Through Rights to Relationship

Much of the liberal political struggle of the last one hundred years has revolved around the acquisition and defense of a set of rights that we believe to be inherent to the dignity of every individual. Perhaps our greatest victories have emerged out of the women’s rights and African-American civil rights movements. The struggle for the civil rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered people as well as the defense of human rights for peoples around the world continue to demand our work and care, as does the protection of rights we have already won in the face of neoconservative attempts to erode them. I also find some of the arguments for extending rights to nonhuman animals compelling. The discourse of rights is essential to our understanding of freedom and self-determination, so what I’m about to say is in no way intended to imply that these struggles have not been significant or can now be abandoned.

            What I do intend to suggest is that the conventional discourse of rights is necessary but not sufficient to the progressive movement. In mainstream liberal thinking, each individual is free to live in any way he or she chooses as long as whatever he or she is doing does not infringe on another person’s right to exercise the same freedom. In theory, this approach may sound good, but in practice, it presents a number of thorny problems, the most familiar of which may be the issue of abortion. When viewed as a “rights” issue, the ethics of having an abortion comes down to an irresolvable dispute between the rights of a woman and the rights of her unborn child, a dilemma that forces those of us committed to reproductive freedom to argue that a fetus does not yet qualify as “life” and therefore does not have rights, an argument that that doesn’t seem to be very persuasive to a majority of Americans. The truth is that, because human beings are interdependent—maybe more so than ever, or maybe just more obviously than ever—there are few decisions any individual can make that don’t affect the rights of some other individual somewhere, or more likely, the rights of many individuals. Do I have a right to buy clothing made in a sweatshop? Well, in theory I do, but doing so will affect the rights of the people who work in that sweatshop and the rights of their family members. Do I have a right to look away as I walk by the homeless woman on the corner, as I am always tempted to do because to acknowledge her is so painful? Certainly I do, but my decision to do so absolutely has an effect on her experience (not to mention the effect that it has on me to deaden myself in that way). I think we need to move from thinking of ourselves as individual rights-bearers to viewing ourselves as relational beings always inextricably bound up in the web of life. The current globalization of extreme self-interest and greed may be the furthest logical extension an individualistic worldview.

            There is a real danger in what I am saying. Like many women, I’ve sometimes struggled to carve out my own life from the set of expectations that accompany my relationships; for many people in this country and around that world that effort is a life-or-death matter. We cannot afford to lose the freedom for self-determination for which we have struggled long and hard.

            Rather than thinking in terms of relationship or rights, I want to suggest that we think of our evolving liberal/progressive worldview in terms of a dialectic between these two, from which we now need to emerge into a synthesis of relationship and rights. One of the most compelling images for me of how such a synthesis might be imagined was elaborated by philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in his description of the ethical moment as the “face-to-face with the Other.” According to Levinas, each of us is, by the very nature of our being, by the fact that we are here taking up space, indebted to everyone else. We are from birth to death always already in relationship and bound by an ethical imperative to respond to other beings. However, the relationship is with what he calls “the face of the Other,” which in his conception is always mysterious, sacred, and in some way unknowable, and must be allowed to remain so. This mystery is the source of the Other’s right to self-determination. The Other is irreducible to any conception I might have of her or him.

This takes us into messy ethical territory and pretty much ensures that we can never know with self-righteous certainty that we are doing right by each other. For example, according to this model, the abortion issue becomes a complex meditation that demands equal consideration of the sacred, mysterious existence of both this individual woman and this unborn child. This is uncertain territory, which is, I think, exactly where the abortion debate belongs. Our insistence that the “right to abortion” is a simple, open-and-closed case is getting us exactly nowhere in contemporary America. We have to be willing to consider complexity, which means we have to be willing to engage in respectful dialogue with people who consider themselves pro-life. That may be the only way we’re going to prevent an all-out, categorical reversal of Roe v. Wade and the disastrous consequences that would entail.

As is almost always the case with these columns, this is just some preliminary thinking on my part, and I welcome feedback of any kind. How do you think we can both protect individual freedom and simultaneously take seriously our interdependence? Please email me your thoughts.