Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right IIc: Rights of the Individual (Transmission of Acquired Rights)

 IIb: Rights of the Individual (Acquired Rights)

Unlike connatural rights, acquired rights can change, because their titles and the preconditions of their titles can be changed and the particular form a right takes under given conditions can be adjusted in light of other rights. There are many different kinds of modification of rights; some rights are modified in terms of association (these arise in the context of social right), for instance, and some arise due to violations of rights. One very important form of modification is transmission of rights from one person to another, through transmission of title. Of this, Rosmini says (p. 258):

There are two ways of transmitting [proprietà]:

1. When I free something of my own and someone else occupies it, making it his own.

2. When I free something of my own in favour of someone else who, under certain conditions or without conditions, accepts and takes it immediately as his own; this is called 'contract'.

The second, of course, is in some ways the most important, but the first ends up being more important than it looks.  Rosmini identifies three general cases of release and reoccupation. The first case is the most obvious -- someone has something, renounces their right to it, and someone else occupies it in an ordinary lawful way. In this case, the moral and intellectual connection for proprietà has been dissolved. Wills and testaments, for instance, are this kind of transfer, although they are unusual in the sense that they are non-contracts that by legal fiction are sometimes treated by positive law as if they were contracts. The second, somewhat more tangled, case occurs when someone usurps something to which they have no right, and the passage of time erases the fact of the usurpation so that everyone has come to recognize their occupancy. Rosmini calls this "natural-positive prescription" (p. 259). It still requires good faith (the present occupant has to have reason to think the thing actually his); as Rosmini says, "the passage of time alone does not constitute any just title" (p. 260). Rather, the point is that where people are honest in their claims, the claims can stand even if the original attempt at occupation was unlawful or unjust, if the presently available reasons no longer indicate that. Bare possibility or bare doubt cannot overcome available reasons. The third occurs when someone simply stops using their right, and because of the disuse someone else appropriates it. In this case, called usucaption, it is the physical connection that has dissolved.

Contracts are usually defined as agreements or promises; Rosmini doesn't like either, because he thinks the first is question-begging and the latter inaccurate. His definition of a contract is a "concourse and jural effect of corresponding acts of two persons, of whom one, an owner of a simple or complex right, willingly dissolves the jural bond of the right with or without certain conditions, so that the other may become the owner, if he wishes" where the second person can engage in an "act of acceptance" and, having met the conditions (if any), appropriate the right (p. 265). From this it follows that not all contracts are promises (and not all promises are contracts), not all concern the future, and not all require that any conditions be met. They also do not require any particular symbolism, which usually develops to remove obscurity or potential confusion about the acts of disappropriation and appropriation. Further, it's clear that, since you can transfer the right to someone just by the relevant acts, that it is possible in many cases to transfer the right before they actually take possession; when positive laws require the actual or symbolic transfer of possession, this is again usually just to remove any potential confusion or ambiguity by adding an implicit consignment clause to each contract. Further, while people sometimes make an effort to organize their definitions around multi-party contracts, Rosmini doesn't think this is necessary; for purposes of contracts, groups can be treated as single parties, so you just need to distinguish transferring party and accepting party for any simple contract, and build more complex contracts out of that.

Since contracts require a coordination of acts, they require consent. To be consistent with right, consent has to have four features:

(1) The consent has to concern something capable of being the matter of a contract. Some rights are inalienable -- those directly with divine things and those that are themselves duties concerned with truth, virtue, and happiness. You can't contract away your right to do what virtue clearly requires you to do, for instance. However, merely violating a duty does not of itself invalidate the contract; if a man sells books that his children need for their education, Rosmini says, what he does is wrong, but books are the kinds of thing that can be involved in a contract of sale, so the consent does not run afoul of this requirement.

(2) The consent must be given by persons who are jurally able to participate. Consent requires understanding and free will; it also requires an ability to express consent in a way that can be recognized as consent that is based on understanding and free will. Likewise, those consenting have to be consenting on their own behalf, or, if they are consenting in part or whole on behalf of another, have the consent of the other.

(3) The consent must not be the result of an injustice of one party to the other. Obviously, if the contract is itself unjust, it is invalid, but it's also invalid if the contract is unwanted and forced on another by extreme violence or fear, or by using violence or fear to extort the consent. The mere fact that a contract is done out of fear does not necessarily invalidate it; for instance, if I fear earthquakes and find an insurance agent to buy earthquake insurance, this fear doesn't invalidate the contract, because it is not caused by an unjust act of the insurance company. Likewise, fraud and deception can invalidate the contract, but, again, they need to be an injustice perpetrated by one party on the other.

