Rights & Duties July 17, 2008
An excerpt of an interview with Mary Warnock, from TPM:
“Warnock has generally welcomed advances in reproductive technology, recommending clear regulations that, in many people’s view, draw a sensible line between the permissible and the unethical. Nevertheless, she has become increasingly concerned about an unwanted side-effect of the availability of these techniques.
“I think there is an increasing tendency for people to demand medical or remedial treatment as if it were a right,” she explains. “People are prone to think that they can have whatever they want as a matter of right, and having a child is sometimes what they overwhelmingly want. There really seems to me to be no justification whatsoever for bringing in the concept of rights in this case.”
Warnock believes the root of the problem is a failure to understand the relationship between rights and duties. “I do not think that it makes sense to say that you have a right unless someone has a duty to make sure you get what you claim. For example, if you have a right of way over my property then it’s my duty to ensure that you’ve got a free passage. If somebody has a right then he is claiming someone else has a duty to supply him with what he is claiming. But this is not always possible and if it isn’t possible I’m not sure it makes sense to talk about the right to have a child.
“This led me to draw the distinction between the right to have someone try to help one have a child and the right to have the child, because there are limits beyond which the doctor or the clinic cannot be said to have a duty.”
Warnock is concerned that the mentality of rights is having a damaging effect on the relationship between doctor and patient, and more generally on how we view life’s vicissitudes. It encourages us to think about things as being owed to us which previously we would have been grateful for or seen as opportunities.
“You see people now sue or threaten to sue their school for not having taught them properly,” says Warnock, by way of example. “We used to think we were very grateful for the education we got, or else that it was lousy education and we wish it had been better. But the idea that someone had a positive legal duty to supply one with what one wanted seems to me very peculiar. Part of what it is, I think, is a confusion between what you are entitled to as of law and what you very much want. It’s very easy to confuse those two things.
“It enters into all kinds of areas, such as personal relationships. People say things such as they have a right to be told the truth. Well you want to be told the truth but who gave you the right to be told the truth? It sees to me that the language is aggressive, self-centred and is in danger of destroying concepts such as loving relationships or compassion, for example. The concept of the good Samaritan has really disappeared. The good Samaritan acted out of pure altruism, love and all those things. The bloke in the ditch had no right to be picked up, but he was picked up out of charity. That’s a concept which is going, I think.”
