive rights because the former are not open-ended in the obligations they require, is false. |
But the point I want to make is that the fundamental problem that we face in trying to articulate a notion of rights and responsibilities--which as I say I'm happy with--is the impoverished nature of today's political discourse, which results in unmanageable expectations of both rights and responsibilities. To put it simply, it seems to me that we as citizens are becoming simultaneously more authoritarian and more libertarian. We are more authoritarian about the behaviour of other people that we don't like, and we're more libertarian about our own behaviour. |
And this expresses itself in a whole variety of ways: road rage, for instance. It also expresses itself in Peter Robinson's behaviour on the train. Many of us will feel that we must now exercise the right which we have been given through technology to speak to our neighbours, and to our friends, and to our work mates, at any point during the day, wherever we are. But we will also, I think, feel that we have a right to travel on a train, travel on a bus, walk down the street, and sit in a café without having to listen to someone giving an appallingly boring running commentary on what they're doing to someone they're going to meet in 10 minutes' time. |
So here we have an example of a new rights and responsibilities dilemma. But actually there's a whole range of them thrown up by technology and by urban living, but most of all thrown up by a political class that refuses to be honest with people about the difficult choices that have to be made. |
 | |
| Matthew Taylor discusses the principle of citizens' juries. | |
I want to end, as is my wont, with a concrete proposal. And that proposal is that in relation to a whole number of these areas--these new rights and responsibilities dilemmas--I think we ought to use the principle of citizens' juries as a way of informing public debate. I'm not suggesting these juries should make the final decision, but I think they should meet, they should have their findings in public. Politicians wouldn't necessarily have to abide by them, but they'd have to give very good reasons for not doing so. I think the jury continues to be--despite the attacks made on it by the government--the most respected institution in British society. And the way in which juries work--ordinary citizens coming together, listening to evidence and making judgements--tends to work. |
We've undertaken citizens' juries at IPPR on some of these issues. We undertook a whole series of juries, for example, about what health service treatments people should get. What we found was that ordinary citizens are perfectly capable of making quite sophisticated judgements between lifestyle drugs and other types of drugs. They're quite able to say, "Well, a drug that's about baldness is not the sort of thing the Health Service should provide, because it's not really an illness. A drug which is to do with obesity should be provided, but it should depend on the circumstances, and other drugs which are to do with life-threatening conditions must be provided universally." |
I don't think we involve citizens nearly often enough in those sorts of debate. We ought to trust them more and politicians ought to be guided by them, because one thing is clear: the rights and responsibilities debate has enormous potential. It is, in a sense, a description of the questions facing our society and facing our democracy. It's a debate we should all have. Our politicians seem to be incapable of rising to that challenge. Perhaps it's about time we put someone else in the driving seat. |
|
| |
