Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [16]
The notion of rights has been incredibly powerful in approaching some of the worst examples of injustice over the last hundred years—civil rights, human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, animal rights. Thinkers like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes advanced views in which there are two kinds of rights. The first variety are thought to be innate and inalienable—rights you’re born with and which cannot be taken away from you. The other type are the result of a social contract that underlies the moral structure of society, forming the basic constitutional rules of behavior by which civilization separates itself from a state of nature. These are rights that come from being a member of the society and as a result are yours to surrender or trade for other rights.
These rights are largely prohibitive, that is, they don’t tell you what you have to do, but rather tell others what they cannot do to you. They are little ethical shields that protect your body, your property, and your portrait. When I buy, for example, a copy of I Am America (And So Can You!), it is mine to do with as I choose. I can read it, shred it, lend it to a friend, or wallpaper my den with its pages. It’s mine. As long as I’m not violating someone else’s rights—say, by trying to shove it up my neighbor’s nose—I can do whatever I want, helpful to the world or not.
When we act, then, we need to morally consider the rights of those whom the act affects. To violate these rights makes the action ethically unacceptable.
Special Status in Ethics
So far, we’ve looked at the person acting, the action itself, the consequences of the action on everyone, and the person to whom the action was done. There is one more group of morally relevant individuals, those with whom we have deep interpersonal relationships. By virtue of these relationships, we come to have special moral obligations.
Think of the relationship between parents and children. This is not a contractual or merely duty-based relationship. We don’t act in our children’s interests simply because there are rules we are following. Rather, that sort of relationship is based on care. We’re concerned about them, their development and well-being. We want what’s best for them, both in terms of personal hopes, but also morally. Philosophers like Nel Noddings and Sara Ruddick pointed out that care-based relationships come with certain ethical obligations that we don’t have to strangers.
Consider the episodes of the Report during the writers’ strike. These are people who work together and their relationship could be just a professional one based on punching the clock and getting paid. But one could tell that the Report is like a family. When the writers were not there, the content of Colbert’s performances reflected a genuine concern for the well-being of those who help keep him funny. His support and concern was evident and it shows a depth of moral character that should be appreciated.
Explaining Moral Doubt
Having several moving parts to our understanding of “morally right” and “morally wrong” is not usually a problem. In the overwhelming number of cases, almost every case we come across in day-to-day life, these parts work in harmony and the ethical machine hums along beautifully. All the senses of right and wrong line up and give us the same answers.
But our hard cases, the ethical problems that seem intractable, are the ones where our different parts work in different directions. The ‘what’ tells us yes while the ‘how’ much tells us no. The ‘who’ says we have to while the ‘whom’ says we can’t. We think of all five of these moral aspects when we try to decide how to act, and when our multi-faceted internal thought process turns on itself, we feel that knot in our stomach and sense that there’s a problem.
We may think that our politics answers the question for us, that, say, liberals prefer to consider care and the consequences where conservatives look at rules or rights. Certainly this is the case with some issues. In the case of abortion, for example, many