Letters.

Natural Rights and Human History:

Francis Fukuyama has written his usual interesting piece ("Natural Rights and Human History", Summer 2001), and he is right that we must clean up our moral assumptions before we translate them into policy. I agree with almost every word of his general argument. Indeed, many of his conclusions parallel some of my own: that the propensity to control violence is as strong as the propensity to violence itself, for example. This must seem odd since he has chosen to make me a whipping boy for his "discovery" that the naturalistic fallacy isn't fallacious. I find this odd, since for forty years I have been arguing that the philosophical world was wrong about Hume, who did nothing more than observe the facility with which men leap from is to ought. [1] I have never been one of those scientists "quick to invoke the naturalistic fallacy as a shield to protect their work from unpalatable political implications": unequivocally and absolutely the opposite, often to my cost. [2]

I don't say with Ehrlich that human nature gives us no guidance. In my article to which Fukuyama refers ("Human Nature and Human Rights", Winter 2000/2001) I say it either gives direct guidance, or tells us what we might wish to avoid, or is neutral. I was simply concerned to point out that those who are trumpeting the "human" in human rights are mostly trampling on many human rights to promote the political rights they happen to favor. I am agreeing with Fukuyama; I certainly do not "dismiss natural rights." He does not happen to like some of the rights I derive, but that is another matter.

I would have thought that my analysis of the issue of the human rights of the collectivity versus those of the individual--an analysis very guilty of naturalism--would be music to a Hegelian! I think we could have a serious discussion here about naturalism, once Fukuyama figures out that we are on the same (naturalistic) side. The ground would then be cleared for some substantial disagreement over whether rights trump needs (a hierarchy of needs could perhaps solve that one), or over his notion that the economic benefits of a modem capitalist (liberal) economy satisfy "latent longings of our underlying natures." Maybe so, but how?

Consider that in an environment of evolutionary adaptation characterized by scarcity there was, for example, no need for endogenous curbs on our desire for sweet and salty things. Scarcity was its own curb. These "latent longings" however, once offered limitless satisfaction, lead to gorging, obesity, heart disease, alcoholism and addiction to opiates. The analogy holds with material goods, entertainment, violence, competition, information, power, sex and so forth. We are presented not with healthy satisfactions, but with an array of Niko Tinbergen's "supernormal stimuli" that overwhelms our scarcity-dependent controls. Socialism is not an alternative--I have always argued that it was simply another version of the industrial phase--but neither is what we've got. Fukuyama thinks that what is--in capitalism--is right because, in the historical short run, it beat out its opposition. This is a precarious principle, as is his assumption that people prefer the anonymity of modern cities to the traditional world of kin. People who flee to the cities of the capitalist world are not fleeing kinship but poverty. Of course, no one is going the other way, but not because they want to abandon kinship; rather, they don't want to give up material prosperity. Individualism and anonymity are prices they pay, not wholesome choices they voluntarily make. Most immigrants immediately recreate their world of kin when they arrive here, and even our own internal migrants attempt to establish, via elaborate customs of friendship, that same particularistic world. (Note the popularity of Seinfeld, Friends and similar "non-family" sitcoms.) Now this is a debate worth having.

ROBIN Fox

University Professor of Social Theory

Rutgers University

Francis Fukuyama's provocative article, "Natural Rights and Human History", attempts to clarify the sources of rights in his three-fold distinction: "divine rights, natural rights, and what one might call the contemporary positivistic view of rights as located in social law and custom." In short, the possible sources are "God, Nature and Man himself."

Fukuyama's argument for nature, "or, more precisely, human nature", leads him to the sticking point. He believes people must choose human nature-based thinking, because the only "positive rights" approach that he conceives of is, or leads necessarily to, cultural relativism, a conception in which "you have declared from the outset that there are no transcendent standards for determining right and wrong beyond whatever any particular culture declares to be a right."

Fukuyama is wrong to put things this way. It is possible to see the best answer to the question he poses--what are the justifiable or true sources of rights?--by combining positive rights with human nature-based rights thinking.

This is not some idea of compromise or vague splitting of a difference.

Why insist, as does Fukuyama, that everyone must choose for nature now? Why not a conception of rights that is simultaneously moral and historical? Why not posit that a human nature-based conception of rights is the correct or best version of rights, noting that the historical process--as Fukuyama himself is celebrated for arguing--is leading in an identifiable general direction, that of liberal democratic politics and morality? A gradual convergence of cultures, states, and nations on at least many of these rights (and thus also of wrongs) is, he himself argues, quite clear. And from Kant on, this view of rights as process as well as condition has been clear in our intellectual frameworks.

Is it so necessary or convincing to draw only a single line in the sand, rather than one full plus one dotted line? Truth is historical as well as logical. By insisting on the single true answer, by waving unnecessarily the red flag of cultural relativism, Fukuyama oversimplifies the question of the sources of rights and creates political divisions within what should be his own camp, which is otherwise much larger than he thinks.

RONALD TIERSKY

Eastman Professor of Politics

Amherst College

Fukuyama writes: "Americans more than most peoples have tended to conflate rights and interests. By transforming every individual desire into a right unconstrained by community interests, one increases the...