(4) The consent must be expressed in a way that makes clear that it can be seen as a genuine and definite consent. Note that the requirement is that it has to be such that it can be seen as genuine and definite; contracts don't depend directly on the truth but on what is available to all relevant parties to know and use as a basis for action. If you want only to pretend to give your consent, but outwardly give clear signs of consent, it is the latter, publically given consent that matters for the purpose of contract. This must also be clear enough that any future dispute about it could in principle be adjudicated. Further, the consent must be such that the relevant parties can reasonably know what is meant.

Moral reason plays a threefold role in contracts: it governs interpretation of the intentions of the parties to the contract; it compensates for verbal infelicities in the statement of the contract that would destroy the contract if taken too literally, by instead understanding them in a reasonable and beneficial way; and by conscience it determines how far clauses obligate when there is uncertainty (p. 294). It further can play a role in equitable execution of contract, where equity or fairness involves bringing the execution of the contract into alignment with rational justice, even if this involves deviation from strict interpretation of the contract.

Both abandonment-and-occupancy transfers and contracts sometimes result in a change of the rights involved. During contracts, rights can sometimes take on a 'transitory' form; for instance, if we are making a contract with someone, we both have transitory rights during the negotiation that arise from the requirements for consent. In the course of working out the contract, we may also give certain guarantees, some of which will end when the contract is finalized, and others which will be given a final, permanent form in the contract itself. The contract could also determine whether the hand-over is immediate or delayed, at once or by a process, here or at a certain place. We could also split rights, so that they are shared or received in a qualified form.

A particularly important case of modification of rights in transmission occurs with seignory, i.e., lordship or dominion, which results in some sort of state of servitude (i.e., an obligation to render ongoing service) for the other party. The person receiving the state of servitude still retains their connatural rights, but except for infants who have not yet developed their occupancy of themselves, it's also the case that no one can fully occupy another person even with regard to their acquired rights. But it is true that we can by contract 'split' some part of our jural freedom off; this happens when someone becomes a subject of a lord (which is always the case in modern change of citizenship, since modern nation-states reserve seignory powers for themselves), and it also happens in employment contracts.

There are other modifications to rights that occur for reasons distinct from any transmission of rights, and we will consider those next.

to be continued

****

Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right, Volume 2: Rights of the Individual, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham, UK: 1993).

Law and Story

... A man's inventions may be stupid or clever, but if he does not hold by the laws of them, or if he makes one law jar with another, he contradicts himself as an inventor, he is no artist. He does not rightly consort his instruments, or he tunes them in different keys. The mind of man is the product of live Law; it thinks by law, it dwells in the midst of law, it gathers from law its growth; with law, therefore, can it alone work to any result. Inharmonious, unconsorting ideas will come to a man, but if he try to use one of such, his work will grow dull, and he will drop it from mere lack of interest. Law is the soil in which alone beauty will grow; beauty is the only stuff in which Truth can be clothed; and you may, if you will, call Imagination the tailor that cuts her garments to fit her, and Fancy his journeyman that puts the pieces of them together, or perhaps at most embroiders their button-holes. Obeying law, the maker works like his creator; not obeying law, he is such a fool as heaps a pile of stones and calls it a church. 

 In the moral world it is different: there a man may clothe in new forms, and for this employ his imagination freely, but he must invent nothing. He may not, for any purpose, turn its laws upside down. He must not meddle with the relations of live souls. The laws of the spirit of man must hold, alike in this world and in any world he may invent. It were no offence to suppose a world in which everything repelled instead of attracted the things around it; it would be wicked to write a tale representing a man it called good as always doing bad things, or a man it called bad as always doing good things: the notion itself is absolutely lawless. In physical things a man may invent; in moral things he must obey--and take their laws with him into his invented world as well.

[George MacDonald, The Fantastic Imagination]

Dashed Off XII

 Scripture is useful for:
-- Romans 15:3-4
-- -- -- didaskalia: teaching
-- -- -- paraklesis: encouragement
-- 1 Corinthians 10:11
-- -- -- nouthesia: admonition
-- 2 Timothy 3:16-17
-- -- -- didaskalia: teaching
-- -- -- elegmon: reproof [in some mss, elenchon: proof]
-- -- -- epanorthosis: correction
-- -- -- paideia en dikaiosyne: education in justice

Ontological commitment is a modal notion. (Alonzo Church)

Torah is not merely given by God, it is received by Israel; in Torah as covenant, God is not merely imposing law but also making it with Israel, creating a new thing with Israel as a sub-creator of it.

People in literary and academic contexts often say 'bourgeois' when they really mean 'common' or 'vulgar'.

For many arts, there is a techne form and an empeiria entechnos form. (Philodemus)

"Performative contradiction differs from logical contradiction by having some actuality, sc. some act done in fact, though this act is *really distinct* from the act as performative contradiction." James Chastek

Song makes poetry more illuminating.

The humility appropraite toa  good metaphysics is a recognition of incompleteness, not a timidity in concluding.

representative vs constructive personation

The Divine Word is the exemplar cause of all myth.

