Group Rights vs Individual Rights
Example Topics: THW Legalise Female Genital Mutilation, THBT Countries That Criminalise Abortion Have The Right To Stop Their Citizens Travelling Abroad to Have One, THW Abolish Religious Education, THBT Creationism Should Be Taught Alongside Science in Schools, THW Force The Catholic Church to Employ Female Priests, THW Ban Gay Re-Education Camps.
Intuitively, the clash in these debates is between the rights of a group to impose illiberal ways of life upon their members and the rights of members of those groups to lead lives independently of that group. For instance, the topic THW Permit The Teaching of Creationism in Schools, the principled material on the affirmative will concern the extent to which the members of fundamentalist Christian groups rely upon the strength of religion in their communities to lead flourishing and meaningful lives. The way that children are educated is obviously critical to that. The group therefore has a right to impose their views on children. The negative will run that the right to religious freedom is really the right to choose your religion, not the right of a group to impose religion upon you. Thus, public education ought to be secular and rationalist, in order to enable children to make these choices independently. Here’s a couple of typical lines that either side might want to run.
In Favour of Strong Group Rights
Communitarianism
•It’s a basic moral good that individuals lead flourishing lives where they can realise their conception of the good.
•However, the most important factor in leading a flourishing life is the community in which one lives. Communities define the extent to which we experience meaningful relationships, the different options we can pursue in life, and the principled background against which we develop and revise our conceptions of the good. If we’re concerned about the welfare of individuals, therefore, we ought to be concerned with the welfare of communities. More specifically, in order to defend the welfare of the members of that community, we ought to defend the value systems that those communities rely upon to define themselves and access the aforementioned goods.
•As such, communities have a moral right to defend and perpetuate their value systems.
•That then means that community has a right to [insert content of motion here].
Harm Minimisation
Note: this analysis relies upon being able to establish inevitability. It can be very useful, essentially because in a debate between two well-matched teams, communitarianism (basically the only principle open to the defence of strong group rights) will almost always lose to a more sophisticated account of individual religious liberty. This analysis is valuable because, when it succeeds, it puts the principled issues of the debate to one side which, with luck will neuter the typical line run by the pro-individual rights side. We’ll use THW Legalise Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).
•Firstly, the status quo. - FGM is illegal.
•Firstly, that a particular type of conduct will take place regardless of legal sanction and why this is the case. - However, the bans that are currently imposed upon FGM are impossible to enforce. As such, the practice continues unabated. Sex and sexual organs are often taboo in the relevant cultures in question and as such the issue is never discussed publicly, and it then becomes impossible for police to gather evidence about the practice (especially when, obviously, there are no outward signs). Moreover, women are often repressed by these groups which makes it much harder for them to publicise their stories. Finally, in many cultures FGM has a strong religious significance (for both the men and women) which tends to dilute the deterrent power of the law. FGM is inevitable.
•Secondly, that on that basis, the principled side of the discussion is less important than the practical. That is, that regardless of one’s moral conception of a particular type of conduct, if it is inevitable that that conduct will occur, the reasonable person ought to prefer the option that minimises harm. We can regret immoral conduct, but if we can’t prevent it we’d be much better served by trying to minimise the damage that it causes. - FGM in many cases is probably immoral and done without the consent of the women in question (especially as they’re often quite young when it’s done). Nonetheless, if nothing can be done to prevent it, we’d do better to try and minimise the harm than legislate ineffectually.
•Thirdly, harms are occurring as a result of the absolute prohibition of the conduct in question. That is, that the illegality of the conduct is causing harm. If we legalised the conduct, we could improve the situation. - The practice is unregulated. FGM is thus performed by people without any medical training. It is also often quite brutal. Both these things could be alleviated if we legalised the practice and regulated it – doctors could perform the treatments as safely as possible (even if it’s impossible to be completely safe, it’s at least better than the status quo). - Other typical harms you might run here include unenforceability (and thus a victimisation of minority groups), alienating antisocial communities even further from the state which makes them even harder to police, breaking up unhelpful social taboos etc…
•Fourthly, therefore we should permit [insert topic here].
In Favour Of Strong Individual Rights
Freedom to Pursue One’s Own Conception of the Good
The typical application of this argument is to religious and ethnic groups that claim the right to coercively impose their views upon another group (e.g. the state imposing a particular faith upon its whole population, a church monopolising the religious views of its students etc…).
•The most fundamental right of all the right to rationally develop and revise a conception of the good life and pursue it in the world.
•Such a life will only ever be good for an individual when that individual has independently chosen that life, free from coercion. - I.e. where a conception of the good is imposed on someone, they’ve been denied the opportunity to opt for a life that would be better for them as individuals; they never had the chance to choose. Moreover, people need to independently endorse their own choices in life before they’re valuable. If the state was to force us all to attend the opera on the grounds that it would be good for us, most people would get no good out of it at all. Not because opera’s not valuable in itself, but because a person is unlikely to derive value from an activity they’ve been coerced into doing – they’ll resist.
•As such, it is wrong for any group to coercively impose its way of life upon anyone, especially where those individuals did not have a meaningful chance to consent to that way of life (e.g. children, the mentally disabled etc…).
•Therefore we ought not permit x to coercively impose y on z.
Speech Act Theory
This is a good response to the harm minimisation analysis above. Even if we can’t prevent the harms of a particular practice, there might (1) still be a worse harm in legalising it and/or (2) there might be a value in an unenforceable law. The argument works by establishing that particular acts of expression (statements or states of affairs) are in fact acts in themselves and as such have morally significant consequences.
The argument works like this;
•Outline the speech act; - Pornography is legal.
•Outline the actor and why that actor is powerful in the relevant sense. - The government (and because we’re a democracy the majority) keep pornography legal, and widely consume it. People therefore reasonably take the will of the government to be the will of the majority.
•State the consequences of the speech act. - The fact that pornography is still legal has a number of consequences;
- It legitimises the value system that pornographers communicate through their content. In that value system, women are subordinate ‘fuck objects’ and always depicted as inferior to men. That value system is lent a majoritarian legitimacy by the fact that pornography is still legal. As such, it makes more people likely to act on that value system. In this way, further discrimination against women is legitimised. That’s an obvious harm to women. - It ranks women as inferior which makes it harder for them to be treated as equally important members of the community, harder for them to therefore be treated as moral equals, and arbitrarily more difficult for them to progress their agenda socially and politically.
Conclude: therefore x speech act harms y group.
Cheers!
Lachlan