IId: Rights of the Individual (Other Modifications of Rights)
Up to this point we have been considering individual right, which concerns jural persons as such. 'Individual right' in this sense also applies to to societies; people can have duties to societies, so societies can be jural persons with rights, and as such have individual rights. However, people do not merely acquire rights as individuals. They also acquire rights through membership in societies. This is distinct from the ways in which individual rights might be modified by entering into association. It is also distinct from the rights of societies with respect to other societies as peers (e.g., those pertaining to relationships between states), which intersocial right is just individual right applied to societies. Rather, membership in a society gives one a new jural status with new rights that arise from the nature of the society itself; this is the subject of social right. Rosmini suggests that while individual right is more important for the philosophy of right overall (because it is the foundation for everything else), people often find social right more practically interesting and emotionally engaging.
We create links between ourselves and things; these are ultimately a matter of proprietà. We also create links with other human persons; some of these, necessarily only partial, are also a matter of proprietà, in which other people are means to our ends, but we also form personal bonds with them, relating ourselves to them not as end to means but as end to end. Through these personal bonds we form societies, which arise when there are two or more wills knowingly and intentionally working together toward the same thing so as to have something in common. There are many different kinds of society, and each one has a different set of potential implications for rights. Societies scale differently, being more suitable for two or a few or many; they differ according to how knowing and deliberate they are; they differ according to the degree of involvement of the members; and they differ according to what is shared in common. However, all societies do have certain very general features that are given a distinctive or modified form in each particular society; right relevant to this is what is meant by universal social right. Universal social right involves three principal parts:
(1) Seignorial right, that is, right that is relevant to lordship or dominion. Seignory is not society, but many societies are structured internally by their relation to dominion, and therefore it plays a role when it comes to rights in society. "Seignory is simply a right to the labour of a person who retains all his dignity" (p. 53). It is not a right of personal superiority (which depends on relation to justice), nor is it a right of government (which is for the service of society), although historically it has often been confused with both.
(2) Governmental right, that is right relevant to the organization and administration of society, particularly in terms of how rights are ordered and related to each other within it. While different from seignory, historically seignory has sometimes functioned as a title for right to govern, and modern states in general are structured by seignory (they rule people as subjects), essentially because they just took over feudal functions that were entirely a matter of seignory and (unlike in the feudal case) started exercising them on the scale of the whole society. (Doing this without careful distinction is arguably a reason why modern states have a tendency to despotism.) The natural right of government for any society belongs to all of its members together; each member has a share in the proprietà of the whole society and its benefits, and thus have a number of rights with respect to it, e.g., a right of inspection, i.e., the right to know how the governance of the society is going, and a right of proposal, i.e., the right to propose improvements that are taken seriously and implemented if found to be certainly beneficial. In any case, the right of government is alienable, and a society can have the whole body of its members keep and exercise the right to govern, or can reserve the right to govern while giving responsibility for this or that to particular members, or can reserve the right to govern while paying someone from outside of the society to serve administrative functions, or (as very often happens) can alienate the right to govern to someone by investing the power of government in them. Every governmental, i.e., administrative, office is an alienable right that carries further rights that are relevant to the function of the office.
(3) Communal right, which deals with rights in common among the members of society. One of the relevant rights is the right of association; people have a right to moral and just association:"The right to freedom of association is founded in human nature" (p. 123). Because of this their associations, if not harmful to society, should be recognized as long as the broader society can know how the association was formed: "Every society, having the right to exist, has equally the right to be recognised" (p. 123). The right to freedom of association and the right to social recognition combine to create a third right, the right to social proprietà, which is effectively the right to exercise individual right as a society: "Every just society has of its nature the right to possess, unless it renounces it" (p. 125). Whether and when members have a right to leave the society depends on the nature and decisions of the society, but members can only be excluded from a society for failing in their duties with respect to it.
All of this, of course, is quite general, but that's inevitable, and its generality does not reduce its importance, since these points are the essential ones around which the many different kinds of society will ring their variations: "...the special Right of any society whatsoever will be found only by applying the principles of universal Right to the constitutive facts of the society" (p. 133). These facts, and thus the relevant titles for rights, are as variable as societies themselves, and have to be ascertained by looking at the particular society in question.
However, there are three societies of extraordinary importance, whose existence affects every other society, and which play significant roles in the fulfillment of human life: family, Church, and civil society. Thus Rosmini will look at each of these in turn.
to be continued
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Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right, Volume 3: Universal Social Right, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham, UK: 1995).