"The monk's whole life tends toward Easter. Its 'Lentent character' ensures that the tension does not slacken." Erik Varden

"No one can become an educated person in school, even in the best of schools or with the most complete schooling." Mortimer J. Adler

"The greater a man's hope in God, the more is express his hope that in God there is greatness of goodness, eternity, power, wisdom, love, perfection, mercy, justice, and the other virtues consonant with God." Llull
"Through faith man believes in God, and through hope man awaits the grace and blessing of God."
"God is that being who needs nothing outside Himself, because in Him exist all perfections."

The single most important mathematical skill is not being tied down by defensiveness or embarrassment when caught in an error.

Gregory of Nyssa on human sublimity: Hom. 2 on Song of Songs

Only what is appropriate as an object of contemplation has intrinsic value. (Although some things, like pleasure, can have an instrumental value that, compared to other things with instrumental value, have a value *as if* intrinsic, due to analogies with contemplation.)

A major end of civil society is to form the conditions for and to facilitate contemplative action and life. It is this end that grounds and defines the autarchy of civil society.

"Let it be assumed that the states by virtue of which the soul possesses truth by way of affirmation or denial are five in number, i.e., techne, episteme, phronesis, sophia, nous; we do not include judgment and opinion because in these we may be mistaken." Aristotle, NE 1139b15-20

While appreciation of the beautiful is not publicmindedness, a civil society that encourages the former will in fact do many things that encourage the latter.

music as unsaturated meaning-framework
-- dance, singing, dramatic & cinematic visuals as ways to help saturate

The active life is a cooperative life.

absurdity punchline // jump scare

Many of our likes and dislikes are received, not original to us nor originated by us.

"...Possibility is the regulative idea for the analysis of wholes into parts. Parts are then possibilities or potentialities with respect to their respective wholes and systems are hierarchies of such possibilities." Scott Buchanan

the manifold of actuality

Genuine repentance is acceptance of judgment even if it is done in hope of mercy.

It is Judaism more than any other culture or religion that makes the world a world.

Our being born not only looks forward to life in the world but also backward to how the world prepared to receive us.

Being is best known in peace.

Beauty suggests truths to us, and more broadly suggests Truth.

A society without a Christian culture will drift into having an anti-Christian one.

Actuality is, so to speak, the possibility of possibility.

the world as the possibility of answers to questions

the agent intellect as liberating light

The sensible is the act of the intelligible.

Speaking and writing are arts; language is a way of taking in the world, the world as suitable for speaking and writing.

God as the exemplar cause of language

language as visible sign of invisible spirit

to seek out the pang of hunger / that you may not forget the pang of hunger

hermenes eisin ton theon (Ion 534c)

language as a way of affecting the world and as a way fo being affected by the world

the world as the reservoir of the not-yet-thought

Logos is the temple of To On; word is the shrine of being.

We do not directly experience language as language; our experience of it is through speaking and writing particular things.

Heidegger tries to understand saying in terms of showing, but in fact it is distinct and only related to showing by analogy.

Language is essentially dialogical, and only is monological insofar as we can conceive ourselves as both unitary and plural speakers.

language as making possible the extension of our personal ambit

Given the postulates of practical reason, it is reasonable to collect and accept suggestive evidences that they are (at least roughly) true, and to collect and accept responses to evidences apparently suggesting otherwise, as long as we can do so without violating what is proven and known.

"The highest ideal, toward which we strive, is to remain in good agreement with the physical world as the guardian of our felicity, without being compelled therefore, to break with teh moral, which determines our dignity." Schiller

"That we pursue something passionately does not always mean that we really want it or have a special aptitude for it. Often, the thing we pursue most passionately is but a substitute  for the one thing we really want and cannot have." Eric Hoffer
"Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self."

the sense of sublimity as essential to extended ascetic practice

God as that which makes reasonable hope always a live option

school as a framework for failing gently

the major modes of learning
(1) meditation/reflection
(2) tradition
(3) special investigation
(4) discussion

The true democratic education is good books well read and good speeches well discussed.

A work of art may fail to be expressive in the way the artist intended. This is one of the key phenomena for understanding expressiveness.

Testimonial effects describe parts of their own causal origins. But in an expanded sense, many effects are signs giving information about the causes leading to them. (This could perhaps be adapted into an argument against Hume -- some things in fact tell us that they are effects and also something about their causes.)

Sheet music is a notational description of a normative structure constructed for the use of a musical instrument.

1 Enoch 20:1-8
Uriel: in charge of the world and Tartarus
Raphael: in charge of the spirits of men
Reuel: takes vengenance on the world of the luminaries
Michael: in charge of the good ones of the people
Sariel: in charge of the spirits who sin agains the spirit
Gabriel: in charge of paradise and the serpents and the cherubim
Remiel: in charge of those who rise

Mt 26:24 // 1 Enoch 38:1-2

1 Enoch 39:4-5 -- the righteous dwelling with the angels "petitioning and interceding and praying" for the sons of men
"And righteousness was flowing like water before them, and mercy like dew upon the earth; thus is it among them forever and ever." (39:5b)

garment of glory 1 Enoch 2:15-16

It is generally more accurate to say that we experience things in the Spirit than that we experience the Spirit.

