Exploring the concepts of rights and equality

INTRODUCTION

Since the publication of John Locke’s Second Treatise On Government in the 17th century, the closely related concepts of rights and equality have provided the philosophic justification for subsequent political developments in the West. In this discussion, we’ll explore the genesis of these concepts and their philosophic mutations in the years that have followed.

Required reading: The Political Philosophy of John Locke and Its Influence on the Founding Fathers and the Political Documents They Created

POINTS OF DISCUSSION

The genesis of the political concepts of Equality and Rights in John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government

• The metaphysical equality of men as the basis for Individual Rights
• Individual Rights and property
• The difference between Locke’s explicit and implicit accounts of the source of Individual Rights
• Individual Rights as equality under the law
• Critiques of the doctrine of the Lockean doctrine of Individual Rights

Marx’s rejection of the Lockean concepts of equality and rights

• Economic equality as necessitated by the process of Dialectic Materialism
• The implicit transfer of the concept of rights from the individual to the group
• The negation of Individual Rights

The Equality Of Opportunity doctrine

• Description of the Equality of Opportunity doctrine
• The Equality of Opportunity doctrine as an application Marxist premises
• Critiques of the Equality of Opportunity doctrine

Mixtures of Lockean and Marxist premises in the doctrine of Human Rights

• The difference between Negative Rights and Positive Rights
• Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms
• The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• 20th century doctrines as based in the philosophy of Pragmatism
• Pragmatism as the basis for the Mixed Economy/Welfare State

Egalitarianism and the Equality of Outcome doctrine

• Egalitarianism as a moral imperative treat people as though differences between them don’t exist
• The Marxist roots of Egalitarianism
• Egalitarianism as a corrective to the “unfairness” of nature’s failure to distribute natural endowments equally
• Equality as the elimination of discrimination in cognition and evaluation
• Rights as recompense to "marginalized" groups by means of devaluing standards
• DEI as a political application of Egalitarianism

Ayn Rand's contributions to understanding and applying the concept of Individual Rights

• The source of rights as rooted in the dependence of human survival on the use of reason
• The initiation of physical force by other men as the negation of reason
• The need for government to ban the initiation of physical force as the essential means of protecting Individual Rights.
• The similarities and differences between Rand's and Locke's accounts of the source and implimentation of Individual Rights.
• Rand's account of the source of Individual Rights as an answer to critiques of Locke

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