Sunday Essay - choices, values and the question of rights

In discussion on Saturday Morning Musings - Triggs, terrorism and the decline of freedom, Winton Bates suggested that there were natural or innate rights, while kvd argued that "Rights are granted, not innate."

The evolution of the concept of natural or innate rights as compared to legal rights is well covered in the Wikipedia article on the topic. It is an important part of the evolution of Western civilization, concepts that give the citizen the right to stand against the exercise of coercive state or group power.

In considering the question of rights, it is important to recognise that they are a human construct. The arguments of the philosophers and politicians who developed the concept of natural rights created a mental or philosophical framework to support the case. They could not prove it or establish it beyond challenge, for logical refutation was always possible. In the end, the case rested on an increasingly sophisticated presentation ultimately based on beliefs and values that were unprovable, that rested on assertion.

You can argue for the natural rights based case on utilitarian grounds. This is a powerful common argument that is implicit in current arguments about the future directions of China. China will finally fail, the argument runs, because the communist elites will not give up their power and privileges to allow the creation of a rights based society in which rights might actually threaten the power and privileges of the elites. Establishment of the rule of law is an often cited example, democracy another.

I am inclined to agree with these arguments and especially the importance of the rule of law. However, in my own case I keep coming back to a simple issue. To me, questions of rights are, in the end, questions of the values that are important to the individuals involved.

As a management trainer, one issue that I dealt with lay in the difference between groups and teams. A group was a collection of individuals that in some ways identified themselves as a group that had its own values and sense of self identity. It might be no more than those who drank at the pub on a Friday night. By contrast, a team was a directed group, one with objectives and some form of governing structure.

As a management trainer, I was interested in how you moved from group to team, what made a team an effective team, My job as a trainer was pragmatic, to get people thinking and give them the skills they needed to perform. This task was independent of the purpose of the team. In structural, skills and process terms, there are no differences between the creation of an effective squad to exterminate Jews or Gypsies or to deliver IS control over a Syrian city and that required to ensure an effective sales campaign or an IT project.

All groups have processes for admitting members and asserting control. These are extended with teams where specific objectives are involved. With teams, very particular problems are involved where team objectives may conflict with human values. These are purely technical problems. How best do you strip away human restraints so that the team can do its job?

This is true whether you are building a sales force, a political force, the New Border Protection Agency or an IS team. You seek to remove the impediments that prevent effective performance. All bodies believe that they are right, that the end that they pursue is right or at least necessary..

As a technician. I could define a process that would just about give you whatever result you wanted in particular circumstances. There might be better ways of doing it, the answers might not be nice, but my solution would be workable.

Today we live in a world where ethics is actually defined as compliance with rules. There is no focus on what you should do if the rules don't fit, if you disagree with them. .

For better and worse, I entered the public sector at a time when our ethical training actually focused on principles. The Second World War wasn't that far away with its death camps, nor was the Korean War with

it's brain washing.

Taking Adolf Eichmann as an example, a quintessential team player, we asked where do you draw the line? What should you do when you get an order you disagree with? How do you avoid the erosion of values that comes with a constant series of small choices?

Taking the Korean example, why did certain national group prove more resistant to brainwashing than others? What was it about their social structures?

I entered the public service at a very particular time. There were very few graduates. Wars with their particular lessons were still in living memory. Today, neither the level of, nor direction of, our training could be justified. It was neither efficient nor effective,. but it had a huge impact on me.

It wasn't an impact that just emerged. I didn't recognise the value at the time. I needed experience, my own failures and breaches, to understand the value, to determine what was important.

 Looking at all this from the perspective of current debates, I am not a great believer in absolutes. The only absolutes that we can determine lie in our own beliefs,  the things that mark out personal lines in the sand.

As a member of a group, we accept certain constraints. But we need to remember that those who lead groups or teams will always conflate their objectives with the interest of the group. We have to be aware that the only thing that we can control are own own beliefs and our responses to those beliefs. Sometimes, we have to draw a line.

Postscript

In a comment, Winton pointed me to a quite fascinating article on the Magna Carta, a document whose symbolic significance endures.