'nihil est sine ratione' as an affirmation that the object of the intellect is being and not a more restricted object, 'being is itself that which is intelligible', 'what is not intelligible is not being'

Wolff's df. of 'principium': quod in se continent rationem alterius

What is, is such that it is able to be.

A tool is a tool as taken up into society.

The divinelike is everywhere.

"The whole world is under the power of death, bound by the love of duality." Sri Guru Granth Sahib 162
"The One who holds all creatures in His hands / is never separated from them; He is with them all. / Abandon your clever devices, and grasp hold of His support. / In an instant, you shall be saved." SGGS 177

"...the plainest things are often least understood, because they are least attended to." Oswald

Standing Back from Desires

 To have learned how to stand back in some measure from our present desires, so as to be able to evaluate them, is a necessary condition for engaging in sound reasoning about our reasons for action. Here one danger is that those who have failed to become sufficiently detached from their own immediate desires, for whom desire for their and the good has not become to a sufficient degree overriding, are unlikely to recognize this fact about themselves. And so what they present to themselves as a desire for their own good or for the good may in fact be and often enough is some unacknowledged form of infantile dsire, a type of desire that has been protected from evaluative criticism. Hence in deliberating they both reasno from unsound premises and act from badly flawed motivation. Sound practical reasoning and good motivation are related in sometimes complex ways, but an incapacity to distance oneself from one's desires is a danger to both.

[Alasdair MacIntyre, "Vulnerability, flourishing, goods, and 'good'", Dependent Rational Animals, Open Court (Chicago: 1999), p. 73.]

Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right IIb: Rights of the Individual (Acquired Rights)

 IIa: Rights of the Individual (Connatural Rights)

We have connatural rights concerned with relative freedom (connatural rights of the third class), and one of the rights in this category is the right to acquire more rights, in ways consistent with and appropriate to our connatural rights. These acquired rights result not from personhood or human nature, but from human action; but of course, since their foundation lies in the connatural rights, even acquired rights are, so to speak, a contingent extension of the connatural rights. To have this extension, we have to pay much closer attention to a point already noted, namely, that every basic right consists of a law and a title. The law provides the moral structure of the right and its possibility, and the title is the fact that determines how it is relevant and actual in a given case. To be the title of a right, a fact must not itself involve any injustice (which would make it conflict with its law) and it must connect with moral activity, what was previously called the 'governance'.  This moral activity, if its relevance is just the activity itself, is what has been called jural freedom; if it works thorugh an instrument, we have proprietà or jural own-ness. Every acquired right, by definition, has to have some associated act of acquisition that provides the title. So we need to consider how this works first with jural freedom and then with proprietà.

The kind of connatural jural freedom we have cannot be expanded or reduced; it is just that which we have in our own person. But obviously our interactions with the world around us admits of greater or lesser 'reach' in our actions. We can increase our sphere of freedom by increasing the 'reach' of our actions, often by overcoming or working around things that interfere with our actions. We do this fundamentally by actively exercising the freedom we have naturally, and making other things our own in some way. This is complicated by the fact that we live in a world in which other people are doing the same, and our attempts to extend our sphere of proprietà can sometimes interfere with the attempts of others to extend their own spheres of proprietà. I claim something as my property; this limits your ability to claim it as your property. And, of course, if we both do, we have a conflict. Two women may pursue the same man, which is a conflict, and if one woman marries him, that puts him in her sphere of proprietà and complicates the attempt the other woman to put the man in her sphere of proprietà. This conflict will end up being important, because on Rosmini's account civil society exists to coordinate action and set frameworks in a way that reduces and minimizes these conflicts in our attempts to expand our rights. But civil society cannot justly prevent us from expanding our personal sphere, where this can be done in a reasonable way which other people can take into account without harming their own expansions of their personal spheres. This is the basic level of acquired jural freedom, which Rosmini characterizes as "the faculty to do all that is lawful in itself except what is forbidden by law" (p. 91).

In acquired rights that consist in proprietà itself, the proper-ness or own-ness lies in a connection that is made between something else and ourselves, so that that something else is instrumental to our own ends. The act of acquisition consists of forging this connection. We can do this in a very simple way -- for instance, I can pick a spot in the park for my picnic and thereby make it my own, although temporarily and in a limited way. But I could also buy or homestead a parcel of land and make it my own in a stronger and more permanent way, for my enduring and continual use. Rosmini speculates that originally people mostly just did the first -- when people were few and the world was large, people just staked out places to be for the brief periods that they needed them, and then moved on and did the same without retaining much connection to where they had been. They just used things for the present. The second way of making things one's own is more complicated, and involves four levels:

(1) Right of Relative Freedom of Action -- We have a right to any lawful action that does not encroach on another person's proprietà.

