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Framing rights
Let us start with the concept of rights. Who is a rights holder? Who is that desire for rights projected out towards? Why do we need rights? What, exactly, is a right? These basic questions fuelled this thesis. My starting point is what is a right, fundamentally. Which led to why do we need rights in the first place. And finally, I arrived at how do rights emerge from the individual to become normative assumptions within our societies. These questions have vexed philosophers and legal scholars for millennia, yet for me the fundamental question of what is a right remained elusive, illusive even. This is what drew me to Richard Kearney’s work, to see rights as a narrative rather than discrete refined ideals we hold in aspic. To be a person in the world is to experience the world, to be a part of communities and societies, and as such our emergent rights are never fixed, they are always contextual and intersectional. This subjective understanding of rights needs to be squared with every other person’s subjective phenomenology, meaning that we mediate between ourselves to come to a conception of rights we call normative.
Me, you, and mediation equals a normative understanding between us. Replicate this across our networks and you establish society norms that are brought into, negotiated with, or opposed depending on our personal intersections and subjectivity. There is no perfect way of conceptualising rights precisely…
