Even if as a pragmatist you are agnostic as to the precise metaphysical nature of rights, when you say that the metaphysical truth of a particular conception of a right should yield to the dominant consensus or to a particular conception of utility is to make a distinctly moral claim. The problem with democracy is that it says, in part, truth does not matter. Certainly, a proposition's truth can be an individual's justification or reason for action, but in a democracy what matters is not the truth of the proposition, simply a majoritarian acceptance.
This is the dichotomy that gets the Right and the Left so worked up: if Truth matters at the individual level, it must matter at the social level. Thus, when certain of us bemoan the adamance of the "true believers," we are responding, to the belief that social governace MUST reflect particular conceptions of Truth and Justice.
Any social order is a theocracy of sorts: whether the prevailing ordering principle is the Natural Law of Catholocism or Socialism; the moral rightness of the order is guaranteed by the moral rightness of the ordering principle. I take pragmatism to be of a kind: whatever the utility served by a particualr conception of pragmatism, that is the order dictated to the unwashed.
--- Justin Schwartz <jkschw at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> >To say that a "rights regime" is a pragmatic rights
> >regime is to dictate the proper conception of a
> >"right," which is the precise subject of debate --
> a
> >theocracy of pragmatism as it were.
> >
>
> Not at all. It's to say that I don;t care to get
> into it--you can believe
> that rights were delivered by Zeus in a sidecar,
> Nozick can think that they
> inhere in The Objective Order, and I can think they
> are social conventions
> based in facts about conditions for fair
> cooperation. For the purposes of
> talking about which rights there are, we need not,
> and probably should not,
> discuss our views about their bases. --Yes, I know,
> we prags are
> infuriatingly banal and diffident. We picked up the
> trope from Rorty. I
> come by it honestly. He was my teacher.
>
> jks
>
>
_________________________________________________________________
> MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print
> your photos:
> http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx
>
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Greetings - send holiday greetings for Easter, Passover http://greetings.yahoo.com/