(2) Right of Ownership of Action -- In exercising our relative freedom, we engage in an action that incorporates something as part of our action. The action itself is part of our proprietà (ownership), and we have made the other things instrumentally part of the action in at least a basic way.

(3) Right of Relative Freedom to the Thing -- Where the thing incorporated instrumentally into our action becomes adjoined to us -- e.g., it has no strings already attached and we want to keep using it instrumentally -- we can do so. This can be the case even if it is in some sense not ours fully and enduringly.

(4) Right of Ownership over the Thing -- Where we have joined the thing to ourself as an enduring, continual instrument and thus increased our power to act more or less permanently, we have brought the thing fully into our proprietà (own-ship), and it is now said to be our own. 

For instance, we are free to act in ways that relate to unclaimed land (1) and stake out a spot useful to us (2) and use it (3) in a way that makes it recognizably our land-property (4). Likewise, two people can interact with each other (1) and show interest in each other (2) so as to create a stable relationship (3) that can be made permanent in marriage (4), so that they now enduringly belong to each other, each one the other's own spouse. Note again, that we have to recognize that bringing something into our proprietà does not necessarily mean that we possess it as nothing but an instrument (like land or house or even horse), but only that it becomes part of who we are in a way instrumental to our ends. Just as you do not own yourself in the way you own property you buy, so your friends, your spouse, your children, your city, are not your own in the way property you buy is your own -- but they are your own, extensions of your own person. This is fundamentally important. On Rosmini's account of rights, we are not atomistic individuals; our rights make us juridically overlap with each other, and it is out of these juridical overlaps that societies and communities are formed. Every person has other persons as extended parts of his own person, as part of his proprietà.

To be relevant to rights at all, the connection between us and the other thing that becomes our own must be simultaneously physical, intellectual, and moral, each of which arises from two things:

I. Physical Connection

--- A. A real relationship of use between a person and something else.
--- B. Taking possession of a thing by some physical act.

II. Intellectual Connection

-- A. An act of understanding the thing as good for oneself in some way.
-- B. An act of judging that the thing may be taken.

III. Moral Connection

-- A. An act of intending to take possession of a thing for our own use.
-- B. A jural quality in the act by which the thing becomes in some sense part of ourself, so that a jural duty arises in others to take that into account.

Ignoring any of these connections leads to a distorted conception of acquired rights involving proprietà; the physical connection is necessary for the title, the moral connection for the law, and the intellectual connection for putting them together. 

So what are the particular ways in which we bring things into our proprietà, or, in other words, what are the kinds of title that we have for our acquired rights over other things?

The first kind of title is, in jurisprudence, universally known as occupancy. This is the simplest title in which all three kinds of connection (physical, intellectual, and moral) arise, and its limitations are those of simple versions of connection; you obviously can only occupy the occupiable, and the occupiable has to be something that can be used in a non-injurious way and that we can 'take possession of'. We take possession of things by some form of work, either preparatory work, as in fencing a piece of land, or productive work, as in cultivating a field, or consumptive work, as in putting logs on a fire, or craft and productive skill, as in constructing a machine. This kind of possession is not strictly exclusive; it does not prevent other people's harmless and reasonable use of what is possessed. It just gives a priority to the use of the owner, and thereby excludes anything that inconveniences the owner or interferes with their use. All of this is on the physical side. On the moral side, occupancy also requires some sort of designation, a sign of occupancy. You can't be occupying something if nobody can possibly tell. The sign doesn't need to be elaborate -- mere verbal or written declaration can suffice if custom makes it recognizable as a designation of something as belonging to you.

Occupancy is not exclusive in another way; more than once person can occupy the same thing, either separately or as a collective body. Rosmini's examples (p. 146) are when two hunters, legally hunting, shoot the same deer at the same time, so that they both have a right to it separately, with two different occupations, whereas a society of persons could take possession of a deserted island together, in a single occupation. Such occupation requires that the occupiers come to a mutually beneficial agreement that modifies or modulates the exercise of each occupier's rights so that they can be consistent.

