The Subordination of Human and Civil Rights to Public Health Policies is a Recipe for Political Oppression
One of the great achievements of Western philosophy and theology was to elevate the human person to such an exalted moral stature that no individual could be treated as a mere cog in the social machine, and each individual’s rights were protected by the law even to the possible detriment of certain collective benefits.
The elevation of human and civil rights above any strategic policy calculus was intended to shelter individuals from efforts by public authorities or other third parties to exercise arbitrary or intrusive forms of control over their lives, or to strip them of basic liberties in the name of some Greater Good.
When we use the language of human and civil rights, we normally imply that individuals can make certain claims upon the political community that are immovable or non-negotiable - or only negotiable under the most desperate and horrendous of circumstances, where an abrogation of said rights is the only way to avert a truly catastrophic outcome for the community at large.
For example, international mobility may be restricted during an international war, if migration from enemy nations puts the security of a country at serious threat. Similarly, domestic curfews may be imposed in an effort to minimise violence and public disorder during a civil war.
The problem is, the circumstances under which fundamental rights may be compromised or abrogated are becoming rather nebulous and open-ended, rendering fundamental rights unstable.
One type of public philosophy that has undermined the stability of human and civil rights in recent times is utilitarianism, a moral doctrine enjoining each of us to act in such a way as to maximise the sum total of happiness or public utility. Under this doctrine, human and civil rights should only be granted to the extent that they contribute to the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or to the extent that they are likely to contribute to something referred to as collective “utility.”
For example, on a utilitarian approach, the right to medical privacy, if it can be said to exist, exists in a weak and watered-down form only. For if it turns out that requesting everyone to disclose their medical records to nightclub owners might reduce disease transmission, and consequently might alleviate pressure on our hospitals, then the right to medical privacy can be abrogated.
Similarly, a utilitarian might recognise a right to equal treatment in the public square, but such a right would remain conditioned by strategic ends such as disease reduction. On this approach, if excluding the unvaccinated might reduce disease transmission or hospitalisation rates, the right to equal treatment in the public sphere could be qualified or cancelled.
Finally, while a utilitarian may recognise the right to informed consent to medical treatment, as a general rule, he would condition such a right upon its contribution to overall utility. For example, on a utilitarian approach, while there might be a general presumption in favour of informed consent, such a presumption might be overridden in case medical coercion had the potential to alleviate disease outcomes and thus reduce the burden on hospitals and ICUs.
Some version of utilitarianism seems to be the dominant conception of human rights in many parts of the Western world today, at least when one of the goods in play is public health.
In many quarters, speculative, unproven, and marginal benefits to public health are now deemed sufficient to justify the abrogation of fundamental civil and human rights. Notably, these speculative and unproven benefits are discovered not by ordinary citizens or local communities, but by a group of unelected experts serving at the behest of the government of the day.
What this means is that civil and human rights are now more vulnerable to erosion by political opportunists than they have been for generations.
For once we allow speculative projections about the possible utility of rights infringements decide when a basic human or civil right is preserved and when it is suspended, we hand an incredibly powerful tool of control and domination to any political class that wishes to exploit it.
For example, someone who wants to secure arbitrary political control over others can simply wheel in their favourite medical expert to come up with a speculative prediction that this or that erosion of rights might avert a possible bad outcome or might reduce the level of some public threat.
Civil and human rights used to be understood as bulwarks against political oppression, only to be dismantled under the most desperate of circumstances, and even then only with very compelling reasons such as the avoidance of a public catastrophe. Now, they are treated by many governments and other public actors as provisional goal posts that can and should be moved every time this or that government expert tells us that public health outcomes can be improved by doing so.
Ironically, this repeated subordination of human rights to public health policies will probably end up making for worse public health outcomes, since a regime in which rights are relatively easily set aside is also a regime in which rule of law and social trust are weakened, and economic life, one of the foundations of public health, is destabilised (since property rights and rights to buy and sell become insecure when rule of law and basic rights are made dependent on their perceived social utility).
In a regime in which human rights are extremely fragile and easily set aside based on highly speculative “expert projections” (that are often neither provable or disprovable), a few power-hungry individuals may ram through despotic political projects that override citizens’ basic rights, under the pretext that they are protecting citizens against this or that imminent threat to public health, such as the latest “variant of concern” of SARS-CoV-2.
And that, I am afraid to say, is exactly what is happening in a host of Western nations as I speak.
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Below, please find a video of mine from last August, “A Storm is Afoot,” warning that we may on the brink of a regime change unless there is a major course correction very soon:
The Subordination of Human and Civil Rights to Public Health Policies is a Recipe for Political Oppression
Yes the 'Greater Good' can be used to justify anything. “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good,” wrote the Soviet dissent Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
excelente analisis, David, gracias por la claridad de ideas y por dar la cara cuando todos callamos. La cuestion ahora es como detener el descenso de nuestra sociedad al autoritarismo mediante la accion judicial, y la exigencia individual de responsabilidades por el daño que estan causando. "With great power comes great responsability".