Column

Too many rights is wrong

It’s midsummer 2005. A new Prime Minister is approaching the palace gates, but the road is blocked by a crush of protesters. Placards are everywhere:

‘Health Rights for All’, ‘Fund Research into My Disease Now!’, ‘We Demand the Right to Life’, ‘We Must Have the Right to Death’, ‘Protect Property Rights – No High Security Mental Hospital in Our Town’, ‘Psychiatric Survivors – We Deserve Equal Respect’…

The PM’s brow creases into a frown. How can her government-elect possibly satisfy everybody’s rights?

The Prime Minster has a point. How can you be for equal health care while providing vastly more research funds for some diseases than others? How can you be against abortion and in favour of euthanasia? How can a doctor advocate human rights and yet use anti-psychotic medication to control prisoners (not patients) for the sake of institutional safety? Policymakers argue that such judgements can be justified given a ‘balanced outlook’, but in reality competing rights claims always boil down to stark choices.

New Zealanders have a Code of Health Rights, which says:

Every consumer has the right to have services provided that comply with legal, professional, ethical, and other relevant standards.

Every consumer has the right to have services provided in a manner consistent with his or her needs.

But do we really?

What if my needs are not catered for by the relevant standards? What use is my right then? What if my needs can be met only at the expense of another person’s needs? What use is his right in these circumstances?

We are obsessed with rights. Any of us can claim hundreds of them. They seem to promise answers, but to believe there can ever be lasting social solutions based on rights is a fundamentally false expectation. Rights are not the answer — rights are part of our problem. Rights polarise people. They fuel disputes, forcing people to take sides.

International politicians regularly quote the constitution of the World Health Organisation:

The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition.

Yet in the same breath many of them condone crippling economic sanctions and warfare against nations whose beliefs they do not share. If there were objective, universal natural rights it would make sense to try to build our institutions to conform to them. But there are not. Human beings make up the rights we want, so it is impossible to prove each other wrong.

There is a better way, though it requires far deeper thought than rights declarations. The answer rests in our thinking seriously about human purpose. What are we here for? What are we trying to achieve in this world? Where do everyone’s purposes overlap? Where can there be compromise? What rights might we relinquish in order to achieve shared purpose?

Examples of the willing abandonment of rights for the greater good are everywhere. Employees take salary cuts in order to save their company. Family members sacrifice their personal interests in order to support a troubled relative. Schoolteachers work through lunch breaks to ensure children’s safety and happiness.

If we are to stand any chance of saving our crumbling, conflict-ridden civilisation, we should worry much less about rights and think much more about our shared, human purposes.

Back at the palace the PM relaxes. She waves benignly as her car smoothly clears the throng. There are so many competing rights, she smiles, a government could be forgiven for granting and refusing whichever happen to suit it at the time…