documents attesting human rights are established as the norms of
international and municipal political correctness. Folks just do
make claims of individual and group rights nowadays, expecting,
often correctly, that they will meet with sufficiently widespread
acceptance. And so rights have emerged alongside the increasing
embarrassment of their public detractors, composing a central
ingredient of acceptable political rhetoric. Even the most
benighted political conservative has lost the folk-memory or myth
of a society with the sort of organic civic unity that precludes
claims of right. Heirs of the Reformation, of the anti-slavery
debates, of the struggles for the achievement of the rights of man
and the citizen, we are all of us bloody-minded enough to keep
cognizance of our rights.
The no-theory theory may look depressingly like a no-argument
theory, impotent in the face of persistent dispute. If one can’t get
the dissenter to acknowledge the fact of her claiming the rights
she repudiates, how is advance possible? This is the point at which
a battery of other arguments kick in. We can try, ad hominem, the
Lockean strategy, the Kantian strategy, the Millian strategy:
whatever argumentative path will take the dissenter from her
premises to our conclusion. Pluralism may be the enemy of philo-
sophical tidiness but it is a friend to the project of finding
agreement.
RIGHTS