Every person, distinct from the connatural right he has over himself, also can develop acquired occupancy-rights over himself; we do this, for instance, when we grow up and become adults. We can also occupy others with their consent, although Rosmini thinks that this is not the foundation of any new right but a transmission of already existing rights. We can also occupy others who are incapable of having occupancy-rights over themselves. None of these kinds of occupancy. which Rosmini calls seigniory or lordship or dominion, can be occupation of a person as such (that would interfere with their connatural rights, which acquired rights can never do). What you can occupy are publicly available aspects of their interaction with the world, their exercised faculties. A common example would be having a right to someone's labor due to an employment contract; the labor of a person is not something separate and detachable from the person, so employment is a consensual occupation of a person in the respect of the agreed-upon labor, in an agreement in which the employer transmits occupancy-rights for the wages in order to have occupancy-rights to the labor transmitted to them. Not all such occupancy is consensual, however; Rosmini's example is an abandoned baby whom someone takes responsibility for; someone taking responsibility for the baby doesn't need the consent of the baby to have a right (always consistent with the baby's connatural rights) to move the baby place to place, diaper them, and so forth, despite the fact that these would sometimes be intolerable usurpations of authority if done to adults. The reason for this is that babies have not acquired occupancy-rights over themselves yet; they have the physical connection required, but not the intellectual and moral connections.

The right of seigniory over children is a provisional right because the relevant occupation is necessarily provisional -- as the child grows, their scope of action increases, and their connatural freedom and rights over this action have to be accommodated by any acquired right, until eventually there is no more room for occupancy by another. Children also have certain moral duties (gratitude, submission, restitution) because the adult is the benefactor who fosters them (so that fostering can be a distinct title of rights); but the jural duties here are not much different from any other jural duties in any other instance of beneficence, which are usually quite limited.

However, children are an interesting case because there is another, more important title that might be had with respect to them: generation. Parents, of course, typically have this title with respect to their children, and this is distinct from the titles they have by occupancy or by beneficence. It is the foundation for the right that historically has been known as patria potestas and that forms the household or family. Almost universally children have been seen as partially extensions of their parents and as having a direct, personal, natural connection to them. This title, like that of occupancy, must presuppose the connatural rights of the child; the child cannot be a mere means to the parent because the child is a person. But parental rights are over the child as a means to the mutually consistent ends of the child and the parents. A difference between the title of generation and that of occupancy is that occupancy with regard to children is provisional, whereas generation is not. As such, it structures the family as a collective person, a unified society through time, given order by the parents. Within this society (and limited by its bounds), the parent has the right to correct and punish the wayward child and the right to administer the goods of the child where necessary. (Abuses and usurpations arise when people fail to recognize the 'wayward' in the first case and the 'where necessary' in the second, or when attempts are made to extend this outside the family/household, but as long as this is avoided, Rosmini thinks both parental rights are quite extensive.)

Unlike connatural rights, acquired rights are subject to change; the very first forms they take are not the only forms they can take, because they can be transmitted from person to person and they can be modified in their exercise. We therefore need to consider their transmission and modification.

to be continued

****

Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right, Volume 2: Rights of the Individual, Cleary and Watson, trs. Rosmini House (Durham, UK: 1993).

Links of Note

 * Eric Wilkinson, Logical Rationalism (PDF)

* Alessandro Conti, John Wyclif, at the SEP

* Sanna Hirvonen, Recipes without makers (PDF) -- I liked this paper a lot.

* Blake Hart, The Shadowbrute and God, on C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, at "The Pilgrim's Interests"

* Gregory B. Sadler, What Is "Public Philosophy"? A Pluralist Approach and Proposal

* Antoine C. Dussault, No Function without Service: Selected Effects Function, the Liberality Problem, and Whole Organisms (PDF)

* Natasha Burge, How Fantasy Literature Lost its Soul, at "The Undercurrent"

* John Hawks, The ancient Egyptian legacy of anatomical science

* John Plaice, The Fruitful Collaboration of André-Marie Ampère and Augustin-Jean Fresnel, at "Fiat Lux"

* Rognvaldur D. Ingthorsson, A Powerful Particulars View of Causation (PDF)

* Peter Frankopan, A Bead Too Far: Rethinking Global Connections Before Columbus, at "Global Threads with Peter Frankopan"

* Amod Lele, In Memoriam: Alasdair MacIntyre, at "Love of All Wisdom"

* Robert Stainton and Christopher Viger, Do Languages Really Exist? (PDF)

* Russell Arben Fox discusses Alasdair MacIntyre, at "Front Porch Republic"

* Yassine Meskhout, The wonder of modern drywall, at "The Works in Progress Newsletter"

* Matthew Sanderson, Rudolf Otto on "Numinous" Religious Experience, at "1000-Word Philosophy"

Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right IIa: Rights of the Individual (Connatural Rights)

 I: The Essence of Right

Having looked at rights in general and established proprietà or jural possession as the principle of derivation for rights, the natural thing to do is actually to derive specific rights. There are two kinds of derived rights, individual right and social right, depending on whether we consider the person in a dissociated way or in terms of society, so we turn to individual rights. 'Individual' here does not mean isolated or atomistic; since any person's right depends on the duties of other people, individual rights have to consider persons as co-existing with other persons, and only separate insofar as their particular interests are separate. There are two kinds of individual rights, depending on whether the relevant title arises from the human nature or from the human action of the person who has the right. The former, arising from human nature, are connatural rights, and the latter, acquired rights.

One of Rosmini's major concerns is to oppose those who hold that all individual rights are acquired. If we consider a newborn baby, it has done nothing to acquire any rights; but if we deny the infant rights, we have an absurd situation of having an intelligent being with no rights. It is true that we could have duties to infants without the infants having any rights, since rights require duties but not vice versa. But we do in fact recognize infants as having rights despite not having done anything to acquire them, and all attempts to deny that they have rights make one of two assumptions that we can see from other cases are not reliable: they make the possession of rights depend on being conscious of having them, and/or they treat having rights as implying that one knows them specifically as moral. In practice, we mostly recognize rights by recognizing the suffering of persons. If we have a person, that is, a being that is capable of understanding and will, even if only in the barest way, and can recognize them as suffering, we take other persons to have the duty not to make them suffer, in such a way as to recognize them as having rights. 

When we recognize that there are connatural rights of some kind, i.e., rights where the title is innate to us, and consider the newborn infant again, we can start identifying what these rights are by asking about the proprietà of the infant. Personal activity is an element of rights, as we previously saw, but the personal activity of infants does not really extend beyond their own bodies and spirits, unless you count the air they breathe (cf. p. 20). Thus the connatural rights we see have a formal and material aspect. That is to say: personhood and humanity. One's own person, by definition, is part of one's proprietà. It is the center of the sphere of what is one's own. But it's not strictly that we have a right to our personhood; rather, our personhood itself is subsistent right (p. 21). This is tied to what we think of as human dignity; our first and most fundamental right is simply ourselves, considered as our own self. It is the seat of jural freedom, our liberty to do as we please within the realm of our rights, and anchors all proprietà. This is the formal aspect of every connatural right. The material aspect is due to the human nature that the person has, the faculties and capabilities that are natural and necessary to us. It is thus the seat of proprietà. 

Rosmini argues that human persons, as such, have three ways of engaging in the world: (1) through the intellect, by our share in truth; (2) through the will, by virtue; and (3) through feeling, by enjoying bliss, i.e., satisfactory completion in things other than ourselves. "Truth, virtue and bliss are therefore the three terms of the human person, or rather of person in general; they are the purest founts from which flows to person its own excellence, its dignity and its supremacy" (p. 31). These are therefore the three points at which the person as such can be injured, in the literal sense of having our rights violated. With regard to the first, truth, someone can try to damage our understanding, as when someone attempts tto make us drunk so that we won't understand something, or they can violate our jural freedom, as when someone attempts to interfere through malicious caprice with our ability to know, or they can try to harm our actual possession of truth, as when someone lies to us. Likewise, with regard to virtue, someone can try to damage our disposition to virtue, for instance, by trying to put us in situations that erode our ability to act virtuously, or they can violate our jural freedom, as when someone tries to limit our ability to do the kind of training required for ability, or they can harm our us in our virtuous action, as when someone attempts to seduce us to do something wrong. Similarly, with respect to bliss, people can attempt to deprive others of present or future fulfillment, or to impede it, or to provoke the opposite. In all of these, someone is trying to injure either our ability, or our choice and action, or our possession of something fundamental to life as a person.

Likewise, when we turn to human nature, we find connatural right concerned with proprietà, which is injured when someone acts to our personal extension by way of our own human capabilities. The most obvious violation of the right to proprietà of our human capabilities is slavery, the treatment of another person as continually existing for one's own ends, and Rosmini argues on this basis that slavery is so injurious to human rights that it should be abolished immediately -- even gradual abolition is intolerable.

It's important to grasp that for interferences with these things (our capacity for truth, virtue, and bliss, or our use of our capabilities) to be violations of rights, they must do so under conditions that relate to the features belonging to rights. It is, of course, possible to interfere with these accidentally or completely unknowingly; this is obviously not a violation of rights. Even deliberate harms are not necessarily violations of rights. If you deliberately harm yourself on any of these points, you have done a moral wrong, since you have a duty to fulfill your promise as a human person, but not all immoral acts are violations of rights. You can do yourself wrong, but you cannot violate your own rights, because you have authority over how they are to be exercised. Likewise, if you fully consent to someone harming you in these ways, they have still done moral wrong and violated their moral duty to you, but they have not injured your right. Another way to put it is that they have violated their moral duty to you, but not their jural duty to you. They are doing wrong to you, but they are not invading your proprietà, because they are (so to speak) invited.

Allowing for this, there are nine kinds of violation of connatural rights, or immediate injuries:

an attempt to deprive us of truth
an attempt to deprive us of virtue
an attempt to deprive us of fulfillment or bliss
an attempt to interfere with the power to achieve truth
an attempt to interfere with the power to achieve virtue
an attempt to interfere with the power to achieve bliss
unjust prevention of those acts of our jural freedom that would aid us in achieving truth
unjust prevention of those acts of our jural freedom that would aid us in achieving virtue
unjust prevention of those acts of our jural freedom that would aid us in achieving bliss

In each of these case, our rights with the respect to the powers, acts, and objects in question give rise to the right to use force in defence of both ourselves and justice with regard to truth, virtue, and human fulfillment. The exact extent of the force to which we have a right depends on the serious of the problem with which we have to deal, and can range from simply speaking the truth about it, to reproving wrongdoing, to imposing punishment, to enforcing restoration. There is also inevitably the complication in that it is easy to overestimate the extent to which one's right to use force applies when one's own rights, or the rights of people important to one, are being violated; another's violation of your rights doesn't give you free license to violate theirs, for instance, nor to do things that harm the common good or involve actions morally wrong in themselves.

Rosmini argues that all rights, connatural or acquired, fall into four classes:

(1) rights consisting directly in proprietà or jural possession of some good
(2) rights consisting in absolute jural freedom, that is, our capacity to act in ways directly relevant to our persons and proprietà
(3) rights consisting relative jural freedom, that is, our actions with regard to our persons and proprietà, protecting them from the error or stupidity of others
(4) rights for force and sanction.

He therefore divides our specific connatural rights according to these classes:

Connatural Rights of the First Class. "When we are born we have [proprietà], or jural possession, of our total self. All the natural activities, faculties, powers, forces, together with ever natural good, are connatural rigths; they cannot be weakened or taken from us" (p. 80). We therefore have (I) a right not be pushed into evil with regard to truth, virtue, and fulfillment. This comes with at least four rights: the right not to be misled by word or action in necessary truths; the right not to be entrapped or provoked into vice; the right not to be made unhappy by trial and test of moral strength; and the right to reputation, praise, glory, and reward of virtue. We also have (II) a right not to suffer attacks on our human nature, which comes with a large number of lesser rights, diversified by our various human capabilities.

Connatural Rights of the Second Class. "An innate absolute jural freedom exists which includes all acts of right have a jural title to the rights mentioned in the previous class" (p. 80). Thus we have (I) title to all acts tending toward truth, virtue, and fulfillment. This gives us a number of rights: the right to meditate on and communicate truth; the right to search for truth in reasonable ways; the right to judge what is just and decent as best we may; the right to do what is just and truthful in an orderly way; the right to perform virtuous acts; the right to choose the means and state of life that seem to be suited for our moral improvement. All of these rights are absolute, but qualified in that our exercise and defense of them have to respect the rights of others. We also (II) have title to all acts done with our innate human powers, where these are internal to us or, if external, necessary for our existence as human beings.

Connatural Rights of the Third Class. "We have a connatural relative freedom, that is, a right to do all that we can with the upright use of our powers unhindered by another's caprice or wickedness" (p. 82), where this does not interfere with another's proprietà or jural freedom. This class has many, many rights -- it covers the whole field of good that comes into our proprietà. Some of the more important are the right to speak and seek help, the right to bodily movement, and the right to what is both lawful and either useful or pleasant.

Connatural Rights of the Fourth Class. "Relative to the preservation of innate rights, the right of sanction is also innate, because, as we said, it is simply the 'energy present in the physical faculty which is the first constitutive element of right'" (p. 84).

Thus connatural rights, which are also call natural rights, human rights, and so forth. These serve as the general framework for acquired rights, which arise not from human personhood or human nature but from human action.

to be acquired

***

Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right, Volume 2: Rights of the Individual, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham, UK: 1993).

Fortnightly Book, May 25

The man who became known as perhaps the greatest poet in Japanese history was born in 1644, first publishing under the pen name, Sōbō, although he later took the pen name under which he is universally known today, Bashō, after the bashō (Japanese banana) tree. It was not until he moved to Edo in 1674 that he began to come into his own, finding like-minded poets and starting his own school. Ironically, he found poetic success not to his liking. He first tried Zen meditation, but then began interspersing his teaching with extensive wandering. Out of these journeys came the next fortnightly book, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, which is a collection of five short, distinct travel writings that mix prose and poetry:

The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton
A Visit to the Kashima Tribe
The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel
A Visit to Sarashina Village
The Narrow Road to the Deep North

The Penguin edition is translted by Nobuyuki Yuasa and has traditional illustrations by Yusa Buson, who is with Bashō considered one of the Great Four of haiku poetry.

The Venerable Bede

 Today is the memorial of St. Baeda of Northumbria, Doctor of the Church.

Bede's Death Song
tr. by Craig Williamson 

 Before he departs on that inescapable journey
Down death's road, no man is so wise
That he knows his own end, so clever or unconstrained
That he need not contemplate the coming judgment,
Consider what good or evil resides in his soul,
What rich reward or bounty of unblessings
Will be offered in eternity when his time runs out. 

 [Craig Williamson, The Complete Old English Poems, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia: 2017) p. 